Dhannuá

Dhannuá (dhannuá bhlóar [ˈdʱannuaː ˈbʱloaːr] or dhannuá aurónar [ˈdʱannuaː ˈauroːnar]), also known as Aurónian is a Lúsanic language, itself a branch of the Indo-European languages. It is primarily spoken in the archipelago of Aurónar. It is a continuation of Middle Dhannuá, the official language used by courts during the Lúreian kingdom, which in turn descends from the insular Dánair dialect of Old Dhannuá, spoken during the Lúsan Empire.

Dhannuá
Dhannuá Aurónar
Pronunciation	[[Help:IPA|[[[User:Chrysophylax/Sandbox/IPA_for_Dhannuá|[ˈdʱannuaː ˈauroːnar]]]]]]
Created by	–
Native to	The Island States of Aurónar
Native speakers	32 thousand (2011)
Language family	Indo-European Lúsanic Finio-Dhannic Dhannic Dhannuá
Early forms	Old Dhannuá (Insular) Middle Dhannuá
Official status
Official language in	The Island States of Aurónar
Regulated by	Cósseneir Dhannuáor Aurónar (Council of The Language of Aurónar)
Language codes
ISO 639-1	dh
ISO 639-2	dha
ISO 639-3	qdh

Background

Dhannuá was conceived in my mind when I decided to properly experiment with an Indo-European lexical and grammatical root stock. I draw inspiration from the Celtic family, the Italic and personal linguaesthetic preferences. It is an attempt to create a naturalistic, modern language of the Indo-European language family.

Classification

Descending from a central Proto-Indo-European dialect spoken thousands of years ago Dhannuá is the sole extant member of the Dhannic group in the Lúsanic branch of Indo-European. Various attempts to classify it as Celtic, Italic or even as a variant of Scythian have proven unsuccessful. Having performed the merger of palatal/plain stops, Dhannuá is categorised as a centum language.

History

Early History

The oldest preserved text in a language that can be ascribed with certainty to an early form of Dhannuá is the Samarkand stele, 300 BCE. The somewhat damaged stele was "rediscovered" in museum inventory, after being donated in 1878 from a private collector and having collected dust for 133 years until its discovery 2011. The somewhat illegible text on the stele reads:

DOMAN•SEVANT•EVEN•REIDA•DEPOT•SEPTA•KLUNIVAD•KAPTOD

doman sewant(i) ewen(s) reida(nti) depot(es) septa(n) klu(sa)ni(a)wad kaptod

'Home they seek, horses they ride, lords seven, Klusaniawa taken.'

The name Klusaniawa (tentatively traced to *ḱlewos-ni-akwa) has been deemed most probable to correspond to the city Lúsania from Old Dhannic myths. If this is true, this would mean that at least one motif of Dhannic story-telling is over 2300 years old. The actual place name might even be older and in fact it might even be a compound dating back to the Proto-Indo-European era, which would shift the time frame to ca 3700 BCE. The name has been analysed as a compound word of *ḱlewos and *ni-akwa. Thus literally carrying the meaning 'Fame-place-of-water'.

One thing that is certain from analysing the sample of Early Dhannua given by the Samarkand stele is that already at this stage the accusative marker had become -n, PIE *septḿ̥ has become septan and a coda-final voicing of the dative –ōt > -ōd. There is also a formation of a verbal adjective with -to as seen in kaptod.

Lúsan Empire

The early form of Dhannuá, sometimes known as Old Dhannuá later gave way to its slightly more known descendant Classical Dhannuá (dhānnwa lūsana) during the Lúsan Empire. Several hundreds of fragments have been preserved from north-eastern Europe, mostly consisting of votive inscriptions, imperial records and various business contracts.

