Modern Manish

Modern Manish is a language spoken in the fictional world of Aior. It is the most widely spoken language on Aior, both by number of native speakers and by total number of speakers. Work on the language began in 2017, and it continues to be updated.

Introduction

Modern Manish as a native language is spoken primarily in Cartondin and Terithius. In addition, there is a group of Katorian pirates that use it. In addition to its use as a native language, the prominence of Cartondin in the world as a military and economic power has led to the use of Manish as a lingua franca in many interactions by educated people from nearly all nations. Typically, this usage is heavily influenced by the native language of the speaker.

Origin

The Modern Manish language as spoken in Cartondin and Terithius traces its origins back to Old Manish, one of the five languages given to Aior by the gods near the time of the creation. Since then, several languages have branched off from the original tongue, but none has such a large group of speakers as Modern Manish. Over the course of just over two thousand years, various groups have used Manish either as a native language or even more commonly as a lingua franca. This has led to the simplification of many of the morphological and phonological features of the language.

Typology

Some of the typological features of Modern Manish include:

• The phoneme inventory consists of fifteen consonants and seven vowels.
• Syllable structure is fairly simple. Every vowel is considered the nucleus of its own syllable, optionally followed by a consonant and optionally preceded by a consonant or a cluster consisting of a stop, /v/, or /s/ and a liquid.
• The basic constituent order is Subject -- Verb -- Object. The language is almost entirely head-initial.
• The language is mostly agglutinative, but there are also a few fusional aspects.
• Verbs are inflected for gender of the subject, tense/aspect, mood, and voice. Each element is marked with an agglutinative prefix.
• Nouns and pronouns are marked for gender and number but not for case.

Changes Since Old Manish

Partly due to its usage as an international lingua franca, Modern Manish has lost much of the complexity of the Old Manish verbal and nominal systems. However, it has also innovated various new features. Phonetically, it is one of the more conservative Manish languages. A list of various changes and innovations includes:

1. Change of unmarked constituent order from Subject-Object-Verb to Subject-Verb-Object
2. Loss of vowel length
3. Loss of /ə/ in all positions
4. Debuccalization of /f/ to /h/ followed by loss of /h/ in all positions
5. Redistribution of the phonemes /ɾ/ and /l/
6. Simplification of syllable structure
7. Regularization of syntax such that the language is almost entirely head-initial
8. Loss of the dual marker in all but the most formal speech and the Royal dialect
9. Development of the prepositions perte and perite 'of' to replace the older construct state
10. Loss of the construct state except in very formal speech and the Royal dialect
11. Reanalysis of the definite state marker ra- as a definite article la
12. Change of most postpositions to prepositions following loss of the construct state
13. Loss of case on nouns and the simplification of case on pronouns
14. Change of the remote and recent past tenses into past perfective and past imperfective
15. Reduplication of the past perfective to produce a habitual aspect
16. Change of the middle voice prefix pef- to mean passive and loss of older tôqâ-
17. Use of particle po (from Old Manish pô 'yes') to ask questions

Major Dialects

There are four major dialects of Modern Manish. Cartondish, the dialect of the majority of Cartondin, is by far the most spoken, but it is also the most divided. The Royal dialect is the form of the language spoken by the Royal Family of Cartondin as well as the dialect affected by those in the presence of royalty. The Terithian dialect is spoken by the majority of Terithius, the smaller country to the east of Terithius. The Southern dialect is spoken by pirates from Katorias.

Cartondish

The Cartondish dialect (more specifically, the dialect as spoken in Rowesburg and surrounding areas) is typically considered the standard. As such, except when otherwise noted, descriptions of the language in this work refer specifically to the Cartondish dialect. While most common people write the way they pronounce words, scholars and other trained writers typically follow Cartondish orthography.

Royal

The Royal dialect is an interesting one because it is largely artificial. It is mostly based on the Cartondish dialect but makes use of many words and constructions considered archaic in other dialects. It is characterized by careful pronunciation and very few loanwords. It also revived the use of states in place of the definite article and the preposition perte.

Terithian

The Terithian dialect is mostly very similar to the Cartondish dialect, but it has typically been more open to external influences. Relations with Aidenvelle have opened the way for many of the sound changes of Aiden to begin to affect Terithian Manish as well, particularly those that have affected the pronunciation of diphthongs. Some Terithians may not pronounce syllable-final nasals, instead nasalizing and slightly lengthening preceding vowels.

Southern

The Southern dialect is characterized by heavy use of loanwords and calques from other languages, especially the various Manish and Elvish languages of Katorias. This dialect tends to be very innovative, but due to its perceived lack of prestige most of its innovations never carry back to the other dialects, making it at times difficult to understand. Despite this, it is generally still considered to be a dialect of Modern Manish as it has been shown that speakers of Southern Manish can understand the other dialects very well. Phonologically, the Southern dialect is simpler than other dialects. /a/ and /ɑ/ have merged into /a/, and /i/ and /ɪ/ have merged into /i/. /θ/ is pronounced by some speakers as a dental stop, but others pronounce it as [t], losing the phonemic distinction. Speakers who use a dental stop often pronounce /t/ as post-alveolar. In addition, Southern speakers sometimes aspirate voiceless stops.

Phonology

Modern Manish phonology has remained largely faithful to that of Old Manish. The most noticeable difference is the loss of long vowels and the simplification of many consonant clusters. In addition, the system of stress has become much more regular. While some dialects have further simplified the phoneme inventory, they have typically done so in a mostly regular fashion. Because of that, specific dialectical pronunciations will be touched upon only briefly.

Consonants

	bilabial	labiodental	alveolar	post-alveolar	velar
stop	p b		t d		k g
fricative	v	θ	s z	(ʃ) (ʒ)
tap			ɾ
lateral approximant			l
nasal	m		n

Notes

• /ʃ/ and /ʒ/ only occur in loanwords, mostly from Umnan. Some speakers (particularly less educated speakers) do not pronounce them differently from /s/ and /z/, which occur natively.
• /m/ and /n/ contrast in isolation and before vowels, but both assimilate to [m] before labials, [n] before alveolars, post-alveolars, and dentals, and [ŋ] before velars.

Vowels

	front	central	back
close	i ɪ		u
mid	e		o
open		ɑ	a

Notes

• The major distinction between /i/ /ɪ/ and /a/ /ɑ/ is tense-lax. The Southern dialect merges /ɪ/ and /ɑ/ into their tense counterparts.
• Some speakers, especially in Cartondin, pronounce /ɑ/ a bit higher, leading some to transcribe it /ɐ/ or even /ə/.