Late Andanese

Andanese is the name of a people who currently have no language of their own. Around the year 4200, their language went extinct although it was preserved in loanwords and in written records. This written language is called Late Andanese, a language with a very simple phonology.

History

Culture

Like other human peoples, the Andanese originated in the tropics, eating a diet of fish combined with tropical fruits such as pineapples and coconuts. Around the year 4200, they were on the losing side of a war which left them with no land to call their own. But some brave Andanese explorers spoke of an uninhabited island, thousands of miles to the north and still teeming with fish and plenty of land to live on. And so the Andanese people who had only ever known tropical rainstorms and blistering heat came to live in the coldest part of the Northern Hemisphere, the icecapped island of Xema.

Andanese share with Moonshines the unusual trait of having women be strongly taller than men from puberty onward. However the Andanese in general are much shorter people than Moonshines; in fact they are the shortest people in the world. This has led to much lower rates of outmarriage with other peoples and therefore much less spreading out of the tall-female trait into surrounding cultures.

Even though Andanese women are much taller than their men, this did not lead to the Andanese becoming a peaceful, feministic society the way the Pabaps and Poswobs around them did. Arguably the constant feeling of helplessness experienced by adult Andanese men who could barely get through a day without injuring themselves on a solid object, combined with the fact that they were the shorter sex among the shortest human tribe in the world, made Andanese men feel as though they were simply "waste" people whose lives had little worth and led to them frequently starting fights with other Andanese men, and even Andanese women. Andanese women, despite being stronger than their men, rarely participated in violence either against other Andanese or against foreign peoples or animals.

When the Andanese nation was destroyed, many Andanese families literally climbed up palm trees and began to live like monkeys. They in essence became "soft monkeys" in the sense that they did not have the strong muscles or sharp teeth that their lifestyle required but tried to compensate by building sharp knives and other tools to protect them from nature. But even here there was no relief, because the species of monkeys that dominated their territory actually fed on humans, even if only as a minor part of a primarily fruit-based diet. Some Andanese decided to simply accept their fate and live amongst the monkeys that were eating them, but even with a high birthrate these people became fewer and fewer in number over time. Even after the monkeys were defeated in a war of their own, the "tree people" never resettled the land or established a new human nation. The remainder of the Andanese people had scattered by this time, either to other nations or to assimilate as a new tribe of Pabap speakers called Sonsona. These people were still very weak, and no longer warlike, but they had a strong tribal identity despite lacking a language of their own, and therefore they are the only surviving descanedants of the Andanese today.

Phonology

Late Andanese, spoken around the year 4200 and thereafter as a ceremonial language, has only 12 phonemes: the consonants /p m t n s l k h ŋ/ and the vowels /a i u/. And of these, the consonants /s/ and /ŋ/ are rare because they originated primarily from sequences rather than single phonemes. Vowel sequences are allowed, but final consonants are not. Thus there are only 30 syllables in the language. By contrast, Old Andanese had a much higher syllable count because it had more consonants, five vowels, two tones, and allowed clusters and syllable-final consonants. However, in reality the vast majority of syllables in Old Andanese were open syllables as well, and only one syllable per word could carry tone, which means that for the most part Old Andanese could be spelled with only 75 syllables, not greatly different from its descendant. Late Andanese as spoken today is based on historical records, since there is no surviving population that has been continuously speaking the language during the entire 4500 years that have passed since its extinction around the year 4200. Thus the pronunciation varies from place to place without the language itself being different. In general though, these differences are small and mostly related to the pronunciation of whole syllables rather than individual phonemes. It could be argued that syllables like /ni/, /ki/, /si/ are actually single phonemes because many populations read them as single consonants such as /ñ/, /č/, /š/ when they occur before a vowel and in some cases even before a consonant. Likewise it is common to hear the sequences /ii/ and /uu/ pronounced as /e/ and /o/ respectively by speakers whose native languages have those phonemes. And thus it could be said that modern Andanese has more than 12 phonemes after all. However, no Andanese tradition has reintroduced tones or phonemes not directly descended from one of the 30 syllables in the language.

Most word roots have 2 syllables, as in the parent language. With only 30 syllables in the language, this leads to massive homophony, even with classifier prefixes adding a third (or sometimes fourth) syllable. The root words pŏti "thigh", pŏdi "human body", and pòti "kidney" all share the same classifier prefix li- and all have therefore coalesced as liluti in Late Andanese. With other classifiers, even more meanings of luti are found.

Old Andanese

Old Andanese: /p m f t n l k g h q kʷ ŋʷ ʕʷ qʷ/ for consonants, /a e i o u/ on two tones for vowels. Note that Old Andanese preserved the lack of /s/ passed down from the parent language. /f/ is usually analyzed as /hʷ/, and /ʕʷ/ as /gʷ/, which means that all the fricatives (/h hʷ g gʷ/) are laryngeals. (The letter "g" always indicates a fricative; ġ is used for the stop in related languages but does not occur in any stage of Andanese.)

Old Andanese /p/ and /t/ became voiced between vowels. /p/ was rare in initial position, surviving only in monosyllabic words. And there were only two such words that survived into Late Andanese. Instead initial /p/ Usually comes from kʷ. On the other hand, p is one of the most common consonants in medial position because it evolved from four parent language onsonants: p b kw qw.

Grammar

Sharply in contrast to other Teppalan languages, Andanese uses a prefix system for classifiers but has no contrast between nouns and verbs. So likui means "tooth" and kikui means "to bite". This feature resembles the general state of languages from the islands of Laba where all Teppalan languages originated. Andanese is thus strikingly conservative. However, because it died out in the 4200s, it cannot be called more conservative than languages like Poswa that still survive today.

Numbers

• apa 1
• nia 2
• munia 3
• huti 4
• haili 5