Atheinən language: Difference between revisions

For approximately 200 years, Azkali to some degree was spoken across [[Mallia]]. With the onset of the 1978 Azkali Civil War, 1980 Azkali Plague, and subsequent conflicts that followed, some ten million Azkalis over the course of several years fled Azkali. Of that ten million, approximately one and a half million fled to Mallia. According to some surveys during the refugee crisis, up to 100,000 who fled to Mallia had some knowledge of Mallian, though few were fluent and none were native speakers. The contact between Azkali speakers and Mallian speakers resulted gradually in the creation of hundreds of pidgin languages as Azkali speakers settled in Mallia, each spoken by seperate communities, and all mostly mutually intelligable. Over the next fourty years, the interaction between pidgin speakers, Mallian speakers, and Azkali speakers resulted in the simultaneous merging and evolution of these languages into Atheinən, developing a consistent character by around 2010.

During its evolution, Atheinən was the subject of widespread linguistic interest, being one of the only modern examples of an evolution of a creole between two languages, and possibly the sole example of one that was actively documented and recorded as it occured.  

The official status of Atheinən is unclear by most linguists. According to [[Nakoi Riku]], as contact between Azkali refugees and Mallians occured, Atheinən as it was know then was considered a number of pidgin languages, each being spoken by a distinct number of Azkalis. As it evolved, however, contact between speakers of the pidgin languages occured, simultaneously with Mallian speakers. As a result, the pidgin languages appeared to merged into several dialects of a distinct Atheinən language. However, this timeline is disputed by a number of linguists. [[Nakoi Riku]] classified Atheinən in her paper ''[[On the Atheinən Creole|On the Atheinən Creole, its Grammar, Phonology, and Evolution]]'' as a creole language, with Mallian as the lexifier, but with heavy lexical influence by Azkali. In a rebuttal published by [[Redho Tsalirricha]], Atheinən was classified as a mixed language. According to the author, <blockquote>''"''many Azkali refugees at that time were fluent to some degree in Mallian, and or subsequently learned, or attempted to learn that language. However, the differences grammatically speaking between Azkali and Mallian resulted in the mapping [sic] of Azkali grammar onto Mallian vocabulary. (...) a large amount of common vocabulary was loaned from Azkali, which they were fluent in, to the language that would become Atheinən. Due to the amount of people who would go on to have children who spoke Atheinən, who were also fluent in Mallian, it would be classified as [a] mixed language [sic]."</blockquote>

|'''b'''

|'''ts'''

! rowspan="2" |Fricative

/θ~d/

/ʁ~ʀ̥~ɹ~ɾ/

Atheinən is highly analytical. In most dialects, with the exception of three verbs - ''to be, to be at,'' and ''to have'', verbs are not conjugated at all. With the exception of pronouns, no nouns are overtly inflected for case, instead relying on word order and particles conveying case-like information. Atheinən's word order, like both of its parents languages, is subject-verb-object, however in some cases it can be shifted for context, emphasis, etc.

 

 

This section will not provide a full overview of Atheinən grammar, instead providing the basics of its grammar.

 

The third person neutral ergative singular pronoun ''ze'' is also used as a definite article.

Neither pronouns or nouns in Atheinən are inflected for number, though there exists ways to specify number by using particles. By default, a noun is assumed to be singular. The particle ''che'' is used to specify a paucal number - i.e a small amount of the noun. The particle ''mən'' is used to specify a plural number. An example of this using the noun ''pazeri'', meaning a farm.

!Atheinən

|pazeri ''che''

|-

Verbs are not conjugated; instead, particles are used in place of what would be conjugated onto the verb in a more synthetic language.