Afansevan

Afansevan (Imperial Afansevan:  (IPA:/ˈduˌβaʁ ˈa.ʁɔˌzaʁ ˈda.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 (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 and English, 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
The are the descendants of Indo-European speaking slaves brought to the New World during the Great Migration, themselves descended from the Afansievo culture, which survived later than in OTL. By the turn of the 10th century, the Afansevans broke free, migrated southwards, and settled in OTL's Los Angeles, forming the Californian Empire. The Californian Empire then quickly conquered and subjugated all of California under one banner, later expanding into OTLL's Nevada, Arizona, and the Baja California peninsula. Later expansions occurred along the Gulf of California and the Western coast of Mexico. The Californian Empire also formed an alliance with the Kyrgyz Khaganate during the latter expansion, eventually helping the southern warlord state win the Kyrgyz Civil War.

In 1205, Pulobudza I took the throne from his third cousin once-removed, Djefspater IV, thus beginning a new dynasty. He was strongly opposed to the old pagan religion that his ancestors followed and began to drift towards Indic religions, especially Buddhism. In 1209, the Californian Empire converted to Buddhism and Pulobudza crushed the nobles that opposed, beginning a 5 month-long peasant rebellion that was swiftly crushed by the end of the year. While he was known abroad by conquering the Turkic-speaking territories of the Great Plains, burning Cahokia to the ground, and forcing the Mesoamerican nations into submission, he was known by the Afansevans for promoting literacy and poetry, triggering a golden age of literacy for centuries. After his death in 1256, several hundreds of thousands of Afansevans were left in conquered territories. Some returned to California with the last bastions of 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 Canadian Shield, and to expand trade with China via the Pacific Rim, so he started integrating the two countries into a Pacific superstate.

By 1539, the Californian Empire was no more, and its former territory was used as a strategic point for Kyrgyzia to colonize Hawaii and other Polynesian islands, which exponentially expanded the trade with the Old World via the Pacific Ocean. It, along with in the turn of the 16th century, which attracted Turkic-speaking settlers to move to California at the expense of the Afansevans, paves the way for Kyrgyzia becoming an economic powerhouse (and having 3x the GDP of all of Europe combined by the 18th century). Despite numerous revolts seeking to reestablish the Californian Empire, Kyrgyzia still holds on to the majority of Afansevan-speaking regions to this day. In 1560, the Kyrgyz Khagan passed a law granting the Afansevans autonomy in exchange for stability, which exponentially decreased the frequency of revolts.



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. It took 30 years to decipher (Work on the decipherment was delayed by the outbreak of World War I), but in 1920, the script 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/.
 * Illegal consonant clusters at the beginning of words (like #stop+stop) have /a/ inserted between the consonants to break up the illegal cluster.
 * 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.

Old Afansevan (1 CE)

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

Imperial Afansevan (1000 CE)

 * 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.

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],  becomes [æʁ],  becomes [ø̞ʁ ~ əʁ], <ör> becomes [ɶʁ ~ əʁ],  becomes [o̞ʁ], and  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 , and that the tone occurs at the end of the nucleus.

Phonotactics
Afansevan's syllable structure is (C)(C)V(C)(C), where C is any consonant, and V is any vowel, , or . 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
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.



Nouns
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.

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. The informal speech retains the genitive for possession.

Verbs
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.

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).

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.

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.

Hence, the tense conjugations look like this:

Converbs
Imperial Afansevan has a rich set of converba, which in English are normally expressed with conjunctions. This is expressed with a single auxillary with sixteen different inflected forms. These have evolved through heavy influence from Turkic-speaking peoples.

Examples of Afansevan Converbs

 * 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 gena 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.

Derivational Strategies
Imperial Afansevan uses <-(a)tus> to form nouns from verbs and adpositions. 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 adpositions 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

Syntax
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. The copula always preceeds the verb. 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.

Numbers
Afansevan uses a pure vigesimal system with a sub-base of five. It has a cardinal suffix <-ynch>, which was derived from American Turkic. Numbers greater than 10 (except for non-compounds and numbers made of shortening of compounds) don't recieve their own cardinal suffix: it's just the individual numbers they are made out of plus cardinal suffixes. As hinted with the Mayan loanwords, Afansevan was part of the Mesoamerican sprachbund, which later expanded into American Turkic.

Influence from Sanskrit
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. 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:

Use for reconstructing PIE
In the ATL that Imperial Afansevan was spoken in, there is very little mutual intelligibilty between other Indo-European languages and it. However, the Afansevan language largely kept the original vowel system of PIE without change (except for the laryngeals), so it is really useful for reconstructing PIE vowels. Also, in this ATL, the laryngeal theory was proven earlier than in OTL due to discreptencies in vowels and consonants alike. For example, Afansevan <tú> "you (singular nominative)" was derived from earlier, itself from PIE *tuH, which makes it a cognate with English thou (which is obsolete today). If the *H never existed, then Afansevan would be left with *<tu> without a high tone, and "one" would become * . There is also living evidence in the Afansevan languages (the languages that diverged from Vulgar Imperial Afansevan following the absorption of California into the Kyrgyz Khaganate), and so this ATL has the laryngeal theory being accepted about thirty years earlier than in OTL.

Example text
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.