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.

Phonology

Late Andanese, spoken around the year 4200 and thereafter as a ceremonial language, 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.

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/, /ti/, /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. 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.

Phonemic contractions and other processes of morphophonology

Historical use of the glottal stop

Old Andanese had held onto a phonemic voiceless uvular stop /q/ inherited from Tapilula. This eventually changed into a glottal stop /ʔ/. While this glottal stop was still phonemic, Andanese underwent a sound change that turned the sound sequences /ki ti hi/ before another vowel into a new phoneme, /s/. Then, later on, the glottal stop disappeared, leaving behind new vowel sequences. Thus, sequences of /ki ti hi/ plus a vowel were once again possible, and the words in which it had changed to /s/ as part of a grammatical operation came to be seen as irregular. The native Andanese script kept the now-silent glottal stop distinct by using different symbols for its syllables, so this unpredictability was not generally a problem for the speakers of the language, but soon the use of the separate symbols fell out of use and they came to be recycled to spell /s/ itself. Thus, one of Andanese's few irregularities is that compounds of a morpheme ending in /ki ti hi/ and one beginning in a vowel sometimes collapse into /s/ sequences and sometimes they do not. This has still not been regularized by analogy.

At the same time as the above shift, the syllables /ku tu pu/ plus a vowel all shifted to /p/. This was not a new phoneme, but it previously had been rare in initial position because of an earlier shift which had changed it to /gʷ/ when it began an accented syllable, and most words at that time were accented on their initial syllable. Thus, this sound change also takes place unpredictably when a word ending in one of those syllables is compounded with certain vowel-initial words.

At older stages of the language, similar shifts had taken place which led to different results. For example, the classifier prefix ki-' indicates men or boys, and contracts to a k- before a word historically beginning in a vowel. It doesn't become s- because the sound shift that caused this change happened much earlier than the /ki/ > /s/ shift, and therefore /ki/ had been eliminated in all of the environments in which it would have been able to shift to /s/. This /ki/ > /k/ shift is still blocked by words historically beginning with a glottal stop, though, because the glottal stop was still there (as /q/) at the time of the /ki/ > /k/ shift. Thus, to refer to the ulihipinimu "hip bone" of a male, one would say kiulihipinimu "man's hip bone", not *kulihipinimu or *sulihipinimu.

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").

NOTE, ALL OF THESE EXAMPLES OMIT THE VERB TENSE MARKERS UNTIL I KNOW WHAT THEY ARE. I DONT KNOW IF THEY ARE COGNATES WITH KHULLS/BABA/ETC OR NOT.

The commonest consonant in the language is /l/. Sentences containing no other consonant are possible:

Lili lilalialali liluli.

The girl is sitting on the mushroom cap.

The voiceless velar stop /k/ is also a common sound:

Kikaki kiyakukaa kikui.

The prince bit the strawberry.

Note that most Andanese speakers do not consider /j/ to be a consonant, since it is simply an allophone of /i/. However, a word like kikaku "banana tree" could easily be substituted.

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 Babakiam that have small phonologies.

Boys' names

Late Andanese names, particularly names for boys, were often extremely long-winded even for what one would expect of such a small phonology, due to the deliberate repetition of similar-sounding words and syllables. For example, 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 name. Each /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.

A classroom of children would often sit quietly when a teacher called out one of 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.

Allophony and sandhi

Allophony in Andanese is best understood as a process that affects whole syllables rather than individually affecting consonants or vowels. With only 30 syllables in its phonology, the syllable has come to be the minimal phonological unit, and each of the 30 syllables behaves uniquely. For example, si behaves sometimes like ti, sometimes like su, and sometimes unlike either of them.

Rate of speech

Andanese is spoken so quickly that speakers of neighboring languages perceive it as a harsh, guttural language consisting mostly of consonants, especially /l h k/, the three most common consonants in the language. However, even though /s/ is rare, it is generally a louder consonant than those others, and speakers of neighboring languages often perceive Andanese to be rich in /s/ as well.

Voicing of consonants

The voiceless consonants /h k s p t/ are always voiceless, even between vowels in rapid speech. The Old Andanese sound rule that caused /p t/ to become [b d] between vowels has disappeared in Late Andanese (it had never affected /h/ or /k/, and Old Andanese did not have /s/). However, these consonants are at most only very weakly aspirated, unlike the voiceless stops of neighboring languages such as Khulls. Loanwords from Andanese into Thaoa and other languages which distinguish aspiration in voiceless stops always assign the unaspirated stops to the Andanese loanwords. (Khulls does not have a true voiceless unaspirated series, however, and therefore uses the aspirated stops after all.)

Palatalization of alveolar consonants

The coronal syllables li ni ti si are contracted to [lʲĭ nʲĭ tʲĭ sʲĭ] before a vowel, and, for most speakers, also before a consonant. In this transcription, the [ĭ] represents a very short /i/ vowel, which may not be fully fronted, and in rapid speech may be omitted entirely without affecting the audible intelligibility of the words being spoken. In formal speech, every vowel is pronounced, but nevertheless, sandhi processes such as this are responsible for the perception of Andanese as a language rich in consonant clusters.

