Andanese - Conlang Profile	Advanced
Language Name Andanese Language Author Andrew Leventis Year Began 2002 Site Andanese Broken Link No Site Language English Site Author Andrew Leventis Language Type personal language Uniqueness See "Design Principles". Language Sources Originally set out to be a language spoken by children, I've now separated this language from my stories and made it a language for its own sake. Design Principles Inflection ... the fusional, polysynthetic kind. I want to make it so that everything can be expressed as one word and that one word functions like every other word. The flip side of this is that non-compound words can be reanalyzed as compounds and taken apart. For me, mathematics offers the ultimate system of generating inflection. Infinity ... As often as possible, word classes and methods of word formation should not be closed, but always be active. For example, I say that I have 11 cases, but really those 11 are just the most convenient ones, and any verb listed in the Zxez Dictionary can be suffixed to a noun and used as a case if it is declined according to the rules required by that noun. The Zxez dictionary itself is an example of how expandable the language is; it consists entirely of foreign words. Optionality ... As much as possible, grammatical features should be optional and there should be at least one alternative way to say something. So I always have lots of synonyms, and right now I even have two genitive cases, with no difference between them other than the ability to choose which ever one sounds better for a particular word or phrase. No Inherent Parts of Speech ... There should be no words that are inherently verbs, nouns, or some other part of speech. Part of speech is determined entirely by morphology and word order. Some verbs and nouns can use the bare stem, but that bare stem by itself is not a verb or noun. Verbs have conjugations of which the noun is just one tense; nouns have declensions of which the verb is just one case. Tolerance ... Andanese can read anything; there are no phonotactics. And there are no meaningless syllable sequences; all the word space is occupied. Even if you try to break the system, it will always be able to produce some meaningful sentence. Thus even randomly generated binary text can be read in Andanese. It is not impossible or even unusual to have several of the same letter in a row. For example, aaaaaaaapa means "tree nursery"; lalalalalalalalala (consisting of the letter la nine times) means "children's art". Sandhi and stress accent patterns distinguish the morpheme boundaries and thus make it possible for new words to occupy word space that is already meaningful. Differentiability ... Any part of speech can be converted into any other part of speech. This means that although there are functional parts of speech, these categories all overlap completely and thus contain each other. Thus verbs are a subset of nouns, since all verbs can serve as nouns; but nouns are a subset of verbs, because all nouns can serve as verbs. The parts of speech that convert parts of speech to other parts of speech are called operands; verbs are derived from them by a certain operand. Timelessness ... Andanese has no history; it has no parent languages and no daughter languages. Throughout time, words have come into and out of use in the language, but the derivational processes of the language ensure that no critical changes will ever occur. Every word lasts forever, even though it may go in and out of fashion. Circular etymologies exist, such as kapa "thunderstorm", a phonