Afansevan

Afansevan (Imperial Afansevan:  (IPA:/ˈduˌβaʁ ˈa.ʁɔˌzaʁ ˈjus.ʁaʁ.da.ŋiˌβaz/), literally "the citizens' tongue") is a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken by about 10 million people inside our world's California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and Western Mexico, and has a diaspora population across the Americas, that takes place in the same universe as American Turkic and has no official status within the, although it is an official language alongside American Turkic in the provinces that formerly constituted the (which can be shown in the map below). This article will be of, which was spoken during the times of the Californian Empire by the higher classes and the bureaucracy as second language speakers and the native language of the Californian royal family, known only from a few religious Buddhist texts (Almost all Afansevan texts found so far are religious, but a few secular ones exist as well) (Due to Buddhist influence, Imperial Afansevan has a lot of loanwords from Sanskrit) and poetry in this ATL and is the primary basis of , while the spoken by the lower classes were the ancestors of all  (Kinda how like Latin diverged into the Romance languages), which are now extinct today. Linguists in this ATL have attempted to reconstruct what Imperial Afansevan looked like via evidence through the religious texts and poetry, its daughter languages, and Neo-Imperial Afansevan, which was the liturgical language of Afansevan Buddhism after California was absorbed into the Kyrgyz Khaganate. This article will focus on what the language was actually like and not of the reconstruction.

This language is primarily based on Russian, English, Latin, and various Turkic languages, but draws influences from German, Italian, Sahaptin, Chinese, Inupiaq, Chumash (Not to be confused with Chuvash, an Oghur Turkic language spoken in the Russian federal subject of Chuvashia!), and some conlangs made by other people as well.

History ()
Some Proto-Indo-Europeans migrated to the Mongolian steppe about 5,000 years ago, after the branchoff of Anatolian from he rest of the speakers. On their way, they encountered the Samoyedic people. The Indo-Europeans speakers that were more influenced by the Samoyeds branched off into the Tocharians, while the people who were less influenced by the Samoyeds other than an occasional loanword, like "to digest", "amazing, wonderful", migrated to OTL's Eastern Mongolia. But when the Indo-Iranian speakers arrived, they influenced the Afansevan language heavily, including making Imperial Afansevan and its descendants satem languages. This influence came even from Iranians, Scythians, until the Xiongnu decided to come in and conquer the entire steppe in the 3rd century BCE.



As it turns out, the Afansevans resisted the Xiongnu heavily. This split the language family in two, into Paleosevan (a portmanteau of Greek παλαιός "old" and Afansevan) and Neosevan (a portmanteau of Greek νέος "new" and Afansevan). The Paleosevans migrated to Lake Baikal, where they stayed until they were assimilated into the Tungusic speakers, while the Neosevans requested the Chinese to help drive the Xiongnu out of their homeland. The Chinese allowed them to migrate into their empire and ensure their protection as long as they pay spcial taxes every month. They were staying until they were driven to Manchuria by the last Han emperors, who considered them "barbarians."

The then passed between various different kingdoms as they began slowly migrating westward for the next four centuries. They were enslaved by the Eastern Turks, until they were defeated by the Kyrgyz and were subsequently brought to the New World during the Great Migration. The Afansevans never had an independent state again until they migrated southwards and settled in the LA basin, forming the Californian Empire. The Californian Empire then quickly conquered and subjugated all of California, later expanding into OTL's Nevada, Arizona, and the Baja California peninsula, along with the Western coast of Mexico. The Californian Empire later allied with the Kyrgyz Khaganate.

In 1205, Pulobudza I, an illegitimate ruler, organized a coup to remove his third cousin, Djefspater IV, from power, thus beginning a new dynasty. He strongly opposed the old pagan religion that his ancestors followed and began to drift towards Buddhism. In 1209, the Californian Empire converted to Buddhism and the Emperor crushed the nobles that opposed, beginning a rebellion that was swiftly crushed by the end of the year. While he was known abroad by conquering the Great Plains, razing Cahokia to the ground, and forcing Mesoamerica into submission, he was known by the Afansevans for promoting literacy and poetry and triggering a golden age for centuries. After his death in 1256 due to accidentally being ran over by a chariot while celebrating the Buddha's birthday at the age of 73, several hundreds of thousands of Afansevans were left in conquered territories. Some returned to their homeland with the last of the military, but others stayed, influencing the languages of conquered territories.

