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 oblqiue 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 homo "man" developed into Spanish hombre.

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.

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 Sucithasi 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.