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 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 ===

* Initial voiceless consonants in affixes, or initial voiceless consonants arising from reduplication become voiced when they occur in word-initial position, e.g. ''tonka'' "one buffalo" → ''<u>da</u>tonka'' "two or more buffalo".

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

 

 

 

 

 

| translation = The mouse falcon-bit.

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>