User:Elector Dark/Sourlander

General Info
Northerners, especially those that dragon herding peoples have had long-standing sea-based contacts with, are a sedentary, settled agricultural people, mainly dealing with animal husbandry (primarily mammalian husbandry, working most with oxen, goats and sheep) and crop agriculture (primarily oats, barley and ryegrass). In fairly recent times, they have been documented to have started organising in large, theo-monarchies, and have organised their society around honour pledges and, as of a few centuries ago, war plunder.

Aside from inter-polity warfare, which has in recent times experienced a sharp and surprising decline, the peoples traditionally marked as Northerners (more properly, Near Northerners, living directly north of the Imperium in a vast east-west stretch, but south of peoples generally collectively described as Far Northerners) are known to also fight the peoples both to their north and, worryingly, south. Primary contacts with southern peoples, most important of which would be Imperial polities directly exposed to Northerner incursions from both ashore and inland, have been both military and commercial, and Northerners are well known as versatile seafarers and merchants, and the wide variety of goods and skills they deal in are reputed as among the best in quality.

Northerner languages all come from a fairly recent common stock, and a very wide and colourful dialect continuum exists spanning their entire settlement. There exists some limited intelligibility between individual groups, and comprehension also usually tends to be asymmetric, with inland speakers having an easier time understanding seashore dialects.

There is some moderate diversity in the typology of Northerner varieties, with many being moderately inflected and mostly lacking noun class. The term Sourland Northerner covers the very close language varieties spoken at and near the bureaucratically so-called Sourlands, a coastal segment built out of rock-salt with a characterstic sour taste, and is considered a common close de-facto koiné for much of the region.

Sourland Northerner is typologically a very isolating language, with no noun class and nearly no overt morphological agreement. Its syntactical alignment very neatly revolves around a modified nominative pattern, where some situations (as is relativisation, and the use of certain classes of definites) force a passivisation strategy.

Phonology
The phonology underlying Sourland Northerner is somewhat odd, but generally typical of many coastal Northerner languages. The consonant inventory bears just thirteen phonemes:

 Plosives: / t k q / — &lt; t k q &gt;  Nasals: / m n ŋ / — &lt; m n g &gt; Sonorants: / r j ʟ / — &lt; r y l &gt; Fricatives: / β s ʃ x / — &lt; v s š h &gt; 

Word-finally, after non-nasal vowels, the nasals /m n ŋ/ may fortite and lose their nasalisation to become [b d g]. These are represented with &lt;b d g&gt; respectively out of convenience.

The vowel inventory is somewhat distorted as well:

 High: / i i: u u: / — &lt; i ei/y u ou &gt; Mid: / e e: ẽ ɞ ɞ̃ o õ / — &lt; e ea ę ø ø̨ o ǫ &gt; Low: / ɑ / — &lt; a &gt;</li> Diphthongs: / iu eu ɑu ui oi ɑi (eɑ) oɑ / — &lt; iu eu au ui oi ai (ea) oa &gt;</li> </ul>

The long vowels /u: e:/ and some instances of /i:/ stem from monophthongised diphthongs; they still have (now rare) free variants [ o͡u e͡ɑ e͡i ]. There is also a general trend of further colloquial monophthongisation. Remaining long /i:/ come from a word-initial contraction of |*ji| and are represented by &lt;y&gt;.

Most varieties spoken in the region have a fairly simple syllable pattern; syllables tend not to have more than two onset consonants, and codas are rarely larger than two segments, allowing /rsk rʃk/ as the only permissible three-consonant codas. Internally, clusters are never larger than three consonants, and almost always two. Further, Sourlander dialects tend to seriously restrict vowel-vowel hiatuses, and often add epenthetic consonants. Words tend to be monosyllabic, and rarely go over three syllables. Geminates tend to be avoided, but are generally not illegal.

Sourland Northerner also has a minimally dististinctive stress feature. As stress, as a rule, in most situations falls either on the rightmost long vowel, or on the penultimate syllable if there is no long vowel in the final three syllables, but roughly a sixth of all words have an unpredictable stress position, which can then be indicated by a caron diacritic. Many speakers level this stress nonetheless and have a fully regular pattern.

A harmony process operates in Sourland Northerner dialects, where an alternation of the tense /i u/ with lax /e o/ exists in derivational affixes and clitics. Front vowels /i i: e e: ẽ/ permit harmony in the back tense-lax pair /u o/, where the lax root /e e: ẽ/ take the lax suffixal /o/, and tense /i i:/ take the tense suffixal /u/. Back vowels /u u: o õ ɑ/ permit harmony in the front tense-lax pair /i e/ in a similar manner. The vowels /ɞ ɞ̃/, as well as all the diphthongs, count as neutral, and do not cause harmony. It is important to note that root back vowels do not permit tenseness alternations in suffixal back vowels, and that root front vowels do not permit the alternations in suffixal front vowels.

The Noun Phrase (NP)
The class of nominals includes nouns, pronouns, adjectives and numerals, but not all Sourlander nominals may form a noun phrase (NP) by themselves; only nouns and adjectives can be full NP heads (such adjectives can be thought of as having undergone a zero-derivation adjective→noun), and pronouns and numerals may only stand as modifiers to NPs. Sourlander nominals are typically not inflected. There exist some words with suppletive or irregular plurals (ykei :: teva 'woman/women'; goiš :: gouš 'child/ren'), and only one word with a suppletive possessed definite (hǿlea :: igqe 'heart'), but these irregulars may commonly be analogised away.

NPs may be marked for three kinds of definiteness: anaphoric definiteness (referencing formerly mentioned information), possessed definiteness (a combination of anaphoric definiteness and possession) and specificatory definiteness (non-anaphoric, generally used as an abstractifier or marker of prominence). Notably, Sourlander lacks cataphoric defitineness reference.

The NP is structured so that it starts with a prepositional slot, followed by adjective phrase modifiers, followed by a numeral modifier, then the head, and a pronoun slot:

The prepositional slot may contain either just one preposition, or engage in grammaticalised preposition stacking, whereas the pronominal and numeral slots must include only one of their kind.

Sourlander utilises a duodecimal system with vestiges of an octal system underlying it:

The numeral slot may also include vague quantity specifiers like gevél "plenty, many", yeuyę "few", ę "a handful (countable on one hand)".

An adjective phrase (AdP) consists of a final head (either an adjective or another adjective phrase) and a single modifier (bare adjective), connected by a conjunctive i: an example AdP would be gø i yur 'big heavy' "very heavy".

Recursion with NPs is difficult: a NP head cannot be a pronoun-determined NP, or a NP with a preposition, and numeral-modified NP heads cannot be further modified by more numeral modifiers. Thus, a NP head can be said to be either a noun, an adjective, or a truncated NP made up only of a NP head and adjective modifiers.

Unlike inland Northerner varieties, Sourlander does not allow tonic free argument pronouns in the NP. All NP pronominals are either possessive or impersonal (demonstrative, indefinite etc.) and the explicit use of pronominal reference is discouraged. Definiteness in NPs is marked through pronouns, and there are two classes of possessives corresponding to indefinite and definite marking. Anaphoric and specificatory definiteness are marked with the same definite marker, but employ different clause syntax.

Table of NP pronominals:

It is beyond typical for speakers to use the singular forms of pronouns (or rather forms unmarked for the plural) instead of their plural counterparts. This is indicative of a levelling shift.

Clause Syntax
The simplest type of Sourlander clause consists of a predicative NP: a bare NP without any verbs in the clause assumes the predicative meaning of "there is NP; NP exists".