Tsaran

Language
Spoken in:	NE United States / Eastern Canada
Timeline/Universe:	Modern day, Non-specific alternate earth
Total speakers:	< 1000
Genealogical classification:	Unknown isolate
Basic word order:	SVO
Morphological type:	Agglutinative
Created by:
Jashan A'al	1985-current

'Tsaran' refers to any of the various forms of the Tsaran language throughout history. It is spoken by the Tsara people, a nomadic and xenophobic tribal people thought to have originated in the area of present-day Romania. The language is at root a linguistic isolate, but has borrowed a great deal of Gallo-Romance vocabulary and features due to the Tsara's length stay in France.

History

The origins of the Tsaran language are a mystery. Lack of any known sister or parent languages, as well as lack of documented material prior to the Elder Tsaran period, has proven a formidable blockade.

Without a doubt, the Tsaran tongue is a linguistic isolate, related none of its surrounding neighbors, Indo-European or otherwise. The features of the language do resemble a neighbor have quickly been found to have been borrowed or coincidental. It is supposed from the Tsaran oral history that the Tsendashai may have spoken either a related language or a distinct dialect of Tsaran itself; however, without written records or samples of this speech, this is purely hypothetical.

Proto-Tsaran

The sole known example of pre-Elder Tsaran speech was found on a fragment of pottery found near Galati, Romania in 1963 (although it remained unidentified until 1998). Whether or not it was written by the Tsara or a neighboring people is unknown. It consists of a single line:

Ky taan ky derentah sul

A possible partial translation was found nearby in 1967:

...(the) moon the ...(mid)night sun....

It is interesting to compare this to the Elder Tsaran equivalent:

Taandais, sana-elanadais eiah

Assuming that it is accurate that the older inscription (dated to approximately 500 BC, four hundred years before the mark of "classical" Elder Tsaran) is indeed a precedessor of Tsaran and not, as some believe, an extinct relative, one can only guess as to what changes and influences must have taken place in the following centuries.

Elder Tsaran (Ley Arah)

The true "Elder Tsaran" period of the language begins at approximately 200 C.E. and extends through the last decades of the Genocide in the late seventh century. This marks the first structured and recorded instances of the Tsaran language.

Elder Tsaran is marked by an extremely agglutinative structure both in its nominal and verbal systems; words ranging up to 7 or more syllables are common place. Suffixes are predominant, with only a few prefixes being present. In very early Elder Tsaran, there is evidence of a split first-person plural; an "inclusive we" (the speaker and the person spoken to) and an "exclusive we" (the speaker and some other person, but not the person being spoken to). This distinction was lost early in the history of the language. Also appearing sporadically in Elder Tsaran is a base-nine numbering system, although by the time of "Classical Elder Tsaran" (from which the majority of linguistic evidence comes) the numbering method had been replaced by a decimal (base-ten) system. Elder Tsaran was primarily a V-S-O language, with some instances of S-V-O.

Elder Tsaran survives to an extent as a scholarly and learned language among well-educated Tsara today (similar to Latin or Sanskrit for Europeans), although it is increasingly rare.

Example:

Selah'dais isalem arapahjes uun arah, oi'eldahel isalem arapahjes rogana

[Long ago] the whole world had one language, and the people had a common speech

Middle Tsaran

The Middle Tsaran period began with the destruction of the Elder Tsaran linguistic records and literature, and the Scattering of the Tsaran people. The lack of literacy and geographic isolation encouraged linguistic variation and change. Middle Tsaran was marked by a gradual preference towards shorter, more analytical constructions, although the inherent agglutinativeness of the language was still extremely apparent. Suffixes and prefixes became more regularized and simplified in their usage. The word order entered a state of flux, becoming about equally V-S-O and S-V-O.

The most striking result of the Middle Tsaran period was simplifications of diphthongs into their initial vowel sound. Diphthongs throughout the language first lengthened ("ai" becoming "aai"), then dropping the final component ("aa"), and finally shortening in length ("a"). The pronominal system was affected most drastically by this and other sound changes, which set the stage for the elimination of the native pronominal system in favor of a Gallo-Roman one in later years.

Example:

Seladais is arapjhes un ara, o'eldahel is arapjhes rogana. (Early Middle)

Selade as aravajhis un ara, o'eldahel as aravajhis rowana. (Late Middle [Eastern])

Dialect Divergence

After the Crossing of the La'esh Na, the Tsaran people were effectively split into two major groups -- the free Eastern population, and the Western population trapped in Pomeillean territory. The two eventually established distinct dialects, although the Western dialect went extinct with the death of the Western Tsara in approximately 750 C.E.

Within Eastern Tsaran itself, several minor dialects arose and flourished for a period of time. However, with the Renaissance and re-standardization of the Tsaran language between 900 and 1000 C.E., the majority of dialects became moribund in favor of the standardized speech. Nowadays, "dialect" is more a term of accent and a few small vocabularic differences.

Example:

Selade as aravajhis un ara, o'eldahel as aravajhis rowana. (Late Middle Eastern Tsaran)

Ara cojhes seladas is un ara, o'ara cojhes rogana ela is (Late Middle Western Tsaran)

Gallo-Romance Influence

Linguistic "contamination" was inevitable when the Tsaran began re-establishing ties with the neighboring nations after their arrival in Gaul. A prime factor in this was the Tsaran sound changes -- Tsaran words were primarily mono- or duo-syllabic, and the simplification of diphthongs and softening of intervocalic sounds created a vast amount of homophones in the language. Instead of retaining two identical words (or nearly-identical words) for different concepts, often a neighboring word would be adopted and modified to more easily fit a Tsaran tongue.

A very prominant result of these sound shifts was the elimination of the native pronominal structure. With the sound shifts, the distinction between the 2nd and 3rd person was effectively nullified. To counteract this, many speakers began using the local Gallo-Romance pronouns. Increasing contact and extention of this practice gradually resulted in a completely new, completely Gallo-Romance pronoun system -- genitive, nominative, and objective.

Gallo-Romance has also served to standardize the somewhat chaotic word order in Tsaran. Originally V-S-O, it had developed tendancies towards S-V-O as well as S-O-V, depending on the structure of the sentence and what words were being used! Under analogy with the local French dialects, the word order has settled firmly into S-V-O, with the exception of direct objects. Like French, Middle Tsaran placed its direct objects between the subject and the verb when the direct objects were pronouns themselves. That is, one said "I him see", not "I see him." This pattern was independantly developed of the Gallo-Romance languages, but was reinforced by the contact.

While originally a great number of terms regarding non-Tsaran technologies and items were adopted from the surrounding languages, it quickly became a favored method to create new terms out of the native lexicon instead. Thus while elís (church) was adopted from the French eglise (the Tsara had no notion of a specific building in which to worship before contact with Christianity), the more modern socára (telephone) is a straightforward coinage (soc - long; ára - speech)