Tannaean language

Tannaean (Tannaīde, Eleenää kuuvo)
Pronounced:	tə'neɪən (tannə'i:de, e'le:næ: 'ku:vo)
Timeline and Universe:	Ilethes
Species:	Human   Tann
Spoken:	Tannaea
Total speakers:	(tba)
Writing system:	Lazeic alphabet
Genealogy:	Maric   East Maric       Tannaean
Typology
Morphological type:	Inflecting
Morphosyntactic alignment:	Accusative
Basic word order:	SOV
Credits
Creator:	Eugene Oh
Created:	September 2006

The Tannaean language is an East Maric language spoken in the Arithide province of Tannaea in southeast Marcasia. While long relegated to the privacy of homes and unofficial correspondence in favour of the more widely-spoken and economically viable Arithide language, especially during the Neira dynasty, modern regionalism and devolution by the central government have led to its reestablishment as official language of the province, and revivalist movements have undertaken the colossal task of translating numerous terms of politics, administration, science, philosophy etc. into Tannaean where once was used the Arithide.

History

The history and development of the Tannaean language has been extensively affected by the many sound-shifts it has undergone. The most important of them include, in reverse order, the devoicing of many consonants especially in word-initial and word-final position, the simplification of consonant clusters and the harmonisation of word stress, all of which served to dramatically reduce the phonotactic repertoire of the language, and contributed to widespread lexical shift.

It is unknown when Tannaean split from the rest of the East Maric languages, as distinctively Tannaean written records survive only from less than 2,000 years ago, after the Areth expanded into the region, bringing with them the Lazeic alphabet, which was subsequently adapted for the language. Despite the added facility of writing, however, Tannaean constantly lost ground to Arithide, which was more prestigious and which was the lingua franca throughout the Lazeian Empire, and practically the only language used for government, commerce and academia.

When the empire collapsed, however, instead of bringing about a Tannaean renaissance, the locally spoken Arithide variant gained ascendancy, particularly so under the reunified Arithian kingdom established in 1336 CIE, and eventually eclipsed Tannaean until the modern era, when devolution gained traction in the Arithian political scene, and education, among other governmental functions, was largely devolved to the provinces in 1982 CIE. Tannaean revivalists campaigned successfully for the reinstatement of a standardised form of the language, based on the Tannean dialect, as an official language of the province in 1984 CIE, by which time a dictionary of terms and such needed for modern use was nearing completion. Official documents were subsequently translated, and the first cohort of students who received their education in Tannaean graduated from high school in 2002 CIE.

Phonology

Consonants

Voiceless consonants dominate voiced ones in Tannaean, partially due to the devoicing process that began more than six hundred years ago. That sound-change affected all consonants word-initially and word-finally, and later all consonants not surrounded by vowels or the sonorants. Certain southern dialects have taken the process further, devoicing all consonants except the sonorants, while in the north voiced consonants are still widely heard where they have been lost in the standard.

	bilabial	labiodental	dental	alveolar	palatal	velar	glottal
nasal	m		n			ŋ
plosive	p, b		t, d			k, g
fricative		f, v		s			h
trill				r
lateral				l
approximant		w			j

Vowels

The Tannaean phonemic vowels number 16: the short a, ä, e, i, o, ö, u, y [a, æ, e, i, o, ø, u, y] and their respective long counterparts.

See also

• Tannaean Sample Text Corpus

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