Palli language
Palli is a laguage spended from Thaoa. Although originally an indepewdnent society, many Andanese spilled over and soon became the new majoreity. But their religion did not trasnger over. Because of the strong Andfanese influence, /ŋ/ is romanized as g here. (There is no /g/ anuyway)
Phonology
In some ways, very conservative. I nfact, Andanese loanwords survived for 4500 years with only one sound change /hi/ > /si/. That shift was reversed bny analogy because many words with ./hi/ cvould e /ha/ in other forms. Thuds Andfanes words are unchanged.
On the other hand, the native vocabulary changed quite a lot because there were many sound changes which drastically reduced the phonemic inventory. Early on, most nouns were replaced with their oblique forms, which always ended in vowels. Thus words started out in early Palli by actually getting longer instead of shorter. This is analogous to what happened in Vulgar Latin, where for example costūmen "custom" developed into Spanish costumbre.
- NOTE, DUE TO MY REWORKING OF THAOA, A LOT OF THE INFO HERE NO LONGER APPLIES. PREVIOUSLY I WROTE AS IF PALLI STARTED DEVELOPING C.4200 AD, WHICH IS AFTER THE DEATH OF THE ANDANESE NATION. I'VE SINCE MOVED IT BACK TO ~2668 AD. INSTEAD OF SPREADING THE SOUND CHANGES OVER 4500 YEARS (4200 - 8700 AD), THEY WILL BE COMPRESSED SO THAT THE FINAL DATE OF CLASSICAL PALLI WILL BE VERY NEAR TO THAT OF CLASSICAL ANDANESE.
The staircase shift
Palli never had any voiced fricatives. Its voiceless fricatives included an /f/ not present in Sakhi, which mostly corresponded to proto-Sakhi /b/. Later, Palli underwent the "staircase shift" where the four fricatives collapsed into two, dependent on the following vowel. A chart of each consonant paired with each vowel has steps like a staircase, hence the name. The sound change is easier to visualize if the endpoints are /f/ and /s/, with a subsequent universal shift of /f/ > /h/. However, the actual sound change was more complicated than this.
/f/ stayed /f/ always.
/h/ became /f/ when before /a o u/, but became /s/ when before /e i/.
/š/ became /s/ when before /a e i/, but became /f/ when before /o u/.
/s/ stayed /s/ always.
Down to three vowels
Later, there came to be only three vowels, as in ANdanese. The shift was /a e o/ > /a/, unlike Andanese. This happened after the staircase shift.
Final phonology
The final phonology is identical to that of Andanese. However, Palli still allowed closed syllables, which led to a very different setup of allophones as compared with Late Andanese. All Andanese syllables were "rising", and most of Palli's were too, but the existence of closed syllables meant that rapid speech could cut syllables down from both ends rather than just affecting the vowel.
The consonants allowed in syllable-final position are /l h k n/. Of these, /h k/ are restricted to appearing before another consonant, and therefore cannot occur word-finally.
/h/ assimilates to a following stop by forming a geminate with that stop. Before an /s/, it becomes [t]. Thus it could be said that syllable-final /h/ behaves more like a glottal stop than an /h/.
/k/ does not assimilate to following stops. /hk/ and /kk/ are held distinct by various means, which differ from dialect to dialect. Because both occur in vernacular readings of Andanese loanwords, it is crucial to maintain this distinction.
Allophones
- /k/ becomes [ʔ] between vowels, and since Palli is mostly CV, this means that [k] is not a particularly common sound in Palli as a phone, unlike Andanese. However, the consonant clusters /hk/ and /kk/ do exist, with pronunciations resembling [k] and [k:].
- Palli is not a mora-timed language, so sequences like /sia/ seem like single syllables to speakers, unlike Andanese this sequence would be pronounced as two (very quickly spoken) syllables. Likewise, the sequence /sii/ sounds like [ši], again behaving as if it were a single syllable. It is thus possible to analyze Palli has having a far larger phonology than Andanese. Put another way, in Andanese, /si/ and /sii/ would sound the same except for length. In Palli /si/ may sound like a single consonant, [š].
Stress accent
Stress accent moves from always-initial to always-final under the influence of Late Andanese.
Vocabulary
Palli ported in the entire Andanese vocabulary and added it to their own bocab inheried from Thaoa. Thus the phonemes of ANdfnaes are just a susbeet of the others and are overrrepreseented repsective to Sakhi etc. Thew grammr is mostly still Thaoa-like, e.g. it has noun cases derived from infixes, which means it retains closed syllables, even though the vast majority of the jnouns do not have closed syllables in the nominative case because Andanese didnt have closed syllables at all. Andanese has many synonyms for the same thing with little difference in m,eaning, e.g. latuhi, latuunama, latunuma "boat". Palli takes all of these and oftne uses the longest one .
Culture
Palli people do not consider themselves descendants of the disgraced Andanese; instead, they say they served as a refuge for the Andanese while maintaining their own culture.
The early Palli territory resembled Greece physically, in that it had a heavily indented coastline with offshore islands. The climate was cool temperate in the earliest days after the split with Sakhi, but warmed up steadily over time. There were not nearly as many islands in Palli-land as there are in Greece, but the Palli people were nonetheless dominated by their ocean.
Despite being named after a woman, Palli had been invaded by the aggressively virile Andanese people and opposed Sakhi's embrace of radical feminism. When the Pallian leadership learned that Sakhi had been forced to sign a Feminist Compact putting Sakhi firmly under female control and shutting down their military, they contemplated an invasion, planning to use the Sakhi men as slaves and the Sakhi women as prostitutes. But no action was taken, because the two nations were separated by the difficult Hutithasi mountains, and even with their superior male standing army the Pallians knew that such a war would be very difficult.
Grammar
In some phrases, subjects are circumfixes. That is, the normal noun goes in front, then the verb and other words dependent on it, then an addition word that reflects the noun.
This setup is descended from the proto-language's SOV nouns, which were entire sentences that came to be used as ordinary nouns by removing the inflection from the (always final) verb. Palli differed from the other languages only in that the verb part of the compound became opaque while the object part of the compound remained "alive" and therefore changeable. Thus, it could also be said that objects are infixes within the subjects. However, unlike the SOV words of these other languages, in Palli the compounds are spelled as separable words.
- note, what about the verb? is it also an infix? try to remember the "messy" words like šučupoladaešakšamo and poekšekmek and what the repetitions were for.
For example, if lanami nuhu "orange" is infixed into hasa liha "boy", the result is hasa lanami nuhu liha "a boy ... an orange". Possibly these words would be abbreviated; the final morpheme could be tacked onto the end of the verb, and therefore seen as a sort of verbal noun-class agreement suffix.
The words tend to be divided based on what was once the border between a noun and its verb. These verbs could be thought of as noun classifiers, e.g. liha "talking" applies to humans.
Cliticization
Perhaps instead, all nouns are bipartite, consisting of a root and a suffix. This suffix cliticizes to the last word in the phrase of which it is the topic. If the noun is used in isolation, it cliticizes to its own root and therefore appears as a single word. If it is the subject of a clause, it cliticizes to the verb and therefore appears at the end of the clause (verbs are still always "final") and therefore appears to be a verb inflection. This essentially mimics the Andanese classifier prefix system, except that
- The noun suffix appears only once, and encloses the entire phrase, rather than appearing on each word.
- It is always a suffix, never a prefix. Many Andanese loans have the prefixes intact, but these are treated as part of the stem and will not separate.
To increase efficiency, probably single-syllable verbs will be favored. The word for boy could use -ka instead of -liha, even though animals also use -ka. The language is still by far the most inefficient in its family, however.