In 1508, the Californian Emperor married a Kyrgyz princess, having a son together. He held the Kyrgyz throne first in 1526 after the reigning Khagan died without any children, followed by the Californian throne in 1531 following the death of his father, ruling the two monarchies under a personal union. He wanted to unify the two countries as one state rather than keep the personal union to counter Vinland's reign of terror across the myriad lakes of the Canadian Shield, as well to compete with the Portuguese over the spice trade.

By 1539, the Empire was cast to the history books, and its former territory was used as a strategic point for Kyrgyzia to colonize Polynesia, which increased trade with the Old World. It, along with in the turn of the 16th century, which attracted Turkic-speaking settlers to move to Ahozia at the expense of the Afansevans, paves the way for Kyrgyzia becoming an economic powerhouse. Despite revolts and terrorist organizations seeking to reestablish the lost Empire, Kyrgyzia still holds on to the majority of Ahozia (The Southwestern US is called Ahozia, pronounced as "uh-HOE-zhuh", from Afansevan plus the Latin suffix -ia) to this day.



In 1650, due to the abundant Turkic gold miners in Ahozia. the autonomy that the Afansevans enjoyed until then was revoked. Several rebel groups had formed in Ahozian territory before, during, and after the autonomy was revoked. The rebel groups launched a full-on rebellion in 1659, and soon Ahozia would be split into hundreds of different states, turning into an all-out civil war. Fortunately, the rebellions were squashed in 1723, but it left a linguistic scar in Ahozia until the late 19th century, when the languages suffered a decline due to them being outlawed in schools.

Decipherment
In 1890, Kyrgyz linguists had discovered recorded texts in Imperial Afansevan by accident, in an abandoned Imperial palace in what is OTL's Los Angeles. These texts was a "letter" sent by the Californian Emperor Pulobudza I to the heavens telling that he will conquer the entire continent in the name of the Buddha in 1210, soon after the Californian Empire had converted to Buddhism. The Kyrgyz linguists found a writing system similar to the Mayan script, but they were unable to decipher it, so the Kyrgyz government sent the text to the central Mayan government. The Mayan linguists then found the sounds of some letters, but were unable to find the sounds of other letters. The letters were found to be similar to some Chinese characters, so the Mayans hired some Chinese people in order to find the sounds of the letters.

In 1902, Rhomanian archeologists discovered a bilingual text in Sanskrit, written in the Nagari script, and Imperial Afansevan near a Rhomanian military base in the ruins of Cahokia. Written in 1240, the text told of the life of the Buddha and how his final reincarnation (Which happened to be Pulobudza I) came to Earth to civilize and conquer the continent under one religion. This text faciliated the decipherment of the new language after the "alien" script was found to be the same as in the letter.

It took 30 years to decipher (Work on the decipherment was delayed by the outbreak of World War I), but in 1920, the Imperial Afansevan language was finally deciphered. In 1930, knowledge of Imperial Afansevan became large enough to establish that the Afansevan languages were Indo-European.

Pre-Proto-Afansevan (3000 BCE)

 * Laryngeals disappear:
 * /h1/ assimilates the following or preceding vowel towards the schwa, then disappears in certain ways:
 * If /h1/ occurs in the syllable coda, then it becomes /k/.
 * Otherwise, it disappears.
 * /h2/ assimilates the following or preceding vowel towards /a/, then disappears. If there is a preceding vowel, lenghtens the vowel.
 * /h3/ merges with /w/.
 * /H/ became /k/.
 * /w/ rounds the preceding vowel, then disappears, if it occurs in the syllable coda. /ew/ > /ø/, /iw/ > /y/, /əw/ > /ə/.
 * Syllabic consonants have an /a/ inserted before them.
 * Aspirated stops become voiceless.
 * Aspirated stops become voiceless.

Proto Afansevan (1500 BCE)

 * Aspirated plosives (but not aspirated palatals) become fricatives.
 * /pʰ/ > /ɸ/
 * /tʰ/ > /θ/
 * /kʰ/ > /x/
 * A sound shift similar to Verner's Law takes place in fricatives.
 * Satemization happens.
 * /c/ > /ɕ/
 * /ɟ/ > /ʑ/
 * /cʰ/ > /kj/
 * /kʷʰ/ > /x/
 * /kʷ/ > /k/
 * /gʷ/ > /g/
 * Exceptions to satemization occur when non-aspirated palatal consonants occur after nasal consonants, where centumization happens instead.
 * Stress shifts to the first syllable, making the law mentioned above phonemic.

