User:Nicolasstraccia/Minhastid: Difference between revisions

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Revision as of 20:27, 12 February 2016


This is a tribute to Minhast, by Chris Borillo: a "Minhastid" of sorts.

Crane Speaker Dialect
[Minhastid]
Pronunciation[/'min.hɑst/]
Created byNicolás Straccia (based on original work by Chris Borillo)
Setting[meta] Alt-Earth
Native toRyu Kyu Islands
Native speakers300 (1996)
Minhastid Languages
  • Crane Speaker Dialect
Language codes
ISO 639-3n/a


Introduction

The Crane Speaker Dialect (CSD) is part of a "lost" branch of the Upper Minhast group of the Historical Regional Dialects of Minhast.

It is spoken in a secluded cluster of settlements in an island just out of Miyako-jima in the Miyako Islands (part of the Ryu Kyu Archipelago, in Japan) by 350 people, about 37% of which are monolingual CSD speakers, 60% are CSD-Uchinaaguchi bilinguals and 3% speak CSD, Uchinaaguchi and also Japanese (1996 census data). Originally fishermen and workers who had left Minhay for Japan, they ended up fleeing for the Ryu Kyus to avoind getting involved in the happenings of WWII.

Typologically, as is the case with Minhast, the CSD is ergative and polysynthetic, with ergativity surfacing both at the morphologic and syntactic levels and a highly agglutinative verbal morphology, performing noun incorporation and other complex valence operations.

The unmarked word order is SOV. Even though some deviation from this word order is allowed for discourse purposes (e.g. an argument that is to be focused is fronted to the head of the clause or in compound and complex sentences), the verb rarely deviates from its clause-final position and the order of the other arguments of the clause (core, oblique, and sentential complements) is not as flexible as in Minhast proper.

Dialectology

Minhast is divided into two major dialects: Upper Minhast and Lower Minhast. The two dialects groups differ chiefly in phonetics and the lexicon (for instance, Lower Minhast contains loanwords from neighbouring languages -e.g. Golahat- which Upper Minhast doesn't). Otherwise, the two dialects are mutually intelligible.

The Crane Speaker Dialect has traditionally been considered an integral part of the Upper Minhast group, given the history of its split from the mainland dialects through emigration from the Upper Minhast speaking prefectures to Japan around the year 1900. Nevertheless, modern comparative study of the differences which characterize the CSD seem to indicate that the linguistic split from the established subgroups of Regional Historical Dialects in the mainland must have happened before the speakers left Minhay and a longer time ago than previously thought. This earlier split would place CSD in a more basal level within the Minhast tree, perhaps as part of a lost third branch parallel to the Upper versus Lower Minhast split. The main point made by two of these contending classifications situate the CSD as follows:

Minhastic Languages
Regional Historical Dialects
Upper Minhast
Mainland Dialects

Salmon Speakers ("Gaššarat", Northeastern Coast)



Dog Speakers ("Hisašarum", Northeastern Plains)



Horse Speakers ("Gannasia", Central Plateau)




Crane Speaker Dialect (Ryu Kyu) 1



Lower Minhast

Gull Speakers (Senzil and Rēgum Prefectures)



Osprey Speakers (Kings' Bay)



Stone Speakers (Neskud and Yaxparim prefectures)




Crane Speaker Dialect (Ryu Kyu) 2



NCR Modern Dialects

Modern Standard Minhast [variant of Upper Minhast]



Modern Colloquial Minhast ("City Speaker Dialect") [admixture of Upper and Lower Minhast]




1 after Hisakawa, Horn-Schwabbach & Harrison, (1957).

2 after Harrison, Yoshida & Dallas, (1996).

This new work in Minhast historical linguistics, lead by Dr. Michael P. Harrison (an old pupil of the Minhast scholar Prof. Dr. Yoshi Hisakawa), and the subsequent revision of the internal splits into the different dialect groups gave place to the term "Minhastic Languages" as a way to address the whole group, owing to 1) the noticeable differences between the fringe dialects of the already established dialect continua and 2) the greater differences present in those dialects which had drifted apart from the rest earlier on, the paramount case of the latter being the CSD itself.

This lead to a revision of the original Kilmarian Hypothesis posed by Hisakawa (Hisakawa et.al., 1957) which upheld the belief that, "when considered on their own" (i.e., only from a linguistic perspective), "the Regional Historical Dialects of mainland Minhay constitute a small language family, more heterogeneous than originally thought and related to other small languages" (the so called Shakhtabari Group of the Kilmay-Ri Family), with Minhast proper being but a central and incidentally more well known branch to it.

