Antarian

Antarian (wāk antarihas) is an independent branch of the Maverico-Casaterran family of languages, native to Antari and neighbouring regions in Vinya. Its sole surviving member, Antarian, is the native language of most Antarians and is co-official with Anglian in Antari. The family contains other extinct languages such as Marallic, Capeatic, Cadialic, and Meyianic. The language is also spoken by minorities in other Vinyan states, where it is mostly unrecognized.

Antarian has the longest written tradition of any living Maverico-Casaterran language, having been attested more-or-less continuously for about 4,000 years on Antarian syllabary script and then the Alphabet, introduced in the 7th century BCE. Knowledge of the Antarian syllabary having gone extinct after the Alphabet's introduction, the script was rediscovered in 1784 but remained undeciphered due to its small corpus of limited subject matter. Anglian antiquarian Sir Edward Keen led the academic effort towards its decipherment in the 1890s and 1900s and conclusively demonstrated it as an archaic form of the Antarian language in 1910. It is often described as the sister to all other Maverico-Casaterran branches in view of its many archaic features.

The first millennium of the attestation of Antarian consists almost exclusively of personal names, labels, inventories, and transaction accounts. Occasionally, longer texts reflecting directions for craftsmen are found. The written record of Antarian experienced a notable enrichment under the Old Antarian Kingdom, during which literature is first set in writing, it being assumed that an oral tradition was normal both at the royal court and in communities.

History

Under the Maverico-Antarian Hypothesis, first raised by Henry Hatter, the ancestor to all Antarian languages diverged from the Proto-Maverico-Casaterran about 6,000 years ago. Two methods have been accpeted to support this date: firstly, the shared vocabulary between Proto-Antarian and other Proto-Maverico-Casaterran languages reflects a neolithic society without the ability to fashion elaborate objects from metallurgy, and secondly, assuming a constant rate of attrition, the relatively few cognate remains within the core vocabulary.

The Antarian language is customarily divided into the following phases:

• Proto-Antarian, the unattested ancestor to the Antarian family, spoken just after splitting from Proto-Maverico-Casaterran.
• Syllabary Antarian, the language attested from about 2000 BCE to 500 BCE with the syllabary script; later phases of the language reflect many features of earlier Classical Antarian, but also present are archaic set phrases.
• Classical Antarian, the lingua franca of the Old Antarian Kingdom, spoken from about 750 BCE to the start of the Common Era.
• Late Antarian, the lingua franca of the New Antarian Kingdom, spoken from the 3rd centry CE to the 10th century. Late Antarian, though attested on media and forms close to their Classical counterparts, is not a direct evolution of the Classical language and shows influence from Caditic.
• Medieval Antarian, spoken from the 10th century to the 14th century.
• Early Modern Antarian
• Modern Antarian

Grammar

The grammars of the Antarian languages are highly inflected and, owing to the family's early attestation, preserves a number of archaic Proto-Maverico-Casaterran features but correspondingly does not share in many common innovations. Due to this genetic position, Antarian has been influential in the reconstruction of Proto-Maverico-Casaterran grammar and syntax.

A common feature in all Antarian languages is ablaut or apophony, where the form of the vowel in each syllable displays gradation between zero-grade (noted in some texts as Ø), e-grade, and o-grade; ablaut is correlated but not completely determined by the position of accent, where the accented syllable is likely to have a full grade, i.e. e- or o-grade, and both are strongly related to syntax in both substantives and verbs. In ancestral PMC, most words could be analyzed into a root, suffix, and ending, or root and ending, and this is also true of Antarian, though the boundaries of each are often obscured by sound change. While the root contains the core meaning of the word and can appear in multiple parts of speech, the suffix and endings determine the latter.

The thematic vowel is present in Antarian in limited numbers. Whereas its presence or absence is a fundamental division in the conjugation and declensional paradigms in other MC langauges, the thematic vowel in Antarian is more akin to a suffix and cannot, in principle, be applied to other suffixes.

Nouns

Nouns in Syllabary Antarian decline for three numbers and nine cases, though not all permutations of number and case are morphologically distinct. The endings are as follows:

	Singular		Dual		Plural
Nominative	hner	-s/-Ø	hnere	-e	hneres	-es
Vocative	hner	-Ø			hneres	-es
Accusative	hnerəm	-m			hnerəms	-ms
Genitive	hanərus	-us	hanreh	-eh	hanərus	-us
Dative	hanərei	-ei			hanərmus	-mus
Locative	hneri	-i			hanəra	-es/-as
Instrumental	hanreh	-h
Ablative	hanərus	-us
Allative	hanəru	-u

Verbs

Verbs in Antarian are conjugated for three persons, three numbers, two voices, and four moods, agreeing with the subject of the sentence in person and number. Unlike most other MC languages, Antarian does not morphologically distinguish tense, with primary endings (associated with the present tense in most languages) conspicuously absent. There are two kinds of roots, present and perfect, which take different endings directly; present roots tend to have transitive meanings, while prefect roots intransitive meanings, but this is by no means universal. Present roots may take personal endings directly or with affixes in derivation, while the perfect roots in general may only take perfect endings. New verbs are always created as presents and never as perfects.

Present

The endings of present verbs are as follows, with ’ed- "to eat" as example:

	Sing.		Du.		Pl.
1st	’édəm	-m	dwé	-wé	dmé	-mé
2nd	’ḗts	-s	štúm	-túm	šté	-té
3rd	’ḗtt	-t	štám	-tám	dént	-ént

Perfect

The endings of perfect verbs are as follows, with kei- "to lie down (oneself)" as example:

	Sing.		Du.		Pl.
1st	kéih	-h/-a	kéiwa	-wa	kéitha	-tha
2nd	kéita	-ta	kéitha	-tha	kéih	-h/-a
3rd	kéiu	-u	kéitha	-tha	kéir	-r

See also

• Antari