Early Afansevan (1000 BCE)

 * The dental fricatives become alveolar sibilants.
 * /w/ > /β/.
 * Vowel shifts:
 * /ə/ > /a/.
 * /e/ and /o/ tend toward low-mid.
 * /tj/, /dj/, /sj/, /zj/ > /tɕ/, /dʑ/, /ts/, and /dz/
 * Alveolo-palatal fricatives and affricates become retroflex.
 * Due to various phonotactical changes, some consonant shifts occur:
 * Two sibilants are not allowed to go next to each other. In that case, the second one is lost and the first one stays.
 * Voiceless obstruents always assimilate in voicing to the last obstruent in the cluster (Sonorants can block this) and vice versa.
 * Two consonants followed by /j/ at the beginning of a word have an /i/ inserted between the two consonants and the /j/ to break up the cluster.
 * A /j/ at the beginning of words followed by a consonant becomes /i/.
 * /w/ + nasal (a relatively common sequence in Proto-Afansevan) becomes /vuN/.
 * Consonant clusters at the beginning of words that violate the sonority hierarchy (like #stop+stop) have /a/ inserted between the consonants to break up the illegal cluster. /ts/ and /dz/ are kept at the beginning of words, later becoming affricates.
 * Stress shifts back to the first syllable in order to keep the order predictable, as the extra adding of vowels caused irregular stress patterns to emerge.

Proto-Neosevan (1 CE)

 * /Nk/, /Ng/, /gN/, /kN/ > /ŋ/
 * The long vowels disappear.

Imperial Afansevan (1000 CE)
Text in bold is not a sound change. Text in italic is not represented in the language I made for this article (The language in this article is set to around the mid 1250s, shortly before Pulobudza's death, the Californian Empire's peak).
 * A six-tone system develops (see below)
 * The rhotic becomes uvular.
 * /ɣ/ (which was created from aspirated /k/ due to mock-Verner's law) merges with the rhotic.
 * Vowels are lowered when followed by 
 * The Afansevan Abugida is invented*
 * <ö> merges with , then moves towards the back of the mouth. As a result,  and <ö>'s lowered counterparts when followed by  become phonemic about fifty years after Pulobudza I's death in 1256. The spelling from Pulobudza's time is kept, causing historical spelling to emerge.
 * The new /ø/ merges with /ɛ/, while /ɶ/ lowers until it eventually merges with /a/. This makes /æ/ phonemic.
 * /æ/ moves back in the mouth until it merges with , making its rhotic allophone phonemic as well, later merging with /a/.
 *  disappears from coda position entirely, making /e/ and /o/ phonemic.
 * /e/ and /o/ merge with their low-mid counterparts.

Consonants
* /w/ only occurs in foreign loanwords. ** The dental fricatives are allophones of the dental laminal alveolar sibilants, but both sounds can be pronounced whatever you want them to be when or  occur.

Vowel Allophony

 *  and <ö> tend to be realized as [ʉ].
 * Vowels become nasalized when followed by a coda nasal consonant.
 * Vowels other than  are lowered when followed by a coda , so  becomes [e̞ʁ], <er> becomes [æʁ], <yr> becomes [ø̞ʁ ~ əʁ], <ör> becomes [ɶʁ ~ əʁ], <ur> becomes [o̞ʁ], and <or> becomes [ʌ̞ʁ].

Tone
Afansevan has developed a six-tone system following the loss of plosives in coda position (other than when there are two plosives in the coda, where the first one is lost, which makes tone phonemic). Note that the vowel in this example is <a>, and that the tone occurs at the end of the nucleus.

Pseudo-Diphthongs
Imperial Afansevan allows a set of pseudo-diphthongs, which is formed by combining any vowel with an approximant <j> or <w>. Diphthongs ending with -w are only allowed to occur in loanwords, while the pseudo-diphthong <ij> is not allowed to exist in native words at all, often being used to transcribe long /i/, especially in words from Sanskrit and Nahuatl.

