Late Andanese: Difference between revisions

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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.
Around the year 4178, the last surviving [[Andanic languages|Andanic]] language went extinct as an everyday spoken language, but its ornate writing system survived, and thus knowledge of the language persisted for thousands of years.  This preserved language is called '''Late Andanese'''.


===History===
==scratch pad==
The Andanese arrived on the continent of Rilola around the year 0, at the same time as the other [[Tapilula]] tribes such as the ancestors of the Poswobs, Pabaps, Moonshines, and so on.  They were a distinct people however, and kept to themselves.  In fact, the Tapilula people branched early on into two groups: the Andanese, and everybody else.  The other tribes are merely subdivisions of the "Gold" tribe that includes all non-Andanese.
'''itanu inuhahuka inuimina inuihupuhu inuihuhatahupuunatata''' "road to a camp fire wood store"


By the 1900s, Andanese were most strongly settled along the south coast where the weather was warmestFor the most part, Andanese did not build their own nations; they settled in the nations of other people such as the [[Pabappa|Pabap]] people and the [[Subumpam|Subumpamese]].  They lived in the same territories as Pabaps but for the most part lived in separate cities.  The two cultures were a lot alike, and believed in the same gods, but Andanese were a very violent people and Pabaps were pacifists who designed gardens lined with fifty different kinds of flowers but could reach old age without ever holding a sword.  They did not generally battle ''each other'', however, so having vampires living amongst them was not a problem for Pabaps.
The above sentence could be loosely glossed as "ROAD STORE WOOD FIRE CAMP", but this does not explain why the words get longer towards the end, and why the increase is much greater on the last word than on the steps in between.  Andanese does not need twelve syllables to say "camp"; the last word in the clause must carry the agreement morphemes of all the others, and these are piled on both sides of the root.


Soon, the Andanese settled amongst the Pabaps to such an extent that they redefined themselves as merely a tribe of Pabaps, or sometimes a collection of tribesThis identity was still held to when the [[Swamp Kids]] took over the reins of power in the year 4149 and renamed their new empire '''Anzan''' after the Andanese that many of them were descended from.
==Phonology==
Late Andanese  has only 12 phonemes: the consonants /l h k m n ŋ s p t/ 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 notThus there are only 30 syllables in the language.


===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 4175, 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.  Others stayed behind and tried to hide behind their skills at learning new languages and creating new political parties; in 4165 the [[Bubbles]] were formed, and despite being Andanese in origin, the public face of the party was the Poswobs and Pabaps.
===Consonants===
====Consonant frequency====
The frequency of consonants is roughly the same as their order in the syllabary: /l h k m n p t ŋ s/.  However, as detailed below, some consonants are more common before certain vowels, and it is more accurate to think of syllables rather than consonants and vowels as the minimal phonemic unit.


Andanese people tended not to build nations of their own; instead, they settled in nations developed by other peoples, chiefly the [[Pabappa|Pabap]] people and the [[Subumpam|Subumpamese]] living along the south coast of RilolaThey also settled in [[Thaoa]]; in fact, Thaoa had more Andanese people per capita than any other nation to its west.  Soon the Andanese actually became a majorityBut the Andanese people here were more intimiately linked with Andanese people living in other nations, and did not generally seek to actually take over the Thaoa government.
===Vowels===
Andanese has three vowels: /a i u/.  There are no tones, stress, or length distinctions.  Unlike most of the languages of the [[Gold language|Gold]] family, Andanese is '''vowel-strong''': its vowels influence the pronunciation of preceding and following consonants, but the consonants have no influence on the pronunciation of the vowelsVowels can only change due to the influence of adjacent vowels: an /i/ or /u/ before another vowel (even the same vowel) will contract into a semivowelOther than this, there are no significant allophones of the three vowels.


Andanese share with Moonshines the unusual trait of having women be strongly taller than men from puberty onwardHowever 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.
Another way that Andanese differs from the Gold languages is that, although /a/ is the commonest vowel, it is noticeably less common by comparison to the other two vowels than it is in most Gold languagesThe three vowels are all well represented in Andanese speech.


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 intended to be harmless, 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 womenAndanese women, despite being stronger than their men, rarely participated in violence either against other Andanese or against foreign peoples or animals.  Likewise Andanese people generally wore clothing that was intended to protect them from injury by sharp objects, rather than to keep them warm during winter.  Thus the throat and wrists were generally covered even if areas closer to the heart were not.
==Phonology and vocabulary==
With only 30 syllables in the language, many sentences, even with basic vocabulary items, are highly repetitiveFor example '''hahaha''' is the word for "hat, cap, headgear" (''ha-'' "shaped like" + ''haha'' "hair of the head").


When the Andanese nation was destroyed, many Andanese families literally climbed up palm trees and began to live like monkeysThey 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 SonsonaThese 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.
Consonants besides /l h k/ are less frequentThe overrepresentation of the consonants /l h k/ (in roughly that order) is part of the reason why Andanese words are often so long even compared to other languages such as [[Babakiam|Play]] that have small phonologies.   


===Phonology===
===Expressive wordplay===
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 phonemesIt 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 allHowever, no Andanese tradition has reintroduced tones or phonemes not directly descended from one of the 30 syllables in the language.
Another reason why words in Late Andanese are so long is the use of extensive wordplay.
====Boys' names====
Boys' names were often extremely long-winded   due to the deliberate repetition of similar-sounding words and syllables. Simple reduplication was avoided, but since the language had many homophones, long sequences of identical syllables piled up even so. By omitting classifier prefixes, the  inventory of homophones increased vastly, with dozens of possible interpretations for each morphemeThus, even two boys with the same name could claim unique derivations.   


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) syllableThe 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 AndaneseWith other classifiers, even more meanings of '''luti''' are found.
The repetitive names were inspired by the Late Andanese process of syllable harmony, in which a whole syllable in a word changes to that of its classifier prefixBut, as with reduplication, Andanese names avoided syllable harmony, since parents considered it unimpressive to coin a name whose internal assonance was simply due to their language's grammarInstead, every morpheme in each name was a proper word on its own and could be interpreted in a fixed number of ways.


====Old Andanese====
One common name, '''Kukukukukukuku''', was an extreme example, since it consisted of the thematic syllable /ku/ seven times in a rowAll speakers recognized ''kuku'' as their word for "leg, run", but from there, thousands of possible interpretations of the name opened up, since, with classifier prefixes removed, the same ''kuku'' could also mean "canopy; place high up", "night", or "road"; meanwhile, the remaining ''ku'' could also mean "forest", "hand", "arrow (weapon)", or "to expose, show publicly"Thus one boy with the name Kukukukukukuku might tell friends his name meant "running down trails  at night" (''kuku kukuku kuku''; trails being roads in a forest) while another would say that it meant "sitting on a treetop with arrows in hand" (''kuku kukuku ku ku'', treetops being high places in a forest).  Stress was  placed only on the final syllable, irrespective of morpheme boundaries, just as in the language as a whole.
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 vowelsNote 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.
A more common name template would intersperse a dominant thematic syllable with several minor ones. '''Kaaaaaaya''' was a common boy's name, where the thematic syllable is /a/ and the two minor syllables are /ka/ and /i/. '''Haaaaaaaaaaa''' was also a very common boy's name.  '''Taaaamaaaaaamaaaaa''' was less common.  '''Aaaaaaaaaaatataaaa''' is another common boy's name.  Each /a/ is a separate syllable.  The longest boy's name in common use was '''Kakakaaakakatakakakakakakakakaka'''. 


The language is very guttural compared to its neighbors; after all, it has 9 dorsal conosnants, but only 3 coronals and 2 labials (though five of the dorsals are labialized)However, the syllable strucutre is almost entirely CV, so it does not sound quite as aggressive as one might think.
Some names had two thematic syllables; an example of this was '''Matamataamatatataamaataaaatata'''The bare /a/ was common enough in the language as a whole that its repetition here was not considered to create a third thematic syllable.


===Late Andanese===
Some names had abbreviated forms. For example, '''Lilalaayilalalalalalaa''' was another very long boy's name, but could be abbreviated to '''Lalaaalai'''.
Late Andanese's phonology was the simplest in the world: /a i u/ for vowels, /l h k m n ŋ s p t/ for consonants, and all syllables are (C)V.  THus there are only 30 syllables in the language.  The allophonic voicing of stops between vowels was reverted here.  Tone and stress were also lost.


