Bäladiri/Reconstruction

Bäladiri is a Westerlander language of the central lowlands. It is part of the lowlands Sprachbund. It features prominent consonant gradation and vowel shortening rules. It has a complex phoneme inventory, with contrasting vowel and consonant length. Its phonotactics are fairly simple: syllables with simple onsets and codas are the most abundant, though sequences like <-ghðr-> do appear as a result of vowel shortening. The direct ancestor of Bäladiri is what I'm going to call pre-Bäladiri, an agglutinative language with fixed word-inital stress. That stage of the language is from before entry into the Sprachbund.

Bäladiri is marked most prominently by its gradation system. Diachronically speaking, it is old enough to have been analogised out in many places (sometimes giving forms like agháinda as opposed to *aáinda/*âinda, of the verb  "see sth.") but young enough to 1) still be acutely productive 2) not cause significant fusion, thus preserving an agglutinative morphology 3) feature multiple grades with fairly straightforward marking.

Bäladiri lenition is caused by many factors. The two most prominent ones are nasal suffixation and stress shifts, respectively softening the consonant they lenite by one and two grades.