Old Adzamian
Old Adzamian | |
---|---|
Adsamotac | |
Pronunciation | [ɐdsɐmʌtɐc] |
Region | Ekuosia |
Language family | Ekuo-Lahiri
|
Writing system | Adzamic |
Official status | |
Official language in | Adzamic Empire, Holy Adzamian Empire |
CWS code | AZM |
Old Adzamian, also known as Old Adzamasi, Old Adzamic, Imperial Adzamian, or simply Adzamian, was the official language and lingua franca of the Adzamic Empire and Holy Adzamian Empire, which ruled over vast swathes of Baredina for nearly a thousand years, ending in the 900s CE. As a result, Adzamian has left its impression in the modern cultures of much of western Ekuosia, eastern Puzimm, and central Baredina through daughters, creoles, and loanwords. At its height, Adzamian had over 20 million native speakers and millions more second-language speakers. The language's extinction is historically marked coincidentally with the fall of the Holy Adzamian Empire in 923, at which point it developed into Early Modern Adzamasi. The Adzamasi language is considered its 'true' descendant, although Dzimur and other Adzamian languages actually have more speakers.
Classification
The language was part of the Adzo-Neviric branch of the Ekuo-Lahiri languages, one of the most widely-spoken language families on Sahar.
History
Although it has been extinct for over a millennia, Old Adzamian is very well-attested from a great number of surviving papyrus scrolls and other written sources from the era. It was spoken broadly throughout the Adzamic Empires, where it functioned as the language of administration and intercultural trade and exchange, bringing about the extinction of some of the smaller language groups it encountered.
Phonology
Phonemes
Labial | Dental | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Uvular | Glottal | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Nasal | m | n | |||||
Plosive | b | t t' d | c c' ɟ | k k' | q q' | ||
Fricative | f | θ | s | ʃ | x | χ | h |
Approximant | l | j | w |
Front | Central | Back | |
---|---|---|---|
Close | i: ɪ | y: ʏ | u: ʊ |
Mid | e: ɛ | ø: œ | o: ʌ |
Open | ɐ | ɑ: |
Phonotactics
Adzamian had fairly strict phonotactic rules, allowing a maximal syllable of CVCC.
Morphology and syntax
Animacy and Nominal morphology
As is characteristic of Adzo-Lahiri languages, Adzamian had a robust animacy hierarchy which influence the inflectional paradigms of nouns, their associated pronouns, and their location and assumed role within a sentence.
Proximitiy and Verbal morphology
The primary deixis in Adzo-Neviric languages is locational, not temporal; verbs inflected for proximal, medial, and distal in forward and backward planes. There were no true tenses, but such information could be conveyed by the use of temporal adverbs.