/p/ was rare in initial position, surviving only in monosyllabic wordsAnd 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 consonants: /p b kʷ qʷ/.  Note that, even though there were no consonant pairs distinguished by voice, the allophony which had been present in Middle Andanese disappeared hereThus, /p/ was always [p], never becoming voiced even between vowels.   
A classroom of children would often sit quietly when a teacher called out their names, as though hearing lottery numbers read off, since a boy with a lengthy name would need to listen for quite a while to know whether the student being called up to the front of the class was him or his friend whose name differed only on the thirteenth syllable.
 
 
;Boys' names
====Girls' names====
Late Andanese names, particularly names for boys, were often extremely long-winded even for what one would expect of such a small phonology; e.g. '''Kukukukukukuku''' was a common boy's name; '''Kaaaaaaia''' was another.  '''Haaaaaaaaaaa''' was also a very common boy's name.  '''Taaaamaaaaaamaaaaa''' was less common but still not unheard of. '''Aaaaaaaaaaatataaaa''' is another common boy's nameEach /a/ is a seaprate syllable. The longest boy's name in common use was '''Kakakaaakakatakakakakakakakakaka'''.  A close second was '''Matamataamatatataamaataaaatata'''. '''Lilalaaiilalalalalalaa''' is another very long boy's name, but can be abbreviated to '''Lalaaalai'''.
Girls' names typically did not use repeating syllables, and were thus typically shorter, but parents often chose long names that did not use repetition.  The number of girls' names in use was always much greater than the number of boys' names, and many parents coined novel names never used before.
 
====Other proper names====
The same pattern of repeating syllables showed up in placenames such as '''Mipatatatatai''' (Land of the Ruling Children of Tata) and party names such as '''Laaatilalatitiaa''' (Rusted Pearls).
 
==Allophony and sandhi==
:''NOTE: This section was much longer until Nov 10 2022See edit history for details.''
Late Andanese has a much quicker speech tempo than the [[Play language]] that occupies the same territory. This is because the most common consonants in Play are the bilabials /p b m/ and the most common vowel is the open low vowel /a/; the time required to move the lips slows down the pronunciation of syllables containing these sounds, and sets the rhythm for the language, so other syllables are also pronounced slowly.
 
By contrast, the most common consonant sounds in Andanese are /l h k/, and therefore can be paired with any vowel without slowing down the speech tempo. Although Andanese has labial consonants /p m/, they are not nearly so common as in Play, and so the tongue and lips move independently during the pronunciation of each syllable far more often than in Play.
 
===Allophones of vowel sequences===
The vowel sequences ''ia ii iu'' are pronounced ['''ya yi yu'''], and this is reflected in RomanizationLikewise, ''ua ui uu'' are pronounced ['''wa wi wu'''.] In the case of ''ii'' and ''uu'', the on-glide is weak but still distinctly present, and the second vowel is lowered slightlyNote that the Romanization here uses '''v''' for IPA /w/ and '''y''' for IPA /j/.
 
Triple vowel sequences are resolved by starting from the right. For example, ''tiui'' can only be ['''tiwi'''], never [*tyui].  And ''kiiii'' is ['''kyiyi'''].
 
The vowel [a] changes very little in any contextThe sequence ''aa'' is simply ['''a:'''], and the sequences ''ai au'' raise the /a/ only slightly.  It is common to find long sequences of vowels, including /a/, especially in derived words. Here, the same rules are followed, and thus ''aaa'', ''aaaa'', and so on, are simply more lengthened versions of /a/, with the speaker's volume and pitch the same throughout the entire vowel sequence. Thus Late Andanese ''aa'' resembles Play /ā/ more than it resembles Play /aa/.
 
===Allophones of VC sequences===
When a syllable beginning with /h/ follows a syllable beginning with a stop,    the [h] spreads backwards over the vowel of that preceding syllable, making it voiceless. Thus, '''puha''' sounds like [pu̥a] or [pʰwa].
 
The VC sequence ''-um-'' is pronounced like a syllabic [''''''] unless the preceding consonant is another labial.
 
The VC sequence ''-un-'' is pronounced like a syllabic [''''''] unless the preceding consonant is one of ''t n l''.


A classroom of children would often sit quietly when a teacher called out of one their names, as if hearing lottery numbers read off, as a boy with a lengthy name would need to listen for quite a while to know whether the child being called up to the front of the class was him or his friend whose name differed only on the 17th syllable.
The VC sequence ''-uŋ-'' is pronounced as a syllabic ['''ŋ̍'''] unless the preceding consonant is one of ''k ŋ''.


==Grammar==
==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 conservativeHowever, because it died out in the 4200s, it cannot be called more conservative than languages like Poswa that still survive today.
Andanese uses prefixes for inflection, and bound  '''postbases''' for derivation. There are no exceptions to this pattern, despite the strong influence of the many Gold-family languages surrounding Andanese, which use suffixes and infixes, but never prefixes.  There are still some infixes inherited from Old Andanese, but because they can only infect the prefixes, Late Andanese is best described as a language that has tables of related prefixes, with one row of prefixes for each infix, rather than a system combining prefixes and infixes.
 
There is no morphological distinction between nouns and verbs in Andanese, but there is a fixed word order of Subject-Object-Verb, showing that verbs and nouns cannot be considered the same part of speech.  In this respect Andanese resembles isolating languages such as Chinese and to a lesser extent English.
 
 
===Classifier prefixes===
All words have classifiers, except for a few that are sometimes considered to have a null morpheme as their classifier.  For example, the classifier '''gi-''' means "humans, human body parts".  Its accusative form is '''na-'''.  However,  classifiers for inanimate objects do not have distinct forms for their accusatives.
 
 
====Repetition of classifier prefixes across nouns and verbs====
Note that classifiers stack on top of the verbs.  That is to say, any verb in the sentence will take a prefix agreeing with the noun classifier of the subject, unless it happens to already have the same classifier.
 
However, humans are spread across several classifiers, which mark different genders and ages of humans.  These all share the same verbs, so it is not necessary to repeat the classifier before the object if the subject and object of a sentence are both human. For example, '''hinuhuki''' means teacher (adult female), '''tukuu''' means student (young child of either gender),<ref>"book" in dict, though</ref> and '''tuupi''' means to kiss. The accusative form of ''hi-'' is ''mi-''. Thus one can say
 
:'''Tukuu minuhuki ''tututami''.'''
::The student ''kicked'' the teacher.
 
====Stacking of classifiers====
Classifiers stack across nouns that are dependent on other nouns.  For example, '''kuha''' means "(a) piece", and '''sikupi''' means "wood", so one can speak of
:'''Kuha ''kusikupi''.'''
::A piece ''of wood''.
 
However, when a two-word phrase such as this is used as an object in a longer sentence, the subject's classifier is repeated only on the first word:
 
:'''Hinuma ''hikuha'' kusikupi hikigi.'''
::The woman scratched ''the piece'' of wood.
 
This can be thought of more clearly with an analogy to mathematics.  The sentence above can be visualized in three dimensions, with ''kusikupi'' as a branch off of ''hikuha'', or as an equation:
 
:'''Hinuma hi(kuha ku(sikupi)) hi(kigi).'''
 
;Words with no classifiers
A small number of words have no classifier prefix.  Many of these are proper nouns or loanwords.  These are treated as if their first syllable were a classifier prefix, and therefore behave exactly the same as other words except that they usually seem to be in the wrong noun class.
 
===Private verbs===
:''Note, it is most likely that the private verbs will depend on only the agent, and will exclude humans and inanimate objects. Therefore the scope is much less.''
Andanese preserves the '''private verbs''' of Tapilula, which also persisted in the [[Gold language]] but were dropped in all of Gold's descendants, along with the classifier system itself.  Private verbs are morphemes, usually only one or two syllables long, whose meaning depends on the preceding classifier prefixes.  For example, there exists a verb '''vutami''' "to gallop, run quickly on all fours".  This verb begins with ''vu-'', which is also the first syllable of the word for horse.  Thus, if a horse is the subject, there is no need to repeat its classifier prefix before the verb; the classifier prefix is already there.  If a man is galloping, one would say
 
:'''Kilatu ki''vutami''.'''
::The man ''is galloping''.
::The man ''is running like a horse''.
 
