EDIT: now with a Table of Contents:
1. Geography
2. Seasons and Safety
3. Nominal Declension
4. Verbs and Pronouns
5. The Nine Arts
Ankoseiwas /anko‘sewas/ "our language" is the literary dialect of the archipelago of Akotvyah, the Spice Islands (native Onkĩlemowas), somewhat south of Salvi.
Geography and culture are as follows:
- The climate is tropical, with over 2 metres of rainfall a year and a great deal of sunshine whenever it isn't pouring cats and dogs. There is much in the way of jungle cover on the islands; each community is relatively isolated from one another except by sea trade, or jungle tracks across the individual islands.
- Technology is fairly low-level, with florin pigs being the only real livestock in constant use and rice paddies taking up much of the land. There is brass and bronze made on the islands, and jade is traded with empires to the south (Hercua and Malehi) while the Salvians to the north are more interested in the cultural knickknacks (better value for magic).
- Clothes are unsurprisingly minimal in these lands.
- The natives (internationally the Keepers, locally Onkẽye) make some of the best traders on this side of the globe. This is not only due to a long history of spice cultivation (and an equally long tradition of haggling), but because the Keeper's Gift is the ability to store objects in the spirit world around one's person and carry them there in stasis for a time.
- Rulers on the islands are all "clones" (atene) of individual "clone-masters" (hasoya, singular ahoya), who are taught the necessary spell in a ritual that binds their collective intelligence together with any copy they pull out of the Deep.
- There is currently a four-way cultural split in the archipelago. One group wishes to remain "untouched" (hidolo) by the outside world and keep to tradition, a second wants to ally the lands with the Dragon Emperor in Malehi as a unified if subservient client state, a third wants to see about introducing Salvian government to the area (the Speaking Soul is strong among the Yehawandi, enough to guarantee even a full-fledged Keeper a chance to power up the amulets the Salvians trade), and a fourth wants to turn the whole island into a diocese of Hercua.
- The current language is based on the dialect spoken on the island of Aheiwa (from Hermaphroditic Ahewa "river-land"), whose ahoya, Kiponda XVI, holds a record number of forty-seven different postings on eleven islands, and is of the hidolo faction. This may change, however. (It's in your best interest to learn at least two other dialects, plus the dialect of the current ahoya and possibly a Salvian language.)
- The local language is written in a number of different scripts, depending on who's in charge at the moment; there are thus variations on the dialects in the Hercuan alphabet, the Malehinese Commoner Syllabary, and Salvian hieroglyphs, each of which has its own importance in society.
- Consonants: p b m w t d s n l j <y> k h
- Vowels: i ĩ e <ei> ẽ <ẽi> Ɛɛ <e> ɛ̃ <ẽ> o∼u <o> õ∼ũ <o> a ã
- Phonotactics: CV(s,n) (n shifts to m before p/b/m); nasal vowels occur where older Vs/Vn occurred next to a consonant that it couldn't occur alongside (next to anything except a stop or a nasal); word length is 1-4 syllables, with 2-3 being the default
- Tripartite alignment, comment-topic/verb-experiencer-subject-object sentence structure, non-topical/topical person/animate/inanimate topicality hierarchy
- Nouns can be masculine, feminine, animate, or inanimate, and can have a default of singular (alternative form plural) or mass (alternative form count); generally these additional features are marked by
- Verbs have only perfective and imperfective forms, with particles added to signify time periods, but also conjugate for transitive, intransitive, causative, reflexive, and passive
- Adjectives are formed as verbs
