But isn't the lockdown the perfect occasion to try and make it work?
Context.
Erdaníla 'the Erdaní way' is the language of Erdaní, the language of the hilly, rugged littoral of the Middle Sea. An old name for the ethnic group is Helí, 'the people'. (Erdaní is, quite simply, 'Heli country).
The Helí were slash and burn farmers, living in semi-permanent villages and moving when they had exhausted the local resources; they were also among the first to domesticate the Southern Hemisphere horse.
This mobile lifestyle led them to expand across the whole of the South-Eastern continent; on the West coast they finally adopted more permanent forms of agriculture and founded the kingdom of Kapittan.
The eastern branch finally settled down in Erdaní, at the time a colony of the Tarandim city-states, and later a province of the Tarandim empire.
Context.
The Tarandim name for them was Qanien, litterally 'murderers' which suggests that first impressions weren't entirely positive; but soon the Qanien adopted the Tarandim urban and agricultural lifestly, as well as the religion. They were good sailors, and shrewd traders (indispensable, in fact, when it came to obtaining good horses), and an essential part of the Tarandim army. They were widely seen as cowardly -- the Qanien view on war was 'it is sweet and fitting to make other people die for their country' but excellent riders and guerilla fighters.
The Qanien ended up in charge for a century and a half before the empire finally collapsed.
Erdaní is now a patchwork of small kingdoms -- or I should, say, queendoms, since the Herdaníní titles pass along matrilineal lines and only women hold property and titles, united by a commonality of language and culture (not entirely unlike the Holy Roman Empire).
The ethnic group is now called Herdaníní, singular Herdanín (or Erdanín, if talking about a man).
.
Erdaníla is, in practice, a dialect continuum; with dialects at the extremes not always mutually intelligible. This sketch will describe the dialect of Cerdóa, the largest city.
Typology
Erdaníla is a polysynthetic, fusional and (mostly) suffixing language.
The Erdaníla sound system
Vowels
| Front | Central | Back | |
| High | i | u | |
| Close | e | o | |
| Open | ʌ ̃ | ||
| Low | a |
e, i are realized [e o] in open syllables, [ɛ ɔ] in closed ones.
It has a nasal vowel, ʌ, generally realized [ʌ ̃], in free variation with [ɔ̃]. It's the result of the merger of the two nasal vowels of proto-Helian, and never the counterpart of an oral vowel.
Consonants
| Labials | Dentals | Alveolars | Post-Alveolar | Velars | Uvular | |
| Plosives | p | t d | k g | |||
| Fricatives | s | h | ||||
| Affricates | j | |||||
| Nasals | m | n | ŋ | |||
| Liquids | l | r | ||||
| Semivowels | w |
t,d,n,l are laminal denti-alveolar while s is apical alveolar, or even post-alveolar before the high vowels /i u/
r is an alveolar flap [ɾ]. /r/ and /l/ only contrast word-initially; only [l] may occur intervocally and l, r > [ɾ] at the end of a syllable.
j is a post-alveolar voiced africate [ʤ]
h is a palatal fricative [ç] before the high vowels /i u/, elsewhere it's realized as a voiceless uvular fricative [χ].
Syllable structure
Syllable structure is a very simple (C)V(C).
There are no diphtongs, but vowels in hiatus are quite common: haáe 'sky' [χa.a.e], iraus, 'bull' [i.ɾa.us]
An intervocalic w or glottal stop may be added: [ha?a?e], [i.ɾawus] in fast speech.
Erdaníla allows the following consonant clusters:
pp, ps, (pr), (pl), tt, (tl), (tr), kk, ks, jj, (kr), (kl), sp, st, sn, (sr), (sl), mb, nd, nj, ŋg, mm, nn, ŋŋ, ll, rd, rg, rw
The cluster in parentheses are all found in loanwords and may be broken up by an epenthetic vowel.
The cluster jj is realized [t.t̠ʃ].
Tone and stress
All vowels may carry either middle tone: a, high tone: á or low tone: à.
Stress is determined as follows:
If any of the last three vowels carries a high tone, stress it:
psísaa ['psi:.sa.a] 'I shall open it'
iwesó[i.we.'so:] 'castle'
molóʌ[mo.'lo:.ɔ̃] 'apple'
As the phonetic transcription above implies, the stressed vowel is longer, in addition to being louder.
In case none of the last three vowels is high, stress the penultimate:
iraus[i.ra:.us] 'bull'.
Finally, if there are several high vowels, stress the penultimate if it's high:
ródíʌ
[ro.'di:ɔ̃] 'they hit me with a spear'.
If not, the earliest one:
sekkéwesí
[sek.'ke:we.si] 'when you met with me'
Low tones are never stressed; stress the vowel after, or before if there's no following vowel:
nàdelʌ 'the land of the dead'
[na.'de.lɔ̃]
hemòd > landowner
['χe:.mod]
Tone rules.
On a scale from 1 to 5:
As we've seen, the stressed vowel is pronounced long; if it's high, the tone is realized as a sharp rising tone:
ké 35.
If if it carries middle tone, the tone is slightly rising: 34
A middle tone before a consonant cluster becomes low, unless it's stressed: 3 > 1
A middle tone vowel following a high tone is realized slightly higher. 3 > 4
A middle tone vowel following a low tone is realized slightly lower 3 > 2
For that matter, a low tone after a high tone becomes a middle tone: 1 > 3
(A low tone before a high tone, or before stress is slightly higher 1 > 2, a high tone before a low tone is slightly lower, 5 > 4)
A high tone after a low tone becomes a middle tone 5 > 3, except if it carries the stress.
A few tone contours should make these rules more clear:
sek-ké-we-sí
2-35-4-5
mo-ló-ʌ
3-35-4
psammàdái 'he/she sent me away'
psam-mà-dá-i
2-2-35-4
hemòd
34-2
ksánùtte 's/he tries to get rival clans to cooperate'.
ksá-nùt-te
35-3-3
heàitte 'uterine sister'
he-à-it-te
3-2-34-3