Whereas if the subject is a horse or a similar animal, the sentence would instead be
:'''Vuhapi ''vutami''.'''
::The horse ''is galloping''.
::The horse ''is running like a horse''.
 
Without the need for an extra syllable before the verb.  Likewise, if the situation were reversed, one could say
:'''Vuhapi vu''gitami''.'''
::The horse ''is running like a human'' (on its hind legs only).
 
The persistence of verbs like these is the main reason why Late Andanese has so many noun classes for specific animals such as turtles and rabbits with few nouns but larger numbers of verbs.
 
 
Note that the neuter prefix ''gi-'', rather than the masculine  ''ki-'' or feminine ''hi-'', is used whenever animals are personified, regardless of the semantic gender of the animal.
 
===Use of classifiers to derive new words===
New words can be formed by copying a word from one class to anotherFor example,  there exists a  word pair of '''gipihi''' "sharp tooth; canine" and '''kipihi''' "to bite".  Thus, a noun became a verb by simply changing the classifier prefix.
 
For some classes, the entire vocabulary can be assumed to be copiable.  As above, ''gi-'' nouns denoting body parts pair with ''ki-'' verbs denoting the action of striking or hitting something with that body part, and with ''mi-'' denoting that body part served as food. 
 
Likewise, the word for a young student, '''tukuu''', is actually derived from the word for book, '''ikuu''', by changing the prefix from '''i-''', which denotes handheld objects, to '''tu-''', which marks the "human children" noun class.
 
===Derivation of words===
Andanese is a head-initial language.  That is, within a word, a classifier prefix will come first, giving the general broad meaning of the word, and each additional morpheme will narrow the meaning of the word further.  This is the opposite pattern of most surrounding languages.  Thus Andanese could be described as having a '''taxonomic vocabulary'''.  Someone hearing the first part of a word will not know its precise meaning, but will have a general idea of what it might be.  But someone hearing only the end of a word will have no idea which of the many possible categories of the vocabulary the word belongs to.
 
An exception to the rule that compounds are head-initial (i.e. "ears of corn") is that if one party is animate,  the animate partner goes first; thus from '''vukia''' "horse" comes '''vukiakiki''' "horse ears".<ref>this probably isn't the reason why gold switched, though, because in goldnthe anime pRtenr oftem.goes last</ref>
 
 
The genitive prefix ''si-'' is never used within a word; this appears only heading up a full, independent word describing a definite object.  Thus, all compounds are single words, and some can be very long.  In general, Andanese words are often highly precise, and may seem long even given the small phonology of the language.  Many words have been lengthened by adding additional morphemes over time, even when such lengthening was not necessary to prevent collision of the word with a homophoneFor example, the word for heart, as inherited from [[Old Andanese]], is ''vi''.  But this is padded with the body part classifier prefix ''li-'' on one side and the precising morpheme ''tu'' "blood" on the other; thus, the resulting word '''livitu''' can be analyzed as "body part heart of blood".
 
====Reassignment of classifier prefixes====
Words have moved from one class to another over time.  For example, the inherited root word for snow, reflected in Late Andanese as ''gina'', is now indifferent to the form of precipitation and only pairs with classifiers: '''gagina''' "snow"; '''vugina''' "rain".
 
===Classifier prefixes and titular words===
Classifier prefixes cannot be used as words of their own.  Every classifier prefix has at least one '''titular stem''', whose meaning simply repeats one of the meanings of the classifier prefix so that it can be used as an independent word.  For example, the classifier prefix ''sa-'' means "love", but the proper verb for "to love" is '''sanala'''.  Thus one would say
 
:'''Kikuhigi nanuma ''kitasanala''.'''
::The soldier ''loved'' the nurse.
 
Likewise, ''ka-'' means "tree", but the full form of the word for tree is '''kakupi'''.
 
====Polysemy====
Classifier prefixes with more than one meaning will have more than one titular wordSince ''ka-'' also means "insect", the word '''kakui''', meaning "insect, arthropod" is also considered a titular word.
 
===Dropping of classifiers in compounds===
Compounds of two nouns generally drop the classifier from the second noun, using semantics to disambiguate the possible meanings.  For example, '''hikala''' "seashell" and '''lakala''' "bear" share the same two-syllable root, and have different noun classifier prefixes.  But the compound word '''pugikala''', which adds ''pugi'' "claw", can only be used to mean "bear's claw" because seashells do not have claws.  If a speaker did want to specifically say "seashell claw", then they would use ''pugi puhikala''.
 
Dropping the second classifier is mandatory when it is the same as the first classifier or of the same syntactic field.  In fact, some teachers posit null morphemes before each element of a compound, each of which agrees with the outermost classifier.  Thus, for example, they analyze ''pugikala'' "bear claw" as ''pugi pukala'', and claim this proves that there exists a secondary Andanese word '''pukala''' "bear" alongside '''lakala''', which is never used in bare form but is called up when speakers create compound words such as the above ''pugikala''.  This theory is one way of explaining the limits of which compounds are allowed to drop the classifiers and which are not.  However, a dictionary based on this theory would list over a million words, most of which would be unusable duplicates of others.
 
:''Note, the morphemes here may be in the wrong order, since animacy overrides head-first construction.''
 
====Locative and thematic classifiers====
Assignment of newly coined words to classifiers usually corresponds either to the place ("locative classifiers") or the purpose of the object ("thematic classifiers").  For example, a spoon is not an edible object, but it is frequently found with them, and therefore the word for spoon, '''miguha''' is in the food class rather than the handheld object class; '''iguha''' instead means "shovel".
 
====Animacy====
Inanimate objects have classifiers that do not change for syntactical active or passive roles.  Since the subject of a sentence is always animate, however, their classifier is always buried underneath another classifier that repeats the subject's classifier.  Note that there are no sound changes; if two vowels come together, they are still pronounced  separately.  Since this happens also to the verb, often a sentence will consist of three alliterative words.  Thus one can say
 
:'''Tulata ''tuinuhu'' tuyula.'''
::The student threw ''the torch''.
 
Here, while a clever student might expect the sequence /tui/ to contract to /pi/, as it historically did in many similar constructions, the morphemes remain separate and the sequence is thus pronounced [twi].
 
===List of common noun classifiers===
All noun classifiers are one syllable long, but some '''second-order classifiers''' can follow other classifiers and create what are effectively two-syllable prefixes.  Even so, the outermost classifier in such a word is the one that echoes throughout the sentence, not the pair.
 
'''a''' : roads, streets
 
'''la''' : large land animals
 
'''i''' : handheld objects
 
'''ha''' : to worship; needle
 
'''ka''' : trees; some flying insects
 
'''u''' : water, liquid; land features (e.g. "beach", "hill")
 
'''ma''' : some grasses
 
'''ga''' : winter, things encountered in winter
 
'''na''' : accusative of gi- (all senses)
 
'''li''' : rung, plank, flat surface(?); water, liquid (alternates with u-)
 
'''sa''' : love
 
'''pa''' : some words for loose-fitting clothes
 
'''ta''' :
 
'''pi''' : pregnant women, babies, and couples
 
'''hi''' : tree (bark); worm; the ocean(?); bowl, cup, dish; adult women (nominative); men, boys (accusative)
 
'''ti''' : foot, motion
 
'''si''' : genitive prefix (etymologically hi-i-; often seen in contracted form as s- before vowel-initial words)
 
'''gi''' : protective objects; sharp, firm, protective; humans, human body parts; birds<ref>NOTE. "humans, human body parts; birds" was originally listed under ''li'' but this is an error.  Both come from Tapilula ''nʷə-'', meaning that humans and birds were considered as one even then.  There is alternate form of the prefix, ''nu-'', which is the basis of the accusative.</ref>
 
'''mi''' : food; breast, nourishment; adult women (accusative)
 
'''ni''' : young girls; place of X, generic placenames; snakes
 
'''pu''' : succulent fruit (doublet of ''tu-''); sexual reproduction, obscene body parts (only when following another classifier such as ''li-'')
 
'''hu''' : fire; celestial objects; insects; tight clothes, "shaped like"; hair of the head, back of body;
 
'''tu''' : small plants; children; blood, bodily humors
 
'''su''' : oceanography (''hi-'' + ''-u-'')
 
'''lu''' : some body parts (a 2nd-order classifier that often comes between the gender marker and the root word)
 
'''ku''' : arrow, sharp weapon
 
'''mu''' :
 
'''gu''' : breast, nurture, nutrition (secondary use only)
 
'''nu''' : fruit<ref>"Large enough to be eaten one at a time, but small enough to hold in one hand."</ref>; buildings
 
'''ki''' : verbs of motion (corresponds to li- body parts); weapon, claw; men, boys; darkness, night, sleep; some buildings
 
The sequences /ja ji ju va vi vu/ have taken on the role of pseudo-classifiers, since in initial position they are monosyllabic:
 
'''ya''' : some grasses; pineapple, large fruit; meat, food
 
'''yi''' :
 
'''yu''' :
 
'''va''' :
 
'''vi''' : eye, vision, knowledge
 
'''vu''' : rain, water; horse, rideable animal
 
If the root begins with a single vowel, the syllables /yi yu vi vu/ reverse to [iy iv uy uv].  If the root word begins with /i/ or /u/ followed by another vowel, however, the normal pronunciation is restored.
 
