Nidâri

Introduction

Ín Duári is an indigenous minority language spoken in small pockets in Minhay. The language is not related to the Minhast language, nor the Peshpeg language, another minority language in the Minhast Nation. A relationship with the extinct Corradi language, another language indigenous to Minhay, has not been successfully demonstrated. Some linguists have also tried to establish a relationship with nearby languages in Northeast Asia, including Japanese, Korean, Ainu, and various Altaic, Tungusic, and Paleosiberian languages. Others have tried to link it to the Indo-European language family, due to typological similarities between the two. Nevertheless, a relationship with other languages continues to elude scholars, and thus Ín Duári remains classified as a language isolate.

The Ín Duári have often been referred to in older literature by the name Golahát. The term is an exonym, originating from the Peshpeg word gola, meaning inferior, and -hát, a Peshpeg suffix used to derived denonyms; the suffix -hát is itself a borrowing from the Minhast suffix -ast/-hast. The endonym ín Duari, used by native speakers to refer to themselves, means "the people", and they refer to their language as rinázi, meaning "those who speak (intelligibly)".

Like Peshpeg, Ín Duári is an endangered language; according to the 2010 census, less than one thousand people still speak the language, the youngest in their late 30's or early 40's. ín Duari has fared better than Peshpeg, which has only a few hundred speakers at most. Nevertheless, ín Duari continues to lose speakers due to several factors, such as the influx of Minhast speakers into traditionally Ín Duári-speaking areas, emigration by the younger generation to urban areas in search for employment, and the influence of the Minhast-dominated media. Particularly devastating to the language in recent years was when the Ín Duári fled to Horse Speaker territory after suffering numerous punitive attacks by the Wolf Speakers during the Three Speakers War. The Ín Duári suffered heavy casualties and as a result lost many native speakers.

Ín Duári is divided into several dialects, with various degrees of mutually intelligibility. The Anzi dialect has historically been the dominant dialect, however an unofficial lingua franca based on the Enoţin dialect has recently spread as its speaker base has been least affected by the diaspora resulting from Wolf Speaker expansion. The GæÞwin dialect, although considered a minor dialect, is found in most linguistic literature as it is the most conservative of all the surviving dialects and is found in most native literary works and prevails in oral tradition; it is considered as the prestige dialect for these reasons and is the dialect described in this article.

Phonology

Orthography

Vanâr, cognate with Ín Duári uannar, means "Eastern Sea", a historical reminder that it was early American missionaries that developed the system before the Minhast prefectures imposed restrictions limiting Western access to Aškuan.

Vanâr Characters
a, â, e, i, o, u, b, p, v, f, t, d, k, g, m, n, l, r, s, š z, h, x, y

Consonants

Ín Duári Consonantal Inventory

		Bilabial	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal	Laryngeal
Nasal		m	n
Plosive		p b	t d		k g	ʔ
Fricative	Non-Sibilant	f v			x, χ		h
	Sibiliant		s z
Affricates
Approximants				j
Trill			r
Lateral			l

Vowels

	Front		Central		Back
Close	i u o ɛ a ɒ
Close-mid
Open-mid
Open

Prosody

Length and Stress

Vowel length is distinctive in Ín Duári, and is indicated in the orthography by acute accents over the lengthened vowels. Additionally, the acute accent in ú and í also signify vowel quality. Since vowel length affects the stress; the acute accent also indicates the location of the primary stress of the word.

Vowel length is almost always associated with syllable stress. As a general rule, long vowels do not occur in CVCC clusters, although some exceptions arise, as in mínþir (exhaustion). If two or more long vowels occur in a word, the final long vowel is stressed.

Morphology

Nidâri is a fusional language with some agglugination.

Nouns

Nouns inflect for gender, number and case. The gender system contains eight classes, descended from an earlier system that distinguished animacy through noun classifiers. In time these classifiers became bound morphemes, accounting for the disparate patterns found across the present noun class system. Animacy is still correlated with noun classes, with animacy tending to decrease from left to right across the noun classes. However, the animacy distinctions have blurred, with some of the nouns in the protolanguage being reassigned to another class due to syncretism.

The Class I and Class II nouns are unmarked in the nominative, but take accusative suffixes. Nouns from Class III to Class VI all exhibit suffix marking on the nominative, with null marking on the accusative. These nouns are referred to as the unmarked accusative nouns, or marked nominative nouns. Based on this type of case marking, linguists have classified Ín Duári's morphosyntactic alighnment as nominative-absolutive , a subtype of the more familiar nominative-accusative morphosyntactic alighment. Nominative-absolutive languages occur rarely throughout the world. However, Ín Duári exhibits nominative-absolutive alignment only in Class III-Class VIII. Class I and Class II exhibit the prototypical nominative-accusative pattern though, so Ín Duári is highly unusual as it appears to exhibit a split alignment system between the nominative-accusative and the nominative-absolutive morphosyntactic alignment classifications.

Class VII and Class VIII nouns have merged the nominative and accusative cases into a single, direct case. The plural forms originally reduplicated the initial syllable with the CV- pattern followed by and infixed -θ-, but through phonological erosion initial consonants were lost, leaving behind the vowel of the original reduplicated syllable. Through time the vowels were leveled to an e- prefix in all noun classes, save for the plural in the form VIII direct case, which changed to initial i- prefix.

