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 or acute 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". A 'mock' AdP may be constructed with a preposited NP which may serve as a modifier. Not all preposed NPs can do this, and this is determined primarily by semantic and pragmatic considerations.

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. A noun with no pronominal modifier must take an obligatory dummy pronominal i, which is homophonous with the definite marker but behaves differently syntactically.

Sourlander doesn't allow bare pronominal reference and arguments, and instead uses a possessive construction: the phrase in gin, which would literally translate to "my person, my individual", typically stands for the 1 argument. Inanimate third person referents may instead use tør en, meaning "its thing".

A typical maximal NP, with all slots filled, would be as gø i yur ę teal i "with a handful of very large stars"

The Verb Phrase (VP)
A VP is always headed by a verb; it isn't recursive, and VPs can't head other VPs. The VP head is always final, and the VP always has an initial preverbal that further specifies it. The VP may additionally have adverbials (functionally VP-internal adjectives) and pronominal argument incorporates (for some types of definites) that are optional, but occur in a fixed order. A maximal VP is thus structured as:

Typical preverbs include:
 * ęn — dummy preverb, empty morphosemantics
 * lø — inchoative, resumptive
 * entál — retrospective, perfect

Anaphoric and possessive definites must also include a pronominal agreement factor, for nominative and accusative arguments. This factor is all that is left of the general Northerner tonic pronoun:

Verbs do not take a pronominal factor if the argument the factor would agree for is a specificatory definite or an indefinite. As all anaphoric and possessive definites must be cross-referenced in the VP, but the VP can handle only core arguments, ditransitives must employ either secundative (if the third argument is indefinite or a specificatory definite) or paraphrasing/applicative (if all three arguments are definite) strategies.

The verb itself does not inflect, and tense and aspect categories are marked with adverbials, and mood is marked for using modal verbs. Verbs can be simple (consisting of only one verb) or complex (with verb serialisation). Complex verbs are typically series of a main verb (called the verbal infinitive) which precedes the modal and is joined by the conjunctive i. If the complex verb has two infinitives, they aren't conjoinedby the conjunctive particle, and complex verbs may never have three or more infinitives.

The VP may be made incomplete by infinitivising its simple verb by postfixing it with the conjunctive i; these VPs then behave much like AdPs and can be thought of as relative phrases (not full clauses) that produce intransitive (single S) relatives.

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". This kind of predicative NP may be turned into a relative "that which is X" by employing it in the same manner one would relativise a verb (with the conjunctive, as an AdP). Predicative NPs may not be modified by prepositions.

Subjects and objects can only be NPs.

In all intransitive active clauses, the order is generally fixed as Subject-VP, with secondary arguments tending to come before the subject, with possibility of being emphatically put after the VP.

Transitive active clauses are generally Subject-Object-VP, but allow for some minor movement when pronominal agreement factors in the VP allow for disambiguation (such as the verb being modified by an adverbial (providing information as to whether the nominative or accusative argument is definite) and taking a definite and indefinite argument). Secondary arguments must always come before the subject, and this may also be used to front the object for emphasis.

Passive clauses are instead either marked modally (with the modal gisa "take, obtain, get") or by the clause having a secondary argument NP with the preposition kriš "with, by" which reintroduces the demoted A argument. In both cases, the former O, promoted to S/nominative, is moved to be obligatorily before the VP. Possessed and specificatory definites always force a passive construction in the clause, while the anaphoric definite may never be promoted by passivisation. Due to this, and the fact that indefinites are incresingly more rarely passivised, the passive may be considered a definite-indefinite disambiguator more so than an actual voice, and that Sourlanders are losing the passive as a free construction.

Vocabulary

 * in - sb.
 * person, individual, human


 * tør - sb.
 * thing, item, trinket


 * gevél - num.
 * plenty, many


 * yeuyę - num.
 * few, not many


 * ę - num.
 * a handful (two to five)


 * gø - adj.
 * big


 * yur - adj.
 * heavy


 * ykei (pl. teva) - sb.
 * woman


 * goiš (pl. gouš) - sb.
 * child


 * hǿlea (def. poss. igqe) - sb.
 * heart


 * teal - sb.
 * star


 * gisa - vb.
 * take, obtain, get


 * as - prep.
 * (together) with,, in the company of


 * kriš - prep.
 * with, by,