Wistanian: Difference between revisions

| Paul A. Daly || Began: January 2017<br/>Status: Mostly Fuctional

'''Wistanian''' (IPA: /wɪˈsteɪniən/), natively known as '''aningali''' (IPA:[ən̻iːn̻ɡəl̻i]) and often nicknamed '''Wisto''', is an ''a priori'' artistic constructed language . Its development began in January 2017 for use in a WIP novel series by prominent characters who are monolingual or bilingual in the language. It is currently on "Version 9.1," having received several edits, updates, and an occasional total rehaul during its development.

In universe, Wistanian is spoken by groups of fictional peoples on a large tropical island on a planet called Vaal (IPA: [veːl̻]). It is a decendant of the Taliv language after having merged with the Nati language during the Wistanian War. These two language communities worked together against the Bwolotil people who were seeking complete possession of the land. This war eventually ended with the signing of a peace treaty between four people groups, the Taliv, Nati, Bwolotil, and the Katapu who remained mostly separated from much of the fighting. About half a decade later, a fifth people group, the Uzin, joined the Wistanian union. The creole that arose from the Taliv-Nati alliance grew in popularity and loaned a large number of terms from the other languages. During the time of the novels, Wistanian has become the ''lingua franca'' of the island. It is considered the language of government, economy, and education, and it is mandatorily taught in most schools. There are approximately 50 million speakers, comprising of 95% of the island's population. Of that number, 60% are native in the language and 20% speak it monolingually.

Typologically, Wistanian is a verb-initial and heavily isolating language with around 1.2 morphemes per phonological word. Its phonology is fairly small including an entirely voiced fricative set and no round vowels. Verbs conjugate for perfective, imperfective, and stative aspects with an additional irrealis form for each. Count nouns are declined for plural number only if its number is higher than five. Wistanian has a large collection of grammatical particles, honorifics, and conjunctions (which are sensitive to switch-reference), but no distinctive lexical category for adpositions, adjectives, or adverbs. The language is primarily written using the Talivian Alphabet (which has horizonal RtL and vertical UtD variants). Some alternate scripts do exist, namely the Diwa Alphabet and Nati Abugida.

The following table features the five distinct monophthongs of Wistanian, /i e a ɑ ɯ/, in each form of phonological stress. With primary stress, they are long and tense; with secondary stress, they are short and tense; with tertiary stress, they are short and lax (/e/ and /ɑ/ never recieve tertiary stress). Wistanian's one diphthong /a͡i/ has no lax form, therefore only taking on primary or secondary stress. (Secondary stress is only observed in polysyllabic perfective verbs).  

Wistanian speakers are usually soft and clear, as politeness and simplicity are important values in many of their cultures. In most Talivian villages, speaking loudly is considered rude and is therefore looked down upon. In the Southwest, the volume is typically louder. Speed also varies as the Northeast prefers slow and careful speech while the Northwest prefers fast-paced speech.

Wistanian follows a fairly rigid syntax and tight grammar for a number of historical reasons. Firstly, due to its mixing with the Nati language, Taliv lost most of its irregularities and exceptions. Secondly, as the Katapu began to teach Wistanian, they had spread false information to "make more sense" of the language, which resulted in further simplification that was later adopted as standard. In Wistanian's infancy, it was almost engineered to be as efficient as possible. However, learners were still able to incorporate features from their native language into Wistanian, providing it with several of its current syntactical quirks (e.g., imperative word order was introduced by the Nati learners).  

Wistanian has four traditional lexical categories (parts of speech): the noun ('''davagg'''), the verb ('''anai'''), the particle ('''mauvaldul'''), and the honorifics ('''garajil''').  

| Any word that takes on nominal morphology and can act as a subject or object the verb.

| Any word that takes on verbal morphology.

Wistanian is predominately head-initial and verb-initial. This is manafested in that particles are always expressed first in a particle phrase (PartP), head verbs are expressed first in a verb phrase (VP), and head nouns are expressed first in a noun phrase (NP).  

  vig-a    dari aa  garauda bi.

  eat-DUR boy  ACC food   goodness