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

Ín Duári was originally written in the native Minhast abugida called the Širkattarnaft, but as it reflected Minhast's four-vowel system, it was deficient in representing Ín Duári's, whose present-day vowel inventory distinguishes seven phonemically distinct vowels. Stress, rather than length, is phonemic and is reflected in the practical Uannar orthography, adopted with modifications from the Latin alphabet. 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.

Uannar Characters
a, á, æ, e, é, i, í, o, ó u, ú, b, p, f, v, d, ð, t, ţ, g, k, n, m, l, r, z, s, h, ua, ue, w, y

The Uannar, originally representing the pronunciation of the Gæţwin dialect faithfully, has now diverged from the language as it is now spoken, so silent letters have arisen. One such example is the definite article ðæl, which is now pronounced /dɛ/ in most dialects.

The grapheme <æ> is freqently pronounced /ɛ/ and written as <e> if it falls within a stressed syllable. <y> is pronounced /ʌ/, reflected in the Uannar when it was first developed, but in contemporary speech may be pronounced /ɪ/ or /ɛ/; this change resulted as a compromise between separate sound changes that occurred in two separate dialects. /ð/ generally changes to /d/ when preceded by a voiced nasal or liquid, or by a vowel followed by an obstruent or voiced nasal or liquid.

An example of the current orthographical representation and original pronunciation, and the current pronunciation in the Gæţwin dialect, is represented in the following example:

Divergences in Spelling and Pronunciation Over Time

Year		Spelling	Pronunciation	Meaning
Differences	c. 1897	Đæl mireli torma ueðen	/ðæl 'mirɛli torma wɛðyn/	"The chair was (sitting) over there."
	2003	Đæl mireli torma ueðen	/dɛ 'mirli 'dɔmʌ wedɪn/

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	θ ð	ç	x		h
	Sibiliant		s z
Affricates
Approximants		w		j
Trill			r
Lateral			l

Vowels

	Front	Near- front	Central	Near- back	Back
Close	i u ɪ o ɛ ʌ ɔ æ a
Near-close
Close-mid
Mid
Open-mid
Near-open
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

Ín Duári 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	heš	he	jan	zay	nay	zay	āni	zan	zane	zan	hašvin	haš	roše	roš	lašne	lašen	raše	raš	hazen	haz
Accusative
Genitive
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”

Syntax

Constituent order

Canonical word order is VSO. Nevertheless, SVO, SOV, VOS, OSV, and OVS may appear as the case system allows such flexibility since it explicitly marks syntactic roles. Modifiers for the most part follow their heads, although determiners and deictics precede their heads.