Minhast: Difference between revisions

Minhast '' (Minhast min kirim'', lit. ''"Minhast-speak")'' is the spoken language of the Republic of Minhay, with a robust speech community of nearly 26 million people, approximately one million of them living in expatriate communities, with the largest concentrations residing in the U.S., Xayda, Mexico, the Middle East, Kallaxwanpūr, and Canada. Significant numbers also exist in Southeast Asia and Norhern Europe. It is divided into two major dialects, Upper Minhast and Lower Minhast, each of which is divided into several smaller subdialects, such as the Salmon Speaker variant of the Upper Minhast dialect, and the Osprey Speaker variant of the Lower Minhast dialect.

Located just 1,232 km from northeast Japan, this Northeast Asian language has no known relatives and bears few if any similarities with Japanese and its two other nearest neighbors, the Kingdom of Kogureo (Korea) and the Ainu Democratic Federation (Ainushir). Two other languages in the island nation, Peshpeg and Golahat, both of which are moribund, are also unrelated; any similarities existing between the two languages and Minhast are due to areal features, with Minhast as the dominant influence. Linguists have investigated possible relationships with the Altaic, Paleosiberian, and Native North American languages, but so far have failed to find any conclusive evidence. Therefore, Minhast remains classified as a language isolate.

Typologically, Minhast is an ergative, polysynthetic language. Verbal morphology is highly aggluginative and performs noun incorporation and other complex valence operations. Unmarked word order is SOV. Ergativity surfaces both at the morphologic and syntactic levels. Both its ergative and polysynthetic characteristics have generated much academic research in comparative and theoretical linguistics.