Phonotactics
Afansevan's syllable structure is (C)(C)V(C)(C), where C is any consonant, and V is any vowel, <r>, or <l>. Consonant clusters made of two plosives are not allowed in the coda. All permitted consonant clusters in the onset are any obstruent (other than <r>) followed by <r> or <l>, or a sibilant followed by an obstruent. <R> and <l> can serve as the nucleus of a syllable, in that case they are pronounced as syllabic consonants. Voiced and voiceless obstruents (other than <r>) are not allowed to go together in coda-onset clusters, in that case, the last one assimilates the other ones in voicing (e.g. /pzf/>/psf/). Also, voiced obstruents (other than <r>) are not allowed to end a word, as they become voiceless in that environment, but voiceless obstruents are still represented in the romanization, the orthography, and the IPA in phonemic transcriptions (Devoicing at the end of words doesn't exist in the dialect spoken by the Californian royal family). Obstruents of the same place of articulation and manner of articulation of different voicing placed next to each other is also not allowed.

Stress System
Stress always falls on the first syllable. Unstressed vowels are reduced towards the schwa.

Writing System (<Duv Krejf Padzati>)
Afansevan uses an abugida derived from the Mayan rebus characters. However, it has characters borrowed from the Chinese rime tables to represent sounds that don't exist in the Mayan script that do exist in Afansevan. It uses a basic system of punctuation, with one slash (</>) representing a boundary between two words and two slashes (<//>) representing the end of a sentence, both derived from poetic notation. The introduction of movable type printing from China allowed Imperial Afansevan to become entrenched in the language of literacy, a role that it enjoyed until the Californian Empire ceased to exist.



Grammar (<Vijhapasa>)
Imperial Afansevan's grammar uses both head marking and dependent marking, and has both head-initial and head-final syntax, which is very rare across the world's languages.

Gender and Number, Pronouns, and Articles
Unlike other Indo-European languages, Afansevan has lost the case system of Proto-Indo-European. Definiteness is formed by adding an article before the noun, which declines for the gender and number of the noun. Afansevan has retained grammatical gender, and pronouns consist of the only traces of PIE's case system (but don't decline for gender, much like what's happening in English right now with the word "they" as the LGBT community is becoming more accepted), declining for five cases: nominative, vocative (which has the same form as the nominative), accusative, genitive, and dative. The reflexive forms descend from PIE enclitic forms, and the third person pronouns are descended from PIE second person plural pronouns. The reflexive pronouns can also be used to mark when the pronoun as an object, using the definate article, switches places with the verb in the sentence.

The plural suffix <-Vr> is derived from the PIE nominative plural *-es, with the final s being rhoticized in a dialect of Neosevan, which is now extinct today as it got replaced by the Mongolic languages during Genghis Khan's conquests, which made its way to the ancestor of the Afansevan spoken in the New World.

The indefinate and definate article each evolved from heavily simplified numerals for "one" and "two" respectively in Early Afansevan. "One" originated as the singular, and "two" originated as the dual, and the numeral for "three" evolved into the plural article. But the system was simplified in Proto-Neosevan, where the plural form was lost, and the singular became the indefinate article and the dual became the definate article. These articles agreed with their noun with case, gender, and number. When the case system was lost, the old case articles were carried over to pronouns and the feminine and neuter articles with cases were lost as pronouns have lost grammatical gender.

To the left is the gender and number suffixes for nouns and adjectives. To the right is the pronouns. To the bottom is the articles.

Pronouns Connected to Nouns, Proper Nouns, and Other Pronouns
The first argument (the pronoun) must be placed before the second argument (nouns, proper nouns, and other pronouns). Imperial Afansevan mandates that you place the first argument in the accusative case, unless it must take other cases, as in linguistically-correct descriptive grammars of English. This is because the conjunction is always treated like it is a verb, with the first argument being the object and the second argument being the subject, and therefore the pronoun after the conjunction must always take nominative case, unless the pronoun must take other cases.

This reflects the word order of Proto-Neosevan (OVS), the language during Afansevan's evolution that the case system was lost under the influence of a now-extinct Indo-Iranian language that was closely related to Avestan, although some scholars suggest that the case system was lost under Chinese influence. Proto-Neosevan and this Iranian language had very different case systems, as Early Afansevan had an agglutinative case system under the dwindling influence of Proto-Samoyed. Verb-initial word order later evolved in Imperial Afansevan and all the other Afansevan dialects under the influence of the Mesoamerican sprachbund, which Afansevan is marginally a part of (The Mesoamerican languages also influenced Imperial Afansevan to evolve possession suffixes and prefixes, and wh-movement).

