User:Dendana

Hello, I'm dendana. I pretty much use the same username everywhere, whether it's ConWorkShop or the ZBB or here. They/them pronouns are best.

My main contribution to Akana is the Edastean language Vuuyin Zayxa, a highly ergative descendant of Buruya Nzaysa with heavy influence from Fáralo, Æðadĕ, and Namɨdu. It is spoken in about 1300-1500 along the river valley north of Buruya.

It is written in the Luyíma alphabet.

Major points:

• Development of sandhi where word-final vowels are nasalized before voiced stops, nasals, and fricatives.
• Glottalized and nasalized vowels which interact with a pitch-accent system.
• Part of Buruya Nzaysa's complex auxiliary system is reinterpreted as a set of absolutive pronouns that decline for aspect.
• Other auxiliaries are treated as prefixes on the verb.
• The topic determiner becomes an ergative proclitic.
• Numbers over 3 have been borrowed from Fáralo.

I like to keep track of my natlang inspirations for each conlang to cite my sources, if you will, but it's a meta enough topic that I wouldn't want to create a page on the main part of the wiki for it.

Mainly, for the sound changes, I was inspired by Gikuyu and Mandarin in the stops and also French and Portuguese in the development of the nasal vowels and sandhi. The laryngeal vowels and tone system are vaguely inspired by Shanghainese, Burmese, and Akha. The treatment of continuants as a single phonological category is similar to what happens in many Athabaskan languages. The grammar is loosely based on Iraqw and other Cushitic languages in terms of the 'selector' and typology, while other parts such as the treatment of the copula, the pronoun declensions, and predicative possession are based more heavily on Hausa. The development of the person/number in the pronouns was influenced by Bengali. The pragmatics-syntax interface drew upon the systems in Amharic and Basque. The possessive enclitics were inspired by Turkmen.

Ideas for VZ descendant: ú, uy, ʊy > y (ú after a palatalized sound)

ɨ, ʊ, ow et al. > u

ó, ew, ɛw, oy, ǝw, ɔy > ø (ó after a palatalized sound)

ɔ, ɔw et al. > o

ɩ, é > i

ɛ, ay et al. > e

ǝ > Ø

low > mid falling

glottalized > mid rising

other > (mid) level

nasal-trigger becomes unproductive and mostly ends up forming kinds of construct states and incorporates, as well are remaining lexically productive.

relatedly, the absolutive pronouns finally get stuck to the verb? or keep doing odd selector-type things as affixes?

l/z/w merger? ʋ/w split? i/j merger?

palatalization of consonants becomes even more of a thing and re-creates a palatal(alveolar) series as well as a labial/palatal one.

vowel sequences begin to simplify, for example zoé > zwe > zwi