LANASSO·TREIES·PORCOS·RO·PENVE·LAANOS·AN·STAUROVE

La(n)nassō treies porcos rō(d) penve lān(os) an stāuro(n)we

'I will exchange tree pigs for five ?hens or a bull'

The Golden age Classical stage appears to have diverged quite quickly (200-300 years) into a continental and an insular division. The continental dialects appear to have become the norm during the latter half of the Empire - the Silver age - during which the majority of recovered texts hail from. The Leidic and Sían languages/dialects are extinct descendants of this group. Little is known of the insular group as a whole, there appears to have been little writing activity in the isles during the Lúsan Empire. Interestingly enough,a small insular variety - Dánair - known from records in Classical Dhannuá as dānaizā dhānnwa was to become the ancestor of Middle Dhannuá.

Dánair

In imperial records, this variety of Dhannuá, this “island-speak” was considered "another sister" (a way of describing what we today would call a dialect) to Classical Dhannuá as evidenced by this inscription dating to the reign of the scholar-king Lúthais concerning the composition of the Empire.

Bhōzōiōm Lūdhas peri sar sa dānaizā dhānnwa ta bhōzānd sann i āuzir nissīr sei ta izd sa aliūzella swēsor dhānnwar Lūsanar. Lannarīzānd sēseid R rōd Z ca aliūzella aljūza sei

'I Lúthais, say of that, that dánaizian tongue that they speak in the eastern isles, that it is another sister of the tongue of Lúsan. They have changed for themselves r for z and other strange things.'

In truth the Dánair dialect appears to have been highly conservative as many Middle Dhannuán forms appear to be closer to the reconstructed and encountered words of Early Classical Dhannuá/Old Dhannuá than mainland silver-age Dhannuá.

Phonology

Main article: Dhannuán phonology

Dhannúa has 22-24 distinctive consonants.

Consonants

		Bilabial		Labiode.		Dental		Alveol.		Postalve.		Velar		Glottal
Nasals		m				n
Plosives		p pʰ	b bʱ			t tʰ			d dʱ			k kʰ	g gʱ
Fricatives				[f]	[v]			s	z	ʃ				h
Trills						r
Glides	Approxim.											w
	Lateral Appr.									l

The pronunciation of /f/ and its voiced counterpart /v/ is considered a dialectal variation on /pʰ/ and /bʱ/. Although they occur in a few standard words as borrowings from these dialects they are often not considered to belong in Dhannuá proper.

Vowels

	Front	Near-front	Central	Near-back	Back
Close	i u (ɪ) (ɪ̈) (e) e̞ o̞ a (ɑ)
Near‑close
Close‑mid
Mid
Open‑mid
Near‑open
Open

Grammar

Main article: Dhannuán grammar

Like many other Lúsanic languages Dhannúa has preserved an Indo-European synthetic-inflectional structure. Although there has been considerable change, certain words remain relatively unchanged from their theorised ancestor, such as the word for flower bhlór (reconstructed PIE:*Bʰleh³-os).

Morphology

Noun

Aurónian has six noun cases – nominative, genitive, accusative, dative, essive, comitative - of which the first four are inherited from Indo-European. The remaining two, the essive and comitative are innovations common to the Finio-Dhannic languages. Certain words appear to preserve a seventh case - the instrumental - but it is extremely rare to encounter this form in modern literature. There are two numbers - singular and plural - although certain words are only encountered in one of these. Grammatical gender appears to be in process of disappearing from the language, Dhannuá originally having had three - masculine, feminine, neuter - but now tendencies to merge the first two in adjectives and referents are becoming increasingly prevalent in certain forms of the spoken language, while morphologically the neuter has in many cases merged with the feminine, giving many "feminine" nouns for historical neuters, e.g. áranna 'a question'.