However, sequences such as /sia/, /nua/, and so on have not been reanalyzed as single syllables, and cannot serve as classifier prefixes. 
 
Note that there are many monosyllabic morphemes that are not classifiers.  For example '''i''' means "shoulder", but is only used with a body part classifier ''li-''.
 
===Consonant-based gender system===
Andanese inherited the consonant-based gender system from [[Tapilula]].    The genders are:
 
'''li''': Babies; also used for humans of indeterminate age and gender (accusative is '''na-''')
 
'''pi''': Pregnant; adult males and adult females together; parents, childbirth
 
'''ki''': Men and boys (contracts to '''k-''' before a vowel; accusative is variable, alternating between '''hi-''' or '''s-''' when acted on by "weak" agents and a contracted form of the prefix of the agent itself for "strong" agents)<ref>from ''təlin'' "penis"</ref>
 
'''tu''': Young children (accusative is '''ti-''')
 
'''ni''': Young girls
 
'''hi''': Adult women (accusative is '''mi-''')
 
There is no neuter gender and no epicene gender.  Note that females have two genders (three if "pregnant" is considered to be exclusively feminine) but males have one.  This is a trait common to many languages of the area, and was present in their common parent language of [[Tapilula]].
 
 
 
As in Gold, all objects found in bodies of water are grammatically feminine even if syntactically masculine. 
 
A very small number of words show relics of the older internal mutations that marked gender in the [[Tapilula]] language.  In Tapilula, classifier prefixes were dropped in more situations than they are in Late Andanese, and therefore the existence of separate stems for different genders was necessary.  In Late Andanese, only a few such words survive, such as the word pair '''kilitu''' "king" and '''hiihu''' "queen".  Even though the stems are different, the use of the prefixes is mandatory in Late Andanese.
 
====Marking the accusative case====
Late Andanese marks the accusative case by changing the noun classifier prefix, if there is one.  For example, the noun classifier for adult women is '''hi-''' in the nominative (agentive) case, but this changes to '''mi-''' when a woman is the patient (direct object) of a verb.  This case is still padded with the additional case marker of the agent itself, meaning that there will be two noun classifiers stacked together.  This is the normal case in Andanese when an noun is the direct object of a verb.  Note that inanimate nouns and most non-human animate nouns do not have separate forms of their noun class prefix for showing the accusative. 
 
The masculine noun class, marked by ''ki-'' in an agent role, is the most changeable of all noun class prefixes, and the only one whose accusative form depends on the noun class of the agent acting on them.  That is, a man stung by a bee will have a different noun class than a man kissed by a woman, in addition to the noun class of the agent which is stacked before the noun class for the man.  Furthermore, the agent and patient forms merge before certain vowel-initial words, and the agent form also takes a special form when the patient is male.
 
The various interrelated patterns are all due to etymology.  The original form of the agent prefix was ''tə-'' in pre-Andanese, and the patient was ''hə-''.  In early Old Andanese, this vowel either disappeared or changed to /i/, depending on environment.  The /t/ soon changed to /k/, part of a general shift.  Then, the sequences ''ki hi'' merged as '''s-''' before a vowel-initial word.  But this change did not spread to words that became vowel-initial later on, meaning that only a few vowel-initial Late Andanese words trigger this assimilation, one of which is /atu/ "soldier".  Further, although the nominative forms for male and female soldiers are both /satu/, in the accusative they diverge, with the masculine form being still /satu/ while the feminine form changes to /miatu/.
 
Any sequence of /hihi/ resulting from these shifts reduced to /hi/ by a general process of analogy.  This occurred when a verb had a female agent and a male patient, but only when one of the other rules above did not force the inner /hi/ to contract into /s/.  Lastly, the /hi/ disappears before many consonant-initial roots, as it evolved early on into a simple /h/ in these positions, which was then dropped. 
 
Sample sentences below illustrate the different possibilities:
 
:''' Satu'''.
::Male soldier.
 
:'''Kuinau ''kusatu'' kutakiu.'''
::The bee stung ''the soldier''.
 
:'''Hiuma ''hisatu'' hitakiihumi.'''
::The woman hit ''the soldier''.
 
:''' Kikapi'''.
:Male farmer.
 
:''' Nianu ''nikapi''  nipihi.'''
::The snake bit ''the male farmer''.
 
: '''  Hikapi'''.
:: Female farmer.
 
: ''' Nianu ''nimikapi'' nipihi.'''
::The snake bit ''the female farmer''.
 
===Second order classifiers and length of words===
Because of the noun classifier prefixes, most word bases are at least three syllables long.  Exceptions are of two kinds: some very common words are used with no classifiers, and some words have classifiers but stems that are only one syllable.  Generally these result from recent sound contractions.
 
Often, a classifier prefix is not sufficient to precisely define a word, and the word will take a ''second-order classifier'' between its "exposed" classifier that interacts with the grammar and the rest of the root word.  For example, many body parts are classified under the prefix ''lu-'', such as '''gilulali''' "head", which breaks down as ''gi- + -lu- + lali''.
 
Most words of this type acquired their second-order classifiers only fairly recently, when drastic sound changes led to phonological collision of words even within the same noun class.
 
Some syllables can be used either as primary or secondary classifiers.  For example, the ''-lu-'' above can only appear after a human gender classifier, but ''ku-'' "arrow, sharp object" often follows ''i-'' "handheld object" to create words for handheld weapons such as '''ikukivuni''' "slicing knife" and '''ikukuhigi''' "one-handed sword".
 
===Other information about private verbs===
:''Note, it is most likely that the private verbs will depend on only the agent, and will exclude humans and inanimate objects. Therefore the scope is much less.''
Andanese preserves the '''private verbs''' of its parent language Tapilula, whereas in the Gold branch of the family they disappeared early on. 
 
Private verbs are verbs whose meaning is entirely dependent on the noun classes of the subject and object that precede it.  For example, if the subject is "boy" and the object is "orange", a verb spelled ''lua'' could mean "to eat".  If the subject is "boy" and the object is "girl", the same verb would mean "to kiss".  The only commonality between the two verbs is that they both involve the mouth, and indeed, ''lua'' is derived from the word for mouth.  The opposite meanings can be indicated by stacking additional classifier prefixes. For example, '''nulua''' means unambiguously "eat" in any context, so one can say
:'''Kupu kihipu ''kitanulua''  '''.
::The boy ''ate'' the girl.
 
This could be translated narrowly as "The boy mouthed the girl like she was a fruit."
 
Through cultural osmosis, similar phenomena later reappeared in some of the Gold languages, particularly those most closely culturally linked to the Andanese.
 
===Syllable harmony===
Due to historical sound changes such as /pua > pʷo > po > pu/, where a syllable beginning in a vowel was completely swallowed up by the syllable preceding it, Late Andanese evolved '''syllable harmony''' where most related languages evolved consonant harmony or nothing at all.  Any ''a'' in the second element of a compound word could  change to match the syllable of the classifier prefix. Often, a further classifier prefix will then appear before the original one since the meaning of the word has changed.  Alternatively, the second word will agree with the first syllable of the first word in the compound rather than its classifier, since the grammar allows for the reinterpretation of originally independent words as sequences of classifier and short word.
 