For example, <Vartar duv merkitos ma sake Hannah> "Me and Hannah went to the store" or "Hannah and I went to the store" is grammatical, but <*Vartar duv merkitos azh sake Hannah> is ungrammatical.

Possession
The informal speech retains the genitive for possession. In the dialect spoken by the higher classes, possession is expressed with a set of prefixes which evolved from genitive pronouns coming before the noun it possesses for inalienable possession and after the noun for alienable possession. This has been extended to nouns possessing other nouns, but the noun or pronoun that possesses something cannot be dropped.

Prepositions
As a language that has lost most of its case inflections entirely, Imperial Afansevan uses a myriad of prepositions to make up for the loss of case marking. Most of these prepositions are derived from verbs that have been heavily simplified, but others have been directly inherited from Proto-Indo-European, such as <an> "in." Others are derived from case markers that got lost and had to become prepositions.

Basic Tenses
Afansevan has two basic tenses: past and non-past. The past is represented by ablauting the vowels in the verb, while the non-past is unmarked. Tense can also be created by using the copula's declinations, followed by marking the specific tense in the verb.

Copula Constructions
Verbs (other than "to be") don't conjugate for person nor mood. This is retained in the vulgar Afansevan dialects, but evolved a class system, which later evolves into the American Turkic class system for person. This means that Imperial Afansevan, like in English, is an anti-drop language. The non-future copula root, <az>, descends from PIE e-grade*h1es "to be", and is a cognate with English is, Irish is, Latin est, Sanskrit asti, Persian ast, Old Church Slavonic jest. The future copula root, <fú>, descends from PIE *bʰuH "to grow, to become" and is cognate with English be, Latin futura ( > English future), Greek phúō ( > English physics, physical).

Distant Past and Future
To form a distant past/future, a suffix (<-pedj>) is used. This was originally a word meaning "a long time" that was placed after the verb. The original word is still used by peasants when communicating with the Californian emperor.

Habitual
To form a habitual, use the suffix <-nö̃>. This is its own seperate word meaning "to use". The suffix was originally <nö̃> being placed after the verb to mark the habitual, but it has been suffixed to the verb to mark the habitual instead.

Resulting Tenses
Hence, the tense conjugations look like this:

Voice
Imperial Afansevan has two voices: passive and active. The active is unmarked, and the passive is marked with an <-(a)r> suffix.

Regular and Irregular Verbs
Imperial Afansevan distinguishes between regular and irregular verbs. Irregular verbs don't take the copula, and unfortunately, the only way to go around this is brute-force memorization.

Evidentiality
Perhaps the most impacts of Amerindian and Turkic influence in Imperial Afansevan are in its system of evidentiality, which is marked with a series of optional verb suffixes. Using inflections to mark evidentiality is very rare among Indo-European languages.

Resulting Regular Verb Conjugation
As a result, there are 93 regular verb conjugations in Imperial Afansevan. In dialects that retain person and mood marking, verbs could be conjugated for over sixteen hundred different forms, which doesn't have time to be recorded here because listing it would crash your scrollbar and it would take until the end of the universe to list them out. Evidentility is completely regular, as it recently got suffixed on to the verb.

Conjunctions
In Imperial Afansevan, conjunctions are expressed with a single auxillary with sixteen different inflected forms.

Examples of Afansevan Conjunctions

 * AfansevanConverb1.png <azmi jaŋ kojo farnasö sake zhvon azh> "I had a child and a dog (LIT: "I posessed a child and dog until recently")."
 * AfansevanConverb2.png <fújeŋ ne shon sashon genamane mane, saŋis sésos azh< "I will not reunite with my wife, nor will I remarry (LIT: "I will not unite with my wife nor marry")."

Auxillaries
In Imperial Afansevan, some verbal morphology is now expressed with auxillaries, as most of the inflectional morphology has been lost. * The imperative auxillary doesn't occur in the first person, as it is used to command other people.

Auxillary-Verb Combos and Null Subject Markers
To form tenses and aspects and moods that would not be possible using the verb conjugations or auxillaries, Imperial Afansevan relies on combinng the auxillary, the verb and one of its conjugations, and a null-subject marker with the suffix <-tus>, which is normally used to derive nouns from verbs and adjectives/adverbs, in that order. The null subject marker is used in order to prevent miscommunication.

