Andaro-Yenmic Languages

The Andaro-Yenmic languages are among my younger projects, and with only one language developed to a usable degree perhaps also the most incomplete (save perhaps for Volsic). Consequently short will their presentation on this page have to be, as I would rather carry on with the work than write about what has yet to be done.

Branches and Languages

• Proto-Andaro-Yenmic
  • Proto-Yenmic
    • Common Erenic
      • Erenic Dialects
    • Old Yashamian
      • Middle Yashamian
        • New Yashamian
  • Proto-Andarian
    • [Planned Branch of ~10 languages]
    • Common Geranian
      • Old Kalparian
        • Kalparian
      • Old Hajan
        • Middle Hajan
          • New Hajan
          • Venyittan
        • Noridic

Notes

History

The Andaro-Yenmic languages presumably originate in the mountain valleys south of Mt. Andaron and the Pass of Yan, not far from the Besokan Valley and the urheimat of the Besokians; for this and many other reasons, they have often been presumed to descend from a common ancestor or be otherwise not too distantly related. Their branches split up early, the Andarians migrating west and becoming the first to subdue most of the western Reknaya. Their kingdoms persisted until the expansion of the Kattasi drove them even further west, down into the plains of Geran, but even there, they could not remain, and when the Kattasi kept expanding and the ancestors of the Aribelians came up from the south, they were pushed back further to the shores of the western sea, forming states in the later Hajalad, on the Norides, and north into the valley of the River Kalpa. Dwelling on its banks and the shores of its estuary, the most prominent of their nations were the Kalparians, known for their naval prowess and their unwillingness to bend the knee to anyone not of their own kin. Under Lécaronian rule, they were the first to revive their language, which had been forbidden by the Olgish invaders, and among the first to in a series of rebellions win their freedom. The Yenmians remained closer to their place of origin, forming the legendary civilization of Tarkar Yenme (a Kattasi name, the endonym is lost). Centred on a plateau city east of Mt. Andaron, it soon expanded north into Celsond, then land of the Volsic peoples. After the fall of Yenme, much of its population remained in Celsond, becoming the ancestors of the Erenic tribes, whose languages would many centuries later form the Celsond Sprachbund with the (Ortûlékian) Celdic Dialects.

Structure

Andaro-Yenmic morphology is predominantly agglutinating, focussing on the coding of case and number on nouns. A curious feature shared by all Andarian languages, and presumably the Yenmic languages before contact with Volsic and/or Celdic, is the seeming absence of verbs, not unlike the near-complete indifference to lexical categories found in Besokian languages, one of the many indications of genetic relations between the two. Sentences are usually analysed as possessing a null-copula, with the semantic predicate role most commonly fulfilled by a noun denoting an action or a process, as in Kal. Metila pepan. ‘Any day [is] their entrance.’ i. e. ‘They might come any day.’