This process is not used in people's names, as scholars consider the use of such vacuous alliteration to be a sign of an unintelligent mind, but it is used in common nouns and some place names.  For  example, a road to a store may be called '''ipunapupu''', the compound of '''i-''' "road, open place", '''puna''' "store", and '''aa''' "road".  Note also that the two main morphemes are in the reverse order from what one might expect, because the reinterpretation of the word for store as a one-off classifier makes the compound head-final instead of head-initial as in most compounds.  This process is reminiscent of [[Play_language#The_four_types_of_compounds|Play's head-initial compounds]], which also require a closing morpheme to restore the "proper" morpheme order.
 
==Orthography and contact with other languages==
Andanese has had several scripts.  Commonly, the Andanese wrote their language with one of a series of artistic syllabaries, each with 30 glyphs, which were based on square tiles.  Of these, the commonest one was based on squares with 90° and 45° angles inside them.  In multi-line texts, the boundaries of the squares would often be omitted, resulting in a shape that resembles a  Tangram puzzle.
 
===Main scripts===
The primary script was derived from the 100-glyph [[Tapilula]] syllabary in a highly irregular manner.  As the phonology contracted and evolved, many glyphs were dropped while others were repurposed.  The actual original glyph derivations are:
 
[see red notebook]
 
Because most of the glyphs were taken from the top half of the syllabary, many  of the original shapes did not appear, and the glyphs were smoothed into simpler designs over time.
 
During the last few decades when Late Andanese still had tones, they were spelled with the inherited glyphs for /va vi vu ya yi yu/.  When Andanese lost its tones, these glyphs did not recover their original values, nor were new glyphs created, and therefore these sequences continued to be spelled with digraphs /ua ui uu ia ii iu/.
 
====Phonetic scope====
The syllabary had only thirty glyphs because Andanese teachers considered their language to have only thirty syllables.  At first, these thirty syllables included two sets of symbols for /a i u/ depending on whether the hiatus was primordial or of recent origin; this had important effects on grammar.  They had no glyphs for /sa si su/ because they considered these  syllables to be underlyingly /hia hii hiu/.  But the final stage of the language shifted the spelling to a phonetic one incorporating the earlier hiatus  glyphs as /s/ glyphs. (That is, the glyphs themselves were repurposed, meaning that /a₂ i₂ u₂/ came to spell /sa si su/.)


===Archaic traits===
The teachers never considered the sequences /wa wi wu/ or /ya yi  yu/ to be proper syllables, even though they behaved as such in  the grammar. Neither were sequences such as /mia mii miu/, whose surface pronunciation was monosyllabic, incorporated into the syllabary with single glyphs. The earlier practice of not writing /s/ made sense from this standpoint, as the distribution of /sa si su/ is very similar to that of sequences like /mia mii miu/ and unlike that of more common syllables like /ka ki ku/; the change happened when the script came to be widely used to write foreign languages in which /s/ was a common sound and could not be analyzed as an allophone of an underlying CV sequence.
Andanese has many unsuual traits.<ref>Search  "GRAND TRUTH PARTICLE.doc" for sentences like ''These were by about 3000 AD reduced to five: Sweet, Sleep, Feminine, Masculine, and Child. '' (Five genders.)</ref>  For example, in an early stage of the language, ''ala'' meant "children, people falling down, animals, abstract concepts, claw-hands raised, swinging arms".  Unusual meaning shifts also have taken place; '''aka''' means "baby; blocking" and is not considered to simply be a set of two homophonous words.


There was also a "grand truth particle" at the beginning of every sentenceIt was omitted if the sentence was true, but ''la'' if the sentence was false; if false, any ''-a-'' in the sentence (that is, /a/ with no consonant) would change to ''-la-'' to match the truth particle.
===Minor scripts===
====Batam====
The oddest looking script, "batam" (an exonym), was not a script at all but a means of drawing objects with the angular shapes of one of the many 30-letter syllabaries.  
   
===Persistence of Andanese words in other languages===
Late Andanese loanwords in other languages are mostly pronounced according to the closest match in the recipient language's spelling, since knowledge of the original language disappeared shortly after the war in 4175.    Thus the pronunciation of these words varies from language to language even as the spelling has remained the same for thousands of years.  However, no tradition has introduced phonemes not directly descended from one of the 30 syllables in the Late Andanese language.


Body parts and certain other inalienables change depending on the gender of the referent.  However, whole syllables change, not just consonants.
The [[Palli]] language, spoken by the southern half of the defeated [[Thaoa]] people, lost most of its inherited vocabulary and replaced them with loanwords from Late Andanese.


==Script==
Andanese had aseveral scripts.  The oddest looking one, "batam" (an exonym), was not a script at all but a means of drawing objects with the angular shapes of the 30-letter syllabary.  It is similar to ASCII art.  Thus, "words" made from Batam were generally more than one line long and were absurdly long even comapred to the rest of Andanese.  Nevertheless, Baram inspired the symbololology of earlyt Khull;s, so e.g. a l;etter that looked like a pineapple came to mean "pineapple", meaning that Khulls ironically developed words even shorter than it had already had by using the same method ANdfanese had used to make its already long words even longer.
===Numbers===
* '''apa''' 1
* '''nia''' 2
* '''munia''' 3
* '''huti''' 4
* '''haili''' 5
==Notes==
==Notes==
[[Category:Teppala]]
[[Category:Teppala]]
[[Category:Languages of Teppala]]

Latest revision as of 08:36, 10 November 2022

Around the year 4178, the last surviving Andanic language went extinct as an everyday spoken language, but its ornate writing system survived, and thus knowledge of the language persisted for thousands of years. This preserved language is called Late Andanese.

scratch pad

itanu inuhahuka inuimina inuihupuhu inuihuhatahupuunatata "road to a camp fire wood store"

The above sentence could be loosely glossed as "ROAD STORE WOOD FIRE CAMP", but this does not explain why the words get longer towards the end, and why the increase is much greater on the last word than on the steps in between. Andanese does not need twelve syllables to say "camp"; the last word in the clause must carry the agreement morphemes of all the others, and these are piled on both sides of the root.

Phonology

Late Andanese has only 12 phonemes: the consonants /l h k m n ŋ s p t/ 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.


Consonants

Consonant frequency

The frequency of consonants is roughly the same as their order in the syllabary: /l h k m n p t ŋ s/. However, as detailed below, some consonants are more common before certain vowels, and it is more accurate to think of syllables rather than consonants and vowels as the minimal phonemic unit.

Vowels

Andanese has three vowels: /a i u/. There are no tones, stress, or length distinctions. Unlike most of the languages of the Gold family, Andanese is vowel-strong: its vowels influence the pronunciation of preceding and following consonants, but the consonants have no influence on the pronunciation of the vowels. Vowels can only change due to the influence of adjacent vowels: an /i/ or /u/ before another vowel (even the same vowel) will contract into a semivowel. Other than this, there are no significant allophones of the three vowels.

Another way that Andanese differs from the Gold languages is that, although /a/ is the commonest vowel, it is noticeably less common by comparison to the other two vowels than it is in most Gold languages. The three vowels are all well represented in Andanese speech.

Phonology and vocabulary

With only 30 syllables in the language, many sentences, even with basic vocabulary items, are highly repetitive. For example hahaha is the word for "hat, cap, headgear" (ha- "shaped like" + haha "hair of the head").

Consonants besides /l h k/ are less frequent. The overrepresentation of the consonants /l h k/ (in roughly that order) is part of the reason why Andanese words are often so long even compared to other languages such as Play that have small phonologies.

Expressive wordplay

Another reason why words in Late Andanese are so long is the use of extensive wordplay.

Boys' names

Boys' names were often extremely long-winded due to the deliberate repetition of similar-sounding words and syllables. Simple reduplication was avoided, but since the language had many homophones, long sequences of identical syllables piled up even so. By omitting classifier prefixes, the inventory of homophones increased vastly, with dozens of possible interpretations for each morpheme. Thus, even two boys with the same name could claim unique derivations.

The repetitive names were inspired by the Late Andanese process of syllable harmony, in which a whole syllable in a word changes to that of its classifier prefix. But, as with reduplication, Andanese names avoided syllable harmony, since parents considered it unimpressive to coin a name whose internal assonance was simply due to their language's grammar. Instead, every morpheme in each name was a proper word on its own and could be interpreted in a fixed number of ways.

One common name, Kukukukukukuku, was an extreme example, since it consisted of the thematic syllable /ku/ seven times in a row. All speakers recognized kuku as their word for "leg, run", but from there, thousands of possible interpretations of the name opened up, since, with classifier prefixes removed, the same kuku could also mean "canopy; place high up", "night", or "road"; meanwhile, the remaining ku could also mean "forest", "hand", "arrow (weapon)", or "to expose, show publicly". Thus one boy with the name Kukukukukukuku might tell friends his name meant "running down trails at night" (kuku kukuku kuku; trails being roads in a forest) while another would say that it meant "sitting on a treetop with arrows in hand" (kuku kukuku ku ku, treetops being high places in a forest). Stress was placed only on the final syllable, irrespective of morpheme boundaries, just as in the language as a whole.

A more common name template would intersperse a dominant thematic syllable with several minor ones. Kaaaaaaya was a common boy's name, where the thematic syllable is /a/ and the two minor syllables are /ka/ and /i/. Haaaaaaaaaaa was also a very common boy's name. Taaaamaaaaaamaaaaa was less common. Aaaaaaaaaaatataaaa is another common boy's name. Each /a/ is a separate syllable. The longest boy's name in common use was Kakakaaakakatakakakakakakakakaka.

Some names had two thematic syllables; an example of this was Matamataamatatataamaataaaatata. The bare /a/ was common enough in the language as a whole that its repetition here was not considered to create a third thematic syllable.

Some names had abbreviated forms. For example, Lilalaayilalalalalalaa was another very long boy's name, but could be abbreviated to Lalaaalai.

A classroom of children would often sit quietly when a teacher called out their names, as though hearing lottery numbers read off, since a boy with a lengthy name would need to listen for quite a while to know whether the student being called up to the front of the class was him or his friend whose name differed only on the thirteenth syllable.

Girls' names

Girls' names typically did not use repeating syllables, and were thus typically shorter, but parents often chose long names that did not use repetition. The number of girls' names in use was always much greater than the number of boys' names, and many parents coined novel names never used before.

Other proper names

The same pattern of repeating syllables showed up in placenames such as Mipatatatatai (Land of the Ruling Children of Tata) and party names such as Laaatilalatitiaa (Rusted Pearls).

Allophony and sandhi

NOTE: This section was much longer until Nov 10 2022. See edit history for details.

Late Andanese has a much quicker speech tempo than the Play language that occupies the same territory. This is because the most common consonants in Play are the bilabials /p b m/ and the most common vowel is the open low vowel /a/; the time required to move the lips slows down the pronunciation of syllables containing these sounds, and sets the rhythm for the language, so other syllables are also pronounced slowly.

By contrast, the most common consonant sounds in Andanese are /l h k/, and therefore can be paired with any vowel without slowing down the speech tempo. Although Andanese has labial consonants /p m/, they are not nearly so common as in Play, and so the tongue and lips move independently during the pronunciation of each syllable far more often than in Play.

Allophones of vowel sequences

The vowel sequences ia ii iu are pronounced [ya yi yu], and this is reflected in Romanization. Likewise, ua ui uu are pronounced [wa wi wu.] In the case of ii and uu, the on-glide is weak but still distinctly present, and the second vowel is lowered slightly. Note that the Romanization here uses v for IPA /w/ and y for IPA /j/.

Triple vowel sequences are resolved by starting from the right. For example, tiui can only be [tiwi], never [*tyui]. And kiiii is [kyiyi].

The vowel [a] changes very little in any context. The sequence aa is simply [a:], and the sequences ai au raise the /a/ only slightly. It is common to find long sequences of vowels, including /a/, especially in derived words. Here, the same rules are followed, and thus aaa, aaaa, and so on, are simply more lengthened versions of /a/, with the speaker's volume and pitch the same throughout the entire vowel sequence. Thus Late Andanese aa resembles Play /ā/ more than it resembles Play /aa/.

Allophones of VC sequences

When a syllable beginning with /h/ follows a syllable beginning with a stop, the [h] spreads backwards over the vowel of that preceding syllable, making it voiceless. Thus, puha sounds like [pu̥a] or [pʰwa].

The VC sequence -um- is pronounced like a syllabic [] unless the preceding consonant is another labial.

The VC sequence -un- is pronounced like a syllabic [] unless the preceding consonant is one of t n l.

The VC sequence -uŋ- is pronounced as a syllabic [ŋ̍] unless the preceding consonant is one of k ŋ.

Grammar

Andanese uses prefixes for inflection, and bound postbases for derivation. There are no exceptions to this pattern, despite the strong influence of the many Gold-family languages surrounding Andanese, which use suffixes and infixes, but never prefixes. There are still some infixes inherited from Old Andanese, but because they can only infect the prefixes, Late Andanese is best described as a language that has tables of related prefixes, with one row of prefixes for each infix, rather than a system combining prefixes and infixes.

There is no morphological distinction between nouns and verbs in Andanese, but there is a fixed word order of Subject-Object-Verb, showing that verbs and nouns cannot be considered the same part of speech. In this respect Andanese resembles isolating languages such as Chinese and to a lesser extent English.


Classifier prefixes

All words have classifiers, except for a few that are sometimes considered to have a null morpheme as their classifier. For example, the classifier gi- means "humans, human body parts". Its accusative form is na-. However, classifiers for inanimate objects do not have distinct forms for their accusatives.


Repetition of classifier prefixes across nouns and verbs

Note that classifiers stack on top of the verbs. That is to say, any verb in the sentence will take a prefix agreeing with the noun classifier of the subject, unless it happens to already have the same classifier.

However, humans are spread across several classifiers, which mark different genders and ages of humans. These all share the same verbs, so it is not necessary to repeat the classifier before the object if the subject and object of a sentence are both human. For example, hinuhuki means teacher (adult female), tukuu means student (young child of either gender),[1] and tuupi means to kiss. The accusative form of hi- is mi-. Thus one can say

Tukuu minuhuki tututami.
The student kicked the teacher.

Stacking of classifiers

Classifiers stack across nouns that are dependent on other nouns. For example, kuha means "(a) piece", and sikupi means "wood", so one can speak of

Kuha kusikupi.
A piece of wood.

However, when a two-word phrase such as this is used as an object in a longer sentence, the subject's classifier is repeated only on the first word:

Hinuma hikuha kusikupi hikigi.
The woman scratched the piece of wood.

This can be thought of more clearly with an analogy to mathematics. The sentence above can be visualized in three dimensions, with kusikupi as a branch off of hikuha, or as an equation:

Hinuma hi(kuha ku(sikupi)) hi(kigi).
Words with no classifiers

A small number of words have no classifier prefix. Many of these are proper nouns or loanwords. These are treated as if their first syllable were a classifier prefix, and therefore behave exactly the same as other words except that they usually seem to be in the wrong noun class.

Private verbs

Note, it is most likely that the private verbs will depend on only the agent, and will exclude humans and inanimate objects. Therefore the scope is much less.

Andanese preserves the private verbs of Tapilula, which also persisted in the Gold language but were dropped in all of Gold's descendants, along with the classifier system itself. Private verbs are morphemes, usually only one or two syllables long, whose meaning depends on the preceding classifier prefixes. For example, there exists a verb vutami "to gallop, run quickly on all fours". This verb begins with vu-, which is also the first syllable of the word for horse. Thus, if a horse is the subject, there is no need to repeat its classifier prefix before the verb; the classifier prefix is already there. If a man is galloping, one would say

Kilatu kivutami.
The man is galloping.
The man is running like a horse.

Whereas if the subject is a horse or a similar animal, the sentence would instead be

Vuhapi vutami.
The horse is galloping.
The horse is running like a horse.

Without the need for an extra syllable before the verb. Likewise, if the situation were reversed, one could say

Vuhapi vugitami.
The horse is running like a human (on its hind legs only).

The persistence of verbs like these is the main reason why Late Andanese has so many noun classes for specific animals such as turtles and rabbits with few nouns but larger numbers of verbs.


Note that the neuter prefix gi-, rather than the masculine ki- or feminine hi-, is used whenever animals are personified, regardless of the semantic gender of the animal.

Use of classifiers to derive new words

New words can be formed by copying a word from one class to another. For example, there exists a word pair of gipihi "sharp tooth; canine" and kipihi "to bite". Thus, a noun became a verb by simply changing the classifier prefix.

For some classes, the entire vocabulary can be assumed to be copiable. As above, gi- nouns denoting body parts pair with ki- verbs denoting the action of striking or hitting something with that body part, and with mi- denoting that body part served as food.

