Proto-Fanezish

Proto-Fanezish (PF) was the common ancestor of the Fanezish language family. It developed in the north-eastern regions of Buvara and northern Eloma. As such, its discourse was heavily influenced by cold weather, coniferous forests, mountainous terrain and the fauna found in those conditions.

The Old Fanezish peoples were known for their adaptability. They were competent seafarers, although not as remarkable in comparison to the North-Heortish peoples. In terms of culture, they were proficient woodcarvers since wood was far more common than stone. They had a clan-oriented society but they were not isolationist; individuals from other tribes and peoples were accepted as long as they learnt their way of living, language and did not commit any crimes.

In the matters of science, the Fanezish peoples were not as advanced as other peoples, but they had acceptable wood-related technology allowing them to build long-lasting homes and public spaces as well as boats and weapons. In regards of religion, they had their own version of the 12-deity based pantheon worshiped by the Dutronish and Buvaro-Elomish peoples.

Proto-Fanezish was characterised by agglutination, a vast system of grammatical cases, a rather simple vowel harmony and an ergative-accusative (tripartite) alignment.

Phonology
Proto-Fanezish had a discrete inventory of phonemes:


 * Two series of unvoiced stop consonants, plain and aspirated.
 * Two series of unvoiced fricatives consonants, plain and aspirated.
 * Two liquid consonants.
 * Five vowels with a quite simple vowel harmony system.

Consonants
The consonants of Proto-Fanezish were the following: 1 The nasal [m] is uttered as [ɱ] before [f], [fh] and [ʋ].

2 The nasal [n] is uttered as [ŋ] before [k] and [kh].

Vowels
Proto-Fanezish had five vowels: As mentioned before, Proto-Fanezish had a simple system of vowel harmony that allowed easier agglutination. Words could only have either front vowels (e, i) or back vowels (o, u). The vowel a was neutral and was allowed to be present with either of the aforementioned vowel sets.

Phonotactics
Proto-Fanezish had easy phonotactics rules. The basic syllable structure was (C1)(J)V(C2), although there were some restrictions of which sounds occur depending on the place of the syllable:


 * C1 may be any consonant, except the glottal stop [ʔ].
 * J is the palato-alveolar approximant.
 * C2 may only be nasals and plain stops and fricatives except glottals.
 * Consonant germinates are allowed.
 * The glottal stop [ʔ] can only occur between vowels.
 * Diphthongs are the following: a + any other vowel, ei and ou.

Rhythm and word-accent
Proto-Fanezish had a syllable-timed rhythm, which suited its agglutinative morphology. Stress always fell in the first syllable.

Writing system
Proto-Fanezish was written using runes, but it also exists a version using the later developed Loksish script for teaching purposes.

Grammar
Proto-Fanezish was an agglutinative tongue because of the use of affixes, more frequently suffixes than preffixes, to indicate the grammatical function of a word and to create new words. such as creating a verb or adjectives from a noun, or a noun from a verbal or adjective root.

Proto-Fanezish sentences followed an ergative-accusative alignment, also known as tripartite alignment, and had a rather free word order, although the neutral word order was Subject-Verb-Object. It ws mostly head-final, but used prepositions and adverbs followed the Place-Manner-Time layout.

Nouns
Classification

Nouns in Proto-Fanezish are classified in