Allophones of syllables beginning with /h/

As /a/ is the commonest vowel in the language, the allophone of /h/ that occurs before /a/ is considered the primary one. This varies between [x] and [χ] depending on stress and emphasis. Before the vowel /i/, /h/ is fronted to a voiceless palatal fricative [ç], and before /u/, it becomes a sound that varies between a rounded voiceless bilabial approximant [hʷ] and a spread voiceless bilabial fricative [ɸ].

Thus, the pronunciation of /h/ is never actually [h]; the spelling is due to the retention of the alphabet used by neighboring languages. Since the allophones of /h/ are entirely determined by which of Andanese's three vowels follows it, in rapid speech the vowel may be spoken so quickly that the listener does not even hear it, and perceives instead a consonant cluster beginning with one of the above sounds. However, /a/ is less likely to be dropped than either of the two high vowels.

Grammar

Andanese uses prefixes for inflection and suffixes 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 is no distinction between nouns and verbs in Andanese, but there is a fixed word order of Subject-Object-Verb.

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.

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 li- 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),, 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).

Polysemy and homophony of classifiers

Classifier prefixes sometimes arise from more than one root. For example, the li- classifier above, which denotes humans and human body parts, is also the classifier for birds, which means that humans can use birds' verbs and vice versa without needing to stack an additional classifier on the verb. These were originally two different roots that coalesced due to very aggressive sound changes. A third meaning of li- is "lake, pond"; however, this is rare, confined to placenames, and not in active use.

Use of classifiers to derive new words

New words can be formed by copying a word from one class to another. For some classes, the entire vocabulary can be assumed to be copiable. For example, li- 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. For example, the word for thigh is lihuliti, but somebody's thighs served for dinner could be called

Yahuliti yatulihi.

Human thigh with spices.

Derivation of words

For the most part, 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 of surrounding languages like Pabappa, where it is the last morpheme within a word that defines the general broad meaning of the word.

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 dummy words

Classifier prefixes cannot be used as words of their own. For example, the classifier prefix sa- means "love", but the proper verb for "to love" is sanala. Thus one would say

Kikuhigi nanuma kisanala.

The soldier loved the nurse.

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 as separate syllables. 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.

List of common noun classifiers

All noun classifiers are one syllable long.

a : roads, streets

la :

i : handheld objects; animals

ha : clothes, "shaped like"; hair of the head, back of body; to worship; needle

ka : tree

u : water, liquid

ma : some grasses

ga : ice, cold, snow

na : accusative of li- (all senses)

li : humans, human body parts; birds

sa : love

pa :

ta :

pi :

hi : tree (bark); worm; the ocean(?); bowl, cup, dish

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

mi : food; breast

ni : place of X, generic placenames

pu :

hu : fire; celestial objects

tu : small plants; blood, bodily humors

su :

lu :

ku : arrow, sharp weapon

mu :

gu :

nu : fruit

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

The sequences /ja ji ju va vi vu/ have taken on the role of pseudo-classifiers, since even in Classical Andanese their pronunciation was already monosyllabic:

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

yi :

yu :

va :

vi : eye, vision, knowledge

vu : rain, water; horse, rideable animal

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. Due to sound changes, the consonants do not line up well with those of the parent language. An Andanese innovation was that, despite the Andanese language in general being nonfusional, gender markers used as prefixes affected the words they attached to. This is actually not truly an innovation, because the Tapilula language did this as well, but Andanese got rid of other such fusional aspects of grammar while retaining the gender "shaping" process. 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 hi- or s-)

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.

Archaic traits

Andanese has many unsuual traits. 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 sentence. It 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.

Body parts and certain other inalienables change depending on the gender of the referent. However, whole syllables change, not just consonants.

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.

Hisorty

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.

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.

Note, also, that /l/ patterns grammatically as a dorsal consonant, which means that from the viewpoint of the Old Andanese speakers, there were only four non-dorsal consonants in the language: /p m t n/.

History=

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.

By the 1900s, Andanese were most strongly settled along the south coast where the weather was warmest. For the most part, Andanese did not build their own nations; they settled in the nations of other people such as the Pabap people and the Subumpamese. They lived in the same territories as Pabaps but for the most part lived in separate cities.

Cultural traits of the early Andanese people

The Pabap and Andanese cultures were a lot alike, and despite having different religions the people worshipped the same gods. However, the Andanese were a very violent people, and stood out sharply from the pacifistic Pabaps they lived among. Young Andanese boys were trained from an early age how to hold a sword, and by the time they could read they were strong enough to kill wild animals and defend their elderly and infirm relatives from hostile would-be invaders. By contrast, young Pabap boys were trained from an early age how to plant trees and vegetable gardens, and how best to decorate their property with the most beautiful flowers they could afford so that people walking through their property could enjoy the scenery and stop to rest after they had eaten their fill of the fruits and vegetables in their Pabap neighbors' garden.

The Andanese and Pabaps generally did not battle each other, however, so having vampires living amongst them was not a problem for Pabaps.

Early Andanese language

See Old Andanese.

Later history

Eventually, 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 tribes. This 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.

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.

Andanese people tended not to build nations of their own; instead, they settled in nations developed by other peoples, chiefly the Pabap people and the Subumpamese living along the south coast of Rilola. They 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 majority. But 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.

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 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 women. Andanese 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.

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.

Numbers

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