Nidâri

Introduction

Nidâri is one of two extant members of the Duaric language family. The language is spoken by roughly 1,200 people in Sašvān ("refuge"), a volcanic island approximately 1100 km southeast of Minhay. Unlike its relative, Ín Duári, more than 90% of its inhabitants claim Nidâri as their first language. The language's survival and relative health compared to Ín Duári, considered a moribund language, can be attributed to the physical separation of its speakers from the Minhast mainland.

Because of this separation, various phonemic and morphological changes have rendered Nidâri and Ín Duári mutually unintelligible. While more innovations have occurred in Nidâri, it nevertheless has retained more of the original Duaric lexicon, as loanwords from the Minhast and Peshpeg languages have had a significant impact on the Ín Duári lexicon.

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

Nidâri 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 ɣ		h
	Sibiliant		s z
Affricates				t͡ʃ d͡ʒ
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 original Proto-Duaric gender system consisted of at least eight noun classes descended from an earlier system that distinguished animacy through noun classifiers. Of these eight noun classes, Nidâri preserved four of them.

Animacy still has some correlation amongst the surviving 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, as can be seen in the Class IV nouns, where the singular nominative and genitive are wildly irregular, whereas the plural nominative and genitive are, with a few exceptions, quite regular.

Case	Noun Classes
	Class I		Class II		Class III		Class IV
	Singular	Plural	Singular	Plural	Singular	Plural	Singular	Plural
Nominative	hora	hohra	talâr
Genitive	horāne	hohrāne	talâre
Instrumental	horē	hohrē
Ablative			talârē
Allative	horā	hohrā	talârā
Locative	horāna	hohrēna	talâri
Comitative	horē	hohrē	talâre

tahlâri tahlâre tahlâr tahlâr tahlâriye tahlârȇn tahlâri tahlarâni/tahlardâne

Pronouns

Case	Noun Classes
	1st		2nd		Class I		Class II		Class III		Class IV
	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
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.").