Likewise, the word for a young student, tukuu, is actually derived from the word for book, ikuu, by changing the prefix from i-, which denotes handheld objects, to tu-, which marks the "human children" noun class.

Derivation of words

Andanese is a head-initial language. That is, within a word, a classifier prefix will come first, giving the general broad meaning of the word, and each additional morpheme will narrow the meaning of the word further. This is the opposite pattern of most surrounding languages. Thus Andanese could be described as having a taxonomic vocabulary. Someone hearing the first part of a word will not know its precise meaning, but will have a general idea of what it might be. But someone hearing only the end of a word will have no idea which of the many possible categories of the vocabulary the word belongs to.

An exception to the rule that compounds are head-initial (i.e. "ears of corn") is that if one party is animate, the animate partner goes first; thus from vukia "horse" comes vukiakiki "horse ears".[2]


The genitive prefix si- is never used within a word; this appears only heading up a full, independent word describing a definite object. Thus, all compounds are single words, and some can be very long. In general, Andanese words are often highly precise, and may seem long even given the small phonology of the language. Many words have been lengthened by adding additional morphemes over time, even when such lengthening was not necessary to prevent collision of the word with a homophone. For example, the word for heart, as inherited from Old Andanese, is vi. But this is padded with the body part classifier prefix li- on one side and the precising morpheme tu "blood" on the other; thus, the resulting word livitu can be analyzed as "body part heart of blood".

Reassignment of classifier prefixes

Words have moved from one class to another over time. For example, the inherited root word for snow, reflected in Late Andanese as gina, is now indifferent to the form of precipitation and only pairs with classifiers: gagina "snow"; vugina "rain".

Classifier prefixes and titular words

Classifier prefixes cannot be used as words of their own. Every classifier prefix has at least one titular stem, whose meaning simply repeats one of the meanings of the classifier prefix so that it can be used as an independent word. For example, the classifier prefix sa- means "love", but the proper verb for "to love" is sanala. Thus one would say

Kikuhigi nanuma kitasanala.
The soldier loved the nurse.

Likewise, ka- means "tree", but the full form of the word for tree is kakupi.

Polysemy

Classifier prefixes with more than one meaning will have more than one titular word. Since ka- also means "insect", the word kakui, meaning "insect, arthropod" is also considered a titular word.

Dropping of classifiers in compounds

Compounds of two nouns generally drop the classifier from the second noun, using semantics to disambiguate the possible meanings. For example, hikala "seashell" and lakala "bear" share the same two-syllable root, and have different noun classifier prefixes. But the compound word pugikala, which adds pugi "claw", can only be used to mean "bear's claw" because seashells do not have claws. If a speaker did want to specifically say "seashell claw", then they would use pugi puhikala.

Dropping the second classifier is mandatory when it is the same as the first classifier or of the same syntactic field. In fact, some teachers posit null morphemes before each element of a compound, each of which agrees with the outermost classifier. Thus, for example, they analyze pugikala "bear claw" as pugi pukala, and claim this proves that there exists a secondary Andanese word pukala "bear" alongside lakala, which is never used in bare form but is called up when speakers create compound words such as the above pugikala. This theory is one way of explaining the limits of which compounds are allowed to drop the classifiers and which are not. However, a dictionary based on this theory would list over a million words, most of which would be unusable duplicates of others.

Note, the morphemes here may be in the wrong order, since animacy overrides head-first construction.

Locative and thematic classifiers

Assignment of newly coined words to classifiers usually corresponds either to the place ("locative classifiers") or the purpose of the object ("thematic classifiers"). For example, a spoon is not an edible object, but it is frequently found with them, and therefore the word for spoon, miguha is in the food class rather than the handheld object class; iguha instead means "shovel".

Animacy

Inanimate objects have classifiers that do not change for syntactical active or passive roles. Since the subject of a sentence is always animate, however, their classifier is always buried underneath another classifier that repeats the subject's classifier. Note that there are no sound changes; if two vowels come together, they are still pronounced separately. Since this happens also to the verb, often a sentence will consist of three alliterative words. Thus one can say

Tulata tuinuhu tuyula.
The student threw the torch.

Here, while a clever student might expect the sequence /tui/ to contract to /pi/, as it historically did in many similar constructions, the morphemes remain separate and the sequence is thus pronounced [twi].

List of common noun classifiers

All noun classifiers are one syllable long, but some second-order classifiers can follow other classifiers and create what are effectively two-syllable prefixes. Even so, the outermost classifier in such a word is the one that echoes throughout the sentence, not the pair.

a : roads, streets

la : large land animals

i : handheld objects

ha : to worship; needle

ka : trees; some flying insects

u : water, liquid; land features (e.g. "beach", "hill")

ma : some grasses

ga : winter, things encountered in winter

na : accusative of gi- (all senses)

li : rung, plank, flat surface(?); water, liquid (alternates with u-)

sa : love

pa : some words for loose-fitting clothes

ta :

pi : pregnant women, babies, and couples

hi : tree (bark); worm; the ocean(?); bowl, cup, dish; adult women (nominative); men, boys (accusative)

ti : foot, motion

si : genitive prefix (etymologically hi-i-; often seen in contracted form as s- before vowel-initial words)

gi : protective objects; sharp, firm, protective; humans, human body parts; birds[3]

mi : food; breast, nourishment; adult women (accusative)

ni : young girls; place of X, generic placenames; snakes

pu : succulent fruit (doublet of tu-); sexual reproduction, obscene body parts (only when following another classifier such as li-)

hu : fire; celestial objects; insects; tight clothes, "shaped like"; hair of the head, back of body;

tu : small plants; children; blood, bodily humors

su : oceanography (hi- + -u-)

lu : some body parts (a 2nd-order classifier that often comes between the gender marker and the root word)

ku : arrow, sharp weapon

mu :

gu : breast, nurture, nutrition (secondary use only)

nu : fruit[4]; buildings

ki : verbs of motion (corresponds to li- body parts); weapon, claw; men, boys; darkness, night, sleep; some buildings

The sequences /ja ji ju va vi vu/ have taken on the role of pseudo-classifiers, since in initial position they are monosyllabic:

ya : some grasses; pineapple, large fruit; meat, food

yi :

yu :

va :

vi : eye, vision, knowledge

vu : rain, water; horse, rideable animal

If the root begins with a single vowel, the syllables /yi yu vi vu/ reverse to [iy iv uy uv]. If the root word begins with /i/ or /u/ followed by another vowel, however, the normal pronunciation is restored.

However, sequences such as /sia/, /nua/, and so on have not been reanalyzed as single syllables, and cannot serve as classifier prefixes.

Note that there are many monosyllabic morphemes that are not classifiers. For example i means "shoulder", but is only used with a body part classifier li-.

Consonant-based gender system

Andanese inherited the consonant-based gender system from Tapilula. The genders are:

li: Babies; also used for humans of indeterminate age and gender (accusative is na-)

pi: Pregnant; adult males and adult females together; parents, childbirth

ki: Men and boys (contracts to k- before a vowel; accusative is variable, alternating between hi- or s- when acted on by "weak" agents and a contracted form of the prefix of the agent itself for "strong" agents)[5]

tu: Young children (accusative is ti-)

ni: Young girls

hi: Adult women (accusative is mi-)

There is no neuter gender and no epicene gender. Note that females have two genders (three if "pregnant" is considered to be exclusively feminine) but males have one. This is a trait common to many languages of the area, and was present in their common parent language of Tapilula.


As in Gold, all objects found in bodies of water are grammatically feminine even if syntactically masculine.

A very small number of words show relics of the older internal mutations that marked gender in the Tapilula language. In Tapilula, classifier prefixes were dropped in more situations than they are in Late Andanese, and therefore the existence of separate stems for different genders was necessary. In Late Andanese, only a few such words survive, such as the word pair kilitu "king" and hiihu "queen". Even though the stems are different, the use of the prefixes is mandatory in Late Andanese.

Marking the accusative case

Late Andanese marks the accusative case by changing the noun classifier prefix, if there is one. For example, the noun classifier for adult women is hi- in the nominative (agentive) case, but this changes to mi- when a woman is the patient (direct object) of a verb. This case is still padded with the additional case marker of the agent itself, meaning that there will be two noun classifiers stacked together. This is the normal case in Andanese when an noun is the direct object of a verb. Note that inanimate nouns and most non-human animate nouns do not have separate forms of their noun class prefix for showing the accusative.