Comparatives and Superlatives
To form a comparative, the first syllable of the adjective is reduplicated. To form a superlative, Imperial Afansevan uses ablaut reduplication, where the first syllable is reduplicated with ablaut and the original first syllable is unchanged. This has evolved first in Afansevan-speaking slaves in order to not get caught trying to plan to escape, followed by slave masters who learned what the slaves are trying to say, and then the majority of Afansevan speakers, partly due to many slave masters becoming members of the nobility and bringing this pattern with them. However, tonogenesis and other sound changes eroded the original reduplication pattern slightly, like in this:


 * azmi duvö anvírovrezhö dvenosontö jusrövanvírö azh. "I am the master's good slave"
 * azmi duvö anvírovrezhö dvẽvenosontö jusrövanvírö azh. "I am the master's better slave"
 * azmi duvö anvírovrezhö dvãvenosontö jusrövanvírö azh. "I am the master's best slave"

Stress and Meaning
In Imperial Afansevan, you can emphasize a word in a sentence and change the sentence's meaning entirely. For example, <Hefti ad löf Bob nís> with emphasis on <nís> means "Let's eat Bob." However, when you put emphasis on <Bob>, the sentence's meaning changes to "Let's eat, Bob." This type of meaning-changing emphasis isn't reflected in the writing system, but in poetic writing, where this emphasis is frequently used, you can add a diacritic to the first vowel of the word that is being emphasized to let the reader know that he/she should emphasize that word.

Derivational Strategies
Imperial Afansevan uses <-(a)tus> to form nouns from verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. This suffix usually assigns the newly-formed nouns to masculine gender, as the suffix was masculine in Proto-Indo-European. It uses <-(o)nt> to form adjectives and adverbs from nouns and verbs, but the vast majority of words using the suffix are derived from nouns, and uses <-li̋> (cognate of English -ly and -like) to form consttructions similar to English -like. Also, to derive the exact opposite of the word, a prefix <an-> is used. These strategies are increasingly being used in Imperial Afansevan as it becomes more agglutinative.

Another strategy that is still productive in Imperial Afansevan, like most the world's languages, is compounding. When combining at least one noun together with another part of speech, the first noun assigns the gender to the whole word.

Imperial Afansevan also uses a suffix <-ina> to mark feminine nouns that have a Sanskrit origin, but it is also used to derive feminine nouns from masculine and neuter nouns.

Numbers
Afansevan uses a pure vigesimal system with a sub-base of five. It has an ordinal suffix <-ynch>, which was derived from American Turkic.The numbers one to three have irregular ordinal forms, because they were used commonly enough to resist the change. Numbers greater than 10 (except for non-compounds and numbers made of shortening of compounds) don't recieve their own ordinal suffix: it's just the individual numbers they are made out of plus ordinal suffixes. As hinted with the Mayan loanwords, Afansevan was part of the Mesoamerican sprachbund, which later expanded into American Turkic.

Numbers and Gender
Some numbers conjugate for gender, but not all numbers.


 * 0 is not conjugated.
 * The numbers from 1-3 are conjugated.
 * All other numbers are not conjugated.

Word Order
Afansevan has a strict VOS word order. The word order got more verb-initial as most of the case system was lost, only being retained in pronouns. Adjectives and adverbs always come before the parts of speech they modify. Adjectives modifying the same noun may be shuffled around frequently and the maning that is being communicated still makes perfect sense. The copula always preceeds the verb, and auxillary verbs come after the verbs they modify. There are some exceptions to the strict VOS word order, such as the object being placed before the verb if it is being linked to the subject by a copula and if the object is a pronoun that is being preceded by an article (hence the example in the writing system example above is and not.

Wh-Questions and Preposition Stranding
To form a question, the interrogative pronoun switches places with the verb and becomes the first word to occur in the sentence. Placing the pronoun where it should belong in the object spot between the verb and the subject in an interrogative sentence is ungrammatical in Imperial Afansevan. Imperial Afansevan also acceptsPreposition n stranding in questions by moving the pronoun's preposition to the end of a sentence. Preposition stranding is not allowed to exist within a non-interrogative sentence.