Case	Noun Classes
	Class I		Class II		Class III		Class IV		Class V		Class VI		Class VII		Class VIII
	Singular	Plural	Singular	Plural	Singular	Plural	Singular	Plural	Singular	Plural	Singular	Plural	Singular	Plural	Singular	Plural
Nominative	hora	hohrāni
Genitive	horan	hohrā
Comitative	horȇ
Ablative
Allative	horȇn
Locative
Instrumental	hordâni hordâne

Pronouns

Case	Noun Classes
	1st		2nd		Class I		Class II		Class III		Class IV		Class V		Class VI		Class VII		Class VIII
	Singular	Plural	Singular	Plural	Singular	Plural	Singular	Plural	Singular	Plural	Singular	Plural	Singular	Plural	Singular	Plural	Singular	Plural	Singular	Plural
Nominative	vaš	veš	jan	zay	nay	zay	āni	zan	zane	zan	hašvin	haš	roše	roš	lašne	lašen	raše	raš	hazen	haz
Genitive	vašân
Instrumental
Ablative
Allative
Locative

Verbs

The Copula

The Nidâri copula inflects for TAM and polarity:

TAM	Positive	Negative
Present	bâz << bey-ân-z, biy-ân-z	bâš, bâšq << bey-ân-z-g, biy-ân-z-g
Future/Irrealis	bidâz << biy-ad-ân-z	bidâšq << biy-ad-ân-z-g
Past	baštân << ba-š-t-ân	baštâq << ba-št-ân-g
Imperative	baš << ba-š	bašqân, bašgân << ba-š-g-ân

The copula originates from two roots, ba- and biy-. The root bi- is used to form the Future/Irrealis stem, whilst ba- forms the rest of the TAM stems. Both ba- and biy- are cognate with Ín Duári bean, “to sit, be in a sitting position”

The Participial

The copula combines with a verbal noun, descended from the Proto-Duaric gerund, to form a compound verb. In Duaric linguistics, this verbal noun is referred to as the participial, as it also functions as nominalizers, adjectives, temporal nouns, among other functions. The participial replaced the original verbal noun that survives in its sister language Ín Duári.

The participial agrees with its subject in gender, number, and case. Adjectives may also appear and modify the participial. Just as in NPs, the participial follows its head.

In intransitive clauses, the participial/participial phrase precedes the copula and any accompanying auxiliaries:

Birân bagdaman baštân.
/bi'rɒ:n bagda'man baʃ'tɒn/
birân bagda-man baštân
to.house running-CL1.NOM was
He ran home.

Han gabagdaman baštâq gureh birân.
/han gabagda'man baʃ'taɣ gu'rɛh bi'rɒ:n /
han ga=bagdam-an baštaq gureh birân
NEG NEG=running-CL1.NOM was.NEG try to.house
He did not try to run home.

In transitive clauses, the gerund precedes the object, which is inflected in the genitive case, followed by the copula:

Han gatâqivan birânen baštâqešan gureh.
/han gatɒ'ɣivan birɒ'nɛn bagda'min baʃtaɣe'ʃan gu'rɛh/
han ga=tâqiv-an birân-en baštâq-ešan gureh
NEG NEG=burning-CL1.NOM house-GEN was.NEG=CAUS try
He did not try to burn down the house.

Syntax

Constituent order

Canonical word order is SV₁OV₂, but V₁OSV₂ and V₁OV₂S also occur, the last of which occurs rarely. The subject can never appear after V₁, the participial component of the verb phrase. This is due to diachronic factors: the participial and object developed from a possessive phrase structure, attested to the survival of the genitive marking on the noun head. As this segment of the VP was originally a possessive phrase, non-constituents such as subjects were blocked from insertion into between the original possessum and possessor.

Verb phrase

As mentioned in the Participial Section, the participial and its head, the object, are in form identical with that of a nominal possessive phrase. The possessor of the NP serves as head and the possessum its dependent, just as the direct object serves as the head of its dependent, the participial. Both the possessor and the direct object receive genitive marking. The participial must also agree with the subject in gender and number, as illustrated in the following example:

Tâqivan birâneqan baštânešan.
tɒ:ɣiv'an birɒ:nɛ'qan baʃtɒ:nɛ'ʃan
tâqiv-an birân-eqan baštân-ešan
burning-CL1.NOM house-CL.IV.GEN was=CAUS
He burned down the house. (lit: "He was the house's burner.").

Adjectives and any modifier, be it for the subject or the object, must agree with their respective heads. The constituent order does not deviate from that of the NP: adjectives follow their heads and agree in case, number and gender. The following example shows the grammatical concordance of the subject and object and their respective modifiers:

Tâqivan behoran birâneqan bišvi baštânešan.
tɒ:ɣiv'an bɛho'ran birɒ:nɛ'qan biʃ'vi baʃtɒ:nɛ'ʃan
tâqiv-an behor-an birân-eqan biš-vi baštân-ešan
burning-CL1.NOM fat.one-CL1.NOM house-CL.IV-GEN red-CL.IV.GEN-was=CAUS
The fat one burned down the red house. (lit: "The fat one was the red house's burner.").