Vadi

Introduction

Vadi is an extinct language once spoken in Minhay. A small parchment fragment was discovered in April 2015 in a cave outside of Peħħat, a small township in Sakkeb Prefecture. Soon larger fragments and then the wonderfully preserved Kalapái Scriptum were discovered in an isolated hut, dated as late as the mid to late 1700's CE. The Kalapái Scriptum is a collection of letters between two farmers who were embroiled in an ongoing feud regarding the property lines between their lands. The letters were written in a mixture of Vadi and the the also recently discovered Corrádi language. A few letters were written entirely in the the extinct Minhast Knife Speaker dialect. Also found among the letters are legal papers drawn from the Prefect of Dog Speaker Country. The farmers' letters contained several texts clearly indicating code-switching between Vadi, Corrádi, and the Knife Speaker dialect. The portions containing the Knife Speaker dialect and the current corpus of known Corrádi words were used to decipher the Vadi texts. The Dog Speaker papers did not contribute directly to the decipherment of the language, but as an external source it provided a great deal of context of the nature of the feud between the litigants. This external contextual source clarified the translation of otherwise ambiguous passages. The Kalapái Scriptum is thus popularly referred to as the "Minhast Rosetta Stone".

Example texts

Ji tábila nikku úla hai, petta ulátane
/d͡zi 'tabela nik:u 'ula hai, petta/
Ji tábi-la nikku úla hai, petta ula-tane!
1S land-PL seize try 2S PST, thief 2S-EMP)
You tried to seize my lands, you are a thief indeed!