Nahónda: Difference between revisions

Nahónda, also known as Nónda and referred to by its own speakers as ''Nahónda keloma'' (lit. "Nahónda speak"), is a language centered in Northwestern Montana.  It is bordered by the Lakota Nation to the east, by the Cheyenne to the south, and the Blackfeet and Crow Nations to the north.  Along its western border lies the Nez Percé Nation.  Long considered a language isolate, new analyses has demonstrated it shares a common lineage with [[Minhast]] and [[Nankôre]].  It has now been classified as a member of the Nahenic language family, a small family that includes Minhast and Nankóre, as well as the recently discovered Neina or Na'ena language in northeast Siberia.  Nahónda is the second largest member of this family, around 60,450 members in the First Nations Confederation, with a few expatriate communities the largest of which exists in southern Manitoba at around nine hundred members.  Minhast remains the population juggernaut, at 26 million members in the Minhast homeland, and around 3 million more scattered in expatriate communities throughout the rest of the world.

Nahónda is an agglutinative and fusional language which is most apparent in its complex verb forms.  Its morphosyntactic alignment is split-intransitive of the Fluid-S subtype.  Agents are explicitly marked while patients receive null marking.  Nahónda canonical word order is SOV, as in both Minhast and Nankóre, but word order is quite flexible and may deviate from SOV word order for pragmatics or other discourse considerations.  Like Minhast, it is considered a polysynthetic language as it exhibits polypersonal agreement, noun incorporation, head marking, holophrasis, and adverbial, modal, and evidential markers inside the verb complex.  The evolution of Nahónda polysynthesis is complex, reflecting both developments from its Nahenic ancestry, and influences from outside sources, especially the Siouan languages.

Nahónda phonology is relatively straightforward.  Except for ejectives acquired from Siouan and other surrounding languages, its phonemic inventory otherwise consists of an average set of consonants, and a five-vowel system.  Its phonemic inventory is considerably larger than Nankóre, which lost most of its voiced consonants, and is slightly larger than Minhast, which lacks affricates.  In syllabic structure, a CV syllabic structure predominates and almost all words end in a vowel, although intermedial biconsonantal clusters do occur, e.g. ''wanko'' /waŋku/ "that one over there".   

===Nahónda Consonantal Inventory===

Under the influence of Siouan Sprachbund, Nahónda is the only Nahenic language that has preserved the original ejectives reconstructed from the protolanguage.  The velar fricative and pharyngeal fricative were also largely lost.  The rhotic /r/ merged with /l/, likely due to Lakota influence.

=== Nahónda Vowel Inventory ===

| -ka-

| -na-

| style="text-align:center" | Active

| rowspan="2" style="text-align:center" | Deictics

 

{| class="bluetable lightbluebg"

|}

Interestingly, their non-polysynthetic relative, Nankôre, employs a similar process to noun incorporation called ''quasi-incorporation''.  And just as in Nahónda and Minhast, the quasi-incorporated noun appears after the main verb but before the auxiliary ''itá''':

 

* Nankôre Quasi-Noun Incorporation,  SV₁OV₂ Order:

 

 

The postverbal position of the incorporated or quasi-incorporated noun is a shared feature among the three languages, apparently inherited from the Nahenic protolanguage.

 

The Conjugation Class slot is occupied by one of three suffixes or their allomorphs, ''-no'', ''-né'', and ''-na''.  These suffixes are descended from Proto-Nahenic auxiliaries, ''*ne'nok'' "do", and ''*ya'na:ʔ'' "be".  In Classical Minhast and many of the modern northern dialects, these became the transitive ''-un'' and intransitive ''-an'' affixes, and ''-u'' and ''-an'' in all other dialects.  In Nankôre, only the intransitive affix survives as the stative auxiliary ''iná'''.  While both Minhast and Nankôre preserve a distinction of transitive-intransitive or active-stative meanings from the protolanguage's auxiliaries, a considerable amount of syncretism has occurred in Nahónda.  So while a slightly higher number of active verbs end with ''-no'' and stative verbs with ''-né'' or ''-na'' in their basic forms, many active verbs have ''-né'' or ''-na'' endings, and ''-no'' for stative verbs.  Interestingly, when a third person singular agent acts on a third person singular patient, the verb obligatorily takes the ''-no'' ending, as third person singular agents and third person singular patients both take null marking.<ref>Its Minhast relative shares this null-marking feature</ref> This so-called "''no''-flipping" of ''-né/-na'' endings is the primary way of cross-indexing the agent when it experiences pro-drop. <ref>The Siouan languages also null-mark third person singular agents and patients, but there is no reason to conclude that they contributed to ''no''-flipping.</ref>

In Nahónda, the clause containing the verb head, i.e. the "main verb", precedes the modifiers<ref>Interestingly, the order of dependent verbs mirrors the placement of verb affixes in the Eskaleut languges.</ref>.  This is an unusual feature, as most(??) languages that employ verb stacking place the modifying verb before its head.  Placement of the dependents appear to be motivated by scopal considerations.  The dependents are also are unmarked for TAM, and person marking is null, i.e. the dependents take third person singular marking; instead, the dependents inherit their person and TAM marking from the main verb.

An example of verb stacking to convey an Allative relation follows:

|phrase = hatāʔ

| IPA = /ha.'ta:ʔ/

| morphemes = Matsanda

| gloss = PN 1S-throw-spear-PST give.3S  

| translation = I threw the spear at Matsanda.