I've been enjoying watching the continued development of Akana - especially Tuysáfa - and tinkering with my Western side-project, Ayčasamo. Now it's time to post my work on an Akanaran language whose existence has been known from the very beginning but about which little has been written - Meshi.
I worked out the sound changes about a year ago, with help from Dunomapuka and others. Since then I've had some thoughts on the grammar and lexicon, and even put a very tentative sample together.
Zaryuzwar pishi in awpi za chik us za pad umwu Kaswun.
Wu chik gwun az nyad, wu nyad Dak za Kasad, am wu pwun ji lud achis achis.
Nak nak zan wu chik zasa za Meshi.
Zaryuzwar commissioned this monument in honour of her father Kaswun.
He was fierce in battle, he fought the Ndak in Kasadgad, and he captured many slaves from them.
The gods will judge him worthy of the Meshi.
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Zaryuzwar pishi in awpi za chik us za pad umwu Kaswun.
Zaryuzwar shape-CAUS this monument DAT make honour DAT father 3SG.GEN Kaswun
Wu chik gwun az nyad, wu nyad Dak za Kasad, am wu pwun ji lud achis achis.
3SG.DIR make fierce DAT fight 3SG.DIR fight Ndak DAT Kasca and 3SG.DIR take from 3PL.DIR slave REDUP
Nak nak zan wu chik zasa za Meshi.
god REDUP decide 3SG.DIR make worthy DAT Meshi
What Meshi is like:
- Fusional (infixing or ablauting) verbal morphology, worn down by two rounds of apocope. Verbs have just one inflected form, the atelic, derived from the j-grade, supplemented by a set of derivational suffixes derived from the stem vowel (like Ngauro); so ays "talk to" has an atelic ayis "call on", and derivatives ayshi "advise", aysu "speak", ayse "answer", aysachi "conversation", aysuchi "language"...
- Isolating morphology for everything else. Nouns don't inflect at all - although they reduplicate for number (again, with parallels in Ngauro, e.g. kasd-kasd) and there are some case particles that behave a bit like prefixes. Pronouns have direct, dative, and ablative-genitive cases.
- SVO, mostly head-first, word order. PEV word-order has been largely retained, and head-first-ness was probably reinforced by contact with several Macro-Talo-Edastean languages.
- Moderately simple phonology. Syllables are (C)(j/w)V(C), with the phoneme inventory below; ch j sh zh are post-alveolar; f v are only marginally phonemic.
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i u
ay aw
e
a
m n
p b t d ch j k g
f v s z sh zh
w r l y
- Derived from PEI and PEV. This has in some cases made me have to choose between possibilities where a reconstruction has been ambiguous.
- Reconstructing PEV roots from Miwan and deriving from those. The same caveat applies.
- Borrowed from Ndak Ta, PTE and PX. Pretty straightforward.
- Borrowed from Antagg. Working from Salmoneus' very partial draft of Royig, I've worked out the sound changes from PTE and used them to derive a wordlist; if this doesn't match up with Sal's work, I will cheerfully claim that it's a different dialect.