Example declension
Gloss	flower
Number	Singular		Plural
Nominative (anómaniú)	bhlór		bhleir
Genitive (niriú)	bhlóar		bhlóru
Dative (datiú)	bhlód		bhléd
Accusative (acusatiú)	bhlónn		bhlóranna
Essive (issóiú)	bhlóta		bhlóradh
Comitative (ueiú)	bhlórúe		bhleirúe
Instrumental (aissiú)	bhlóri		bhlórí

Verb

The Aurónian verb is conjugated for person, number, mood, and tense. In the prescribed standard, the verb is no longer inflected for moods beyond the imperative. All other moods are instead formed by using specific postverbal particles. There are few fully irregular verbs, but many minor irregularities resulting from a conflux of analogical levelling, sound changes, and prior prescriptivism.

One major dialectal difference in Aurónian is found in the construction of tenses (didhánna úánnár). There is a multitude of ways to form both the future and the past tense, depending on whether or not one is using the synthetic form of the verb.

Present tense

The present tense is formed simply for all regular thematic verbs by adding the relevant person suffixes.

person	suffix
I	-ann
thou	-as
he	-adh
we	-an,-am
you	-adh
they	-annad

Future tense

There are two main strategies for the formation of the future tense: future I ('synthetic') and future II ('bhúi-construction').

Future I

The basis of this tense is formed morphologically by affixing -s- (or -r- in some cases) to the naked stem and then the appropriate person endings. This future form is able to occupy the first position of a sentence and thus word-order-wise it behaves just the same as a fully inflected present tense verb.

The relevant person suffixes for this future are

person	suffix
I	-ann
thou	-is, -ir
he	-idh
we	-im
you	-idh
they	-annad

Future II

This tense is on the other hand formed by combining the future tense of ísan with the verbal noun.

the verb ísan in the future tense
I	bhúirinn
thou	bhúiris
he	bhúiridh
we	bhúirim
you	bhúiridh
they	bhúirinn

The inflected form is itself prone to reduction to bhúi in speech, whereupon the use of pronouns becomes obligatory,

Bhúi lúcadh tódh sa vs. bhúiridh lúcadh tódh "She's going to light it"

Syntax

Aurónian Dhannuá syntax is markedly different from Indo-European syntax, especially in its typologically rare VOS word order

Default word order

1. Negation¹
2. Verb
3. Various postverbal particles²
4. Auxiliary verb part³
5. Manner descriptor
6. Indirect object
7. Direct object
8. Subject
9. Location descriptor
10. Time descriptor

Notes

• 1. Usually, if the verb begins with a vowel, the negation ne is procliticised onto the verb, e.g. anúidannad an tódh? 'Don't they know that?' and loses stress.
• 2. e.g. ca 'and, also', an 'question particle'.
• 3. e.g. past tense participle, future II participle, etc.

The bare building block needed for an intransitive sentence is the verb with the subject as an optional component. Sentences with a transitive verb require a direct object.

In actual speech, word order may vary slightly, a bit freer than say English, as words are inflected for case and verbs may be marked for person thus permitting such variations such as verb-subject-object.

Example sentence

'

Questions

Questions follow a slightly different word order from the default, depending on several factors (such as polarity, tense, particle) which makes them one of the more complex parts of the grammar.

In simple questions replace the direct object with the relevant wh-word.

Ísdh úid? "What is that?"

Náscas úid? "What do you doubt?"

For emphasis, it is possible to front the wh-word.

Úid ísdh? "What is that?"

Úíd náscas? "What is it that you doubt?"

In yes/no questions, the usual word order applies in the present tense.

Ísdh an sád penna? "Is that her pen?"

Ísdh. "It is."

Anísdh. "It is not."

In the past tense, the position of the question element is variable. At the fundamental level it has to do with whether one is using the full (bhúir-) or the reduced form (bhúi) of ísan to form the past tense. This has some consequences for the negation and the postverbal particles.

(Ne) bhúirann an dhann sod tódh? "Did I (not) give it to him?"

An bhúi (ne) dhann sod tódh ía? "Did I (not) give it to him?"

The pattern can be described formally as

Q V₁ neg V₂ particle… , e.g. An bhúi ne lússo ca méd tódh so "And he didn't tell me?"