Conjunctions
Conjunctions in Imperial Afansevan are banned from starting or ending a sentence, and are therefore restricted to medial positions. BUT, there is a loophole around this rule. As said in a previous section, conjunctions are treated as verbs, but don't take any marking, and reflect the word order in Proto-Neosevan. Therefore, the null subject and object particles can be used in conjunctional phrases to create a loophole around the no conjunctions in sentence boundary rule, unlike in the prescriptivists' corrupted version of the English language.

Null Subjects/Objects
With a default VOS word order and as one of the few Indo-European languages to allow null-subjects, Imperial Afansevan speakers are highly likely to get misunderstandings from other Imperial Afansevan speakers. For example, simply saying <*Shiravalg jú> "He runs" is ungrammatical. Every Imperial Afansevan sentence cannot occur without at least two nouns and a verb, in order to avoid miscommunication due to null subjects and objects. To solve this, and to still allow null subjects and objects, a special syntactical word exists (<nís> for null subjects and <ním> for null objects) to mark null subjects and objects and is always placed at the end of a sentence. This was evolved from case markers that were treated as seperate words and were placed after the subject, and later got suffixed to the numeral for "zero" after the tonogenesis process and carried over the same function.

The grammatically correct version of the sentence "He runs" is <Shiravalg jú ním>, which literally translates to "He runs to," which doesn't make any sense in English but makes perfect sense in Imperial Afansevan.

Influence from Sanskrit (<Prabalat pro duv Sanskarta Jusrardaŋivaz>)
Due to the Californian Empire being a highly Buddhist nation before it ceased to exist (as the majority of ethnic Afansevans are Buddhist to this day), Imperial Afansevan has loaned lots of words from Sanskrit, which was taught as a second language in the upper classes, along with Imperial Afansevan. In fact, so many Afansevan words originated in Sanskrit that over 40% of Imperial Afansevan vocabulary orginates in Sanskrit (Kinda like how English is not a Romance language despite 52% of their vocabulary having origins in French and Latin), and most Imperial Afansevan words used in the second-order headings in this article have a Sanskrit origin as well. Many of these words were borrowed into American Turkic (and some of the meanings have nothing to do with the original meaning in Sanskrit due to semantic drift), including, but not limited to: Many words for modern concepts, scientific concepts, and linguistic concepts also originate from Sanskrit, often being a literal translation of Greek and Latin roots in English: e.g. the word for "vertebrate" is, and the word for "gun" is. The word for any modern vehicle is a major exception, with it being, literally meaning "a chariot without horses."

Pulobudza I's Letter
The following text is a "letter" sent by the Californian Emperor Pulobudza I to the heavens, in 1210, telling that he would conquer most of North America in the name of the Buddha. This text was essential in the decipherment of Imperial Afansevan.

Schleicher's Fable
The Sheep and the Horses A sheep that had no wool saw horses: one of them pulling a heavy wagon, one carrying a big load, and one carrying a man quickly. The sheep said to the horses: "My heart pains me, seeing a man drive horses." The horses said: "Listen, sheep, our hearts pain us when we see this: a man, the master, makes the wool of the sheep into a warm garment for himself. And the sheep has no wool." Having heard this, the sheep fled into the plain.

<Koj Aŋoz sake duvar Ezhvosar> <Vá trej ezhvosar koj anavis aŋoz, far koj ankà vokinos kojnos, far kojö ankapö dravjö kojnos, sake shira far víro kojnos. Sak duvar ezhvosar duv aŋoz: "Gelk ma mane maneshertos, dravjavó vrech ezhvosar víro." Sak duv aŋoz duvar ezhvosar: "Gelk unsyr ansojshertos, fuŋe vó hermis kambala anvírovrezhö, sake asti vrech anavis duv aŋoz." Sheravalg duv platlant duv aŋoz sanskond vafs juseryr.>

The North Wind and the Sun
The North Wind and the Sun The North Wind and the Sun were disputing which was the stronger, when a traveler came along wrapped in a warm cloak. They agreed that the one who first succeeded in making the traveler take his cloak off should be considered stronger than the other. Then the North Wind blew as hard as he could, but the more he blew the more closely did the traveler fold his cloak around him; and at last the North Wind gave up the attempt. Then the Sun shined out warmly, and immediately the traveler took of his cloak. And so the North Wind was obliged to confess that the Sun was the stronger of the two.

Duv Dàsfal Vants sake duv Saval (translation not finished) Asti vars vresht duv Dàsfal Vants sake duv Saval