The masculine noun class, marked by ki- in an agent role, is the most changeable of all noun class prefixes, and the only one whose accusative form depends on the noun class of the agent acting on them. That is, a man stung by a bee will have a different noun class than a man kissed by a woman, in addition to the noun class of the agent which is stacked before the noun class for the man. Furthermore, the agent and patient forms merge before certain vowel-initial words, and the agent form also takes a special form when the patient is male.

The various interrelated patterns are all due to etymology. The original form of the agent prefix was tə- in pre-Andanese, and the patient was hə-. In early Old Andanese, this vowel either disappeared or changed to /i/, depending on environment. The /t/ soon changed to /k/, part of a general shift. Then, the sequences ki hi merged as s- before a vowel-initial word. But this change did not spread to words that became vowel-initial later on, meaning that only a few vowel-initial Late Andanese words trigger this assimilation, one of which is /atu/ "soldier". Further, although the nominative forms for male and female soldiers are both /satu/, in the accusative they diverge, with the masculine form being still /satu/ while the feminine form changes to /miatu/.

Any sequence of /hihi/ resulting from these shifts reduced to /hi/ by a general process of analogy. This occurred when a verb had a female agent and a male patient, but only when one of the other rules above did not force the inner /hi/ to contract into /s/. Lastly, the /hi/ disappears before many consonant-initial roots, as it evolved early on into a simple /h/ in these positions, which was then dropped.

Sample sentences below illustrate the different possibilities:

Satu.
Male soldier.
Kuinau kusatu kutakiu.
The bee stung the soldier.
Hiuma hisatu hitakiihumi.
The woman hit the soldier.
Kikapi.
Male farmer.
Nianu nikapi nipihi.
The snake bit the male farmer.
Hikapi.
Female farmer.
Nianu nimikapi nipihi.
The snake bit the female farmer.

Second order classifiers and length of words

Because of the noun classifier prefixes, most word bases are at least three syllables long. Exceptions are of two kinds: some very common words are used with no classifiers, and some words have classifiers but stems that are only one syllable. Generally these result from recent sound contractions.

Often, a classifier prefix is not sufficient to precisely define a word, and the word will take a second-order classifier between its "exposed" classifier that interacts with the grammar and the rest of the root word. For example, many body parts are classified under the prefix lu-, such as gilulali "head", which breaks down as gi- + -lu- + lali.

Most words of this type acquired their second-order classifiers only fairly recently, when drastic sound changes led to phonological collision of words even within the same noun class.

Some syllables can be used either as primary or secondary classifiers. For example, the -lu- above can only appear after a human gender classifier, but ku- "arrow, sharp object" often follows i- "handheld object" to create words for handheld weapons such as ikukivuni "slicing knife" and ikukuhigi "one-handed sword".

Other information about private verbs

Note, it is most likely that the private verbs will depend on only the agent, and will exclude humans and inanimate objects. Therefore the scope is much less.

Andanese preserves the private verbs of its parent language Tapilula, whereas in the Gold branch of the family they disappeared early on.

Private verbs are verbs whose meaning is entirely dependent on the noun classes of the subject and object that precede it. For example, if the subject is "boy" and the object is "orange", a verb spelled lua could mean "to eat". If the subject is "boy" and the object is "girl", the same verb would mean "to kiss". The only commonality between the two verbs is that they both involve the mouth, and indeed, lua is derived from the word for mouth. The opposite meanings can be indicated by stacking additional classifier prefixes. For example, nulua means unambiguously "eat" in any context, so one can say

Kupu kihipu kitanulua .
The boy ate the girl.

This could be translated narrowly as "The boy mouthed the girl like she was a fruit."

Through cultural osmosis, similar phenomena later reappeared in some of the Gold languages, particularly those most closely culturally linked to the Andanese.

Syllable harmony

Due to historical sound changes such as /pua > pʷo > po > pu/, where a syllable beginning in a vowel was completely swallowed up by the syllable preceding it, Late Andanese evolved syllable harmony where most related languages evolved consonant harmony or nothing at all. Any a in the second element of a compound word could change to match the syllable of the classifier prefix. Often, a further classifier prefix will then appear before the original one since the meaning of the word has changed. Alternatively, the second word will agree with the first syllable of the first word in the compound rather than its classifier, since the grammar allows for the reinterpretation of originally independent words as sequences of classifier and short word.

This process is not used in people's names, as scholars consider the use of such vacuous alliteration to be a sign of an unintelligent mind, but it is used in common nouns and some place names. For example, a road to a store may be called ipunapupu, the compound of i- "road, open place", puna "store", and aa "road". Note also that the two main morphemes are in the reverse order from what one might expect, because the reinterpretation of the word for store as a one-off classifier makes the compound head-final instead of head-initial as in most compounds. This process is reminiscent of Play's head-initial compounds, which also require a closing morpheme to restore the "proper" morpheme order.

Orthography and contact with other languages

Andanese has had several scripts. Commonly, the Andanese wrote their language with one of a series of artistic syllabaries, each with 30 glyphs, which were based on square tiles. Of these, the commonest one was based on squares with 90° and 45° angles inside them. In multi-line texts, the boundaries of the squares would often be omitted, resulting in a shape that resembles a Tangram puzzle.

Main scripts

The primary script was derived from the 100-glyph Tapilula syllabary in a highly irregular manner. As the phonology contracted and evolved, many glyphs were dropped while others were repurposed. The actual original glyph derivations are:

[see red notebook]

Because most of the glyphs were taken from the top half of the syllabary, many of the original shapes did not appear, and the glyphs were smoothed into simpler designs over time.

During the last few decades when Late Andanese still had tones, they were spelled with the inherited glyphs for /va vi vu ya yi yu/. When Andanese lost its tones, these glyphs did not recover their original values, nor were new glyphs created, and therefore these sequences continued to be spelled with digraphs /ua ui uu ia ii iu/.

Phonetic scope

The syllabary had only thirty glyphs because Andanese teachers considered their language to have only thirty syllables. At first, these thirty syllables included two sets of symbols for /a i u/ depending on whether the hiatus was primordial or of recent origin; this had important effects on grammar. They had no glyphs for /sa si su/ because they considered these syllables to be underlyingly /hia hii hiu/. But the final stage of the language shifted the spelling to a phonetic one incorporating the earlier hiatus glyphs as /s/ glyphs. (That is, the glyphs themselves were repurposed, meaning that /a₂ i₂ u₂/ came to spell /sa si su/.)

The teachers never considered the sequences /wa wi wu/ or /ya yi yu/ to be proper syllables, even though they behaved as such in the grammar. Neither were sequences such as /mia mii miu/, whose surface pronunciation was monosyllabic, incorporated into the syllabary with single glyphs. The earlier practice of not writing /s/ made sense from this standpoint, as the distribution of /sa si su/ is very similar to that of sequences like /mia mii miu/ and unlike that of more common syllables like /ka ki ku/; the change happened when the script came to be widely used to write foreign languages in which /s/ was a common sound and could not be analyzed as an allophone of an underlying CV sequence.

Minor scripts

Batam

The oddest looking script, "batam" (an exonym), was not a script at all but a means of drawing objects with the angular shapes of one of the many 30-letter syllabaries.


Persistence of Andanese words in other languages

Late Andanese loanwords in other languages are mostly pronounced according to the closest match in the recipient language's spelling, since knowledge of the original language disappeared shortly after the war in 4175. Thus the pronunciation of these words varies from language to language even as the spelling has remained the same for thousands of years. However, no tradition has introduced phonemes not directly descended from one of the 30 syllables in the Late Andanese language.

The Palli language, spoken by the southern half of the defeated Thaoa people, lost most of its inherited vocabulary and replaced them with loanwords from Late Andanese.

Notes

  1. "book" in dict, though
  2. this probably isn't the reason why gold switched, though, because in goldnthe anime pRtenr oftem.goes last
  3. NOTE. "humans, human body parts; birds" was originally listed under li but this is an error. Both come from Tapilula nʷə-, meaning that humans and birds were considered as one even then. There is alternate form of the prefix, nu-, which is the basis of the accusative.
  4. "Large enough to be eaten one at a time, but small enough to hold in one hand."
  5. from təlin "penis"