A different school of thought, more conservative and reluctant to Hisakawa's theories, adopts a more loose criterion, grouping the Crane Speakers Dialect together with other "lost dialects", such as that of the Knife Speakers' and the extinct Šarmakandast, in a miscellaneous group, without committing to any definitive classification.


Phonology and Orthography

Phonemic Inventory

The following chart contains the consonants in the Crane Speaker dialect phonology. A variation on the Minhast Latinized alphabet is used throughout this article (see Orthography below).


Crane Speaker Dialect Consonantal Inventory
Bilabial Alveolar Palatal Velar Uvular Glottal Laryngeal Pharyngeal
Nasal m n ŋ
Plosive p b t d k g
Fricative f s z ʃ ʒ χ ʔ h ħ
Affricates t͡ʃ d͡ʒ
Approximants w j
Trill r
Lateral Approximant l

Minhast Vowel Inventory

  Front Near- front Central Near- back Back
Close
Blank vowel trapezoid.svg
i
u
ɪ
e
ɑ
  Near-close
Close-mid
Mid
Open-mid
Near-open
Open



Vowel length is distinctive. Devoiced vowels occur as allophones frequently, based on regular phonotactic rules:

Short Long Devoiced
a ā [ạ]
e ē [ẹ]
i ī [ị]
u ū [ụ]

Syllabic Structure and Phonemic Interactions

As it is the case in Minhast, words are subject to complex morphophonemic changes resulting from interactions with other morphemes occurring in the word. The verb is particularly complex in the various sound changes that may occur as a result of noun incorporation as well as the agglutinative processes involved in conjugation and other inflectional processes. These phonemic changes can be broken down according to the following classifications:

  • Assimilation
  • Metathesis
  • Syncope
  • Epenthesis
  • Voicing/Devoicing
  • Aspiration

These complex morphophonemic interactions operate according to the general phonological principals outlined below:

  1. No syllable can have a consonant cluster of more than two consonants. Syncope can be applied only if a biconsonantal cluster is formed, and the vowel is not a part of a heavy syllable (i.e. the vowel is long, or it occurs in a VCC sequence).
  2. No Minhast word can have an initial consonant cluster. After any initial consonant cluster results from one or more of the possible morphophonemic alternations described below, an epenthetic is automatically appended to the head of the word to form the permissible iCC- pattern.
  3. An epenthetic vowel is always inserted between two syllables if combining the syllables results in a triconsonantal cluster. The default epenthetic vowel is -i-, but the other 3 vowels may also be used, depending on multiple factors (e.g. vowel harmony, an underlying quiescent initial vowel as part of the attached morpheme, etc.)
  4. Minhast has a strong tendency to form intermedial clusters, either or , providing that Rules #1-#3 are observed. If necessary, an epenthetic vowel may be added before or after the syllable to create these syllabic patterns, e.g. e.g. kanut-maris-kar- >> -kant-(u)-maris-kar
  5. The tendency to form intermedial consonant clusters creates complex assimilation interactions that nevertheless are predictable and almost always regular. These interactions are illustrated in Table X below:

    Crane Speaker Dialect Phonotactics Table

    Orthography

    The Crane Speaker Dialect uses two writing systems. One of them is a variant of the "Ammerkast" Latin script for Minhast, itself a an adaptation of the Americanist phonetic notation (with the exception of the grapheme <ħ>, which was adopted from IPA). Note the glottal stop <'> is usually not written unless there is a hiatus between two vowels.

    "Ammerkast" variant
    a, á, e, é, i, í, u, ú, ('), b, p, f, d, t, g, k, x, n, m, l, r, z, s, ś, h, ħ, w, y


    Another system is an indigenous script, adapted from the Uchinaaguchi kana system.


    Derivational Affixes

    There is a small set of suffixes that can be attached to a verb root to derive a noun, nevertheless Minhast prefers to nominalize clauses or use NI. The most frequently encountered ones are listed in the following table.

    Derivational Affixes
    Affix Gloss/Meaning
    -hupnia instrumental affix
    -śnia,-śn consisting of
    -pniś propensity towards
    -pna abstract affix, "-tude,-ity","-ness"
    -sset temporal affix, "time of"
    -kian /kjan/ [çʲɐ̯n] locative affix
    -(n)niwak,-nwak occupational affix, "one who engages in an activity"
    -tak, -Vtka (V=a: -atk) intransitive/transitive manner affix, "the manner of engaging in an activity; the manner of being"
    -(a)rt the result of an action or event
    -(n)(u)mmat similarity of the action/event/state of the verb; also serves as an abstraction affix like "-pna"



    Table of Abbreviations

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