Mestian/Reconstruction

General Information
Mestian (natively Mástā) is a dragon herder language spoken in the central lowlands and on the isle cluster of Dragonforge. Mestian is a transitionally agglutinating and fusional language that possesses a moderately opaque morphology. It has, as is characteristic of languages native to the lowlands, a pitch accent that is moderately well developed and is fairly contrastive. It is written most frequently in the indigenous Dragon Imperial alphabet modified to suit its needs; it is, for the most part, written with full stress and length marks and nearly unambiguously indicates all the language's consonants.

It is furthermore a relative isolate within the wider Adaric language family, and as such is a distant relative of languages such as Sarhan. Even though they are both herder tongues, Mestian and Mendian are presumably completely unrelated. This page is dedicated to a step-by-step walk backwards through Mestian's linguistic history. It deals with internal reconstruction up to a point, and then tries to use both guesswork and what little comparison is possible to go back all the way to proto-Adaric.

 Mestian (natively Mástā) is the language of some of the dragon-herding peoples in the central lowlands and on the Dragonforge. It is part of the lowlands Sprachbund. It is part of the Adaric language family and is a distant relative of Sarhan.

Speaking from a mixed diachronic and synchronic point of view, Mestian is a heavily fusional language descended from a heavily agglutinating stage. Many of the previously agglutinative components of the now-fusional morphemes are still vaguely evident and partially identifiable, although many have long since merged beyond transparency. Its tonal system descends from a mixture of stress accent and the disappearance of /*h/: most dipping long vowels come from a vowel that was lengthened by the loss of that /*h/.

Mestian is natively written most frequently in the indigenous Dragon Imperial alphabet, specifically modified to suit the needs of the language. It is written with full stress marks and is used as the template for orthographies of the languages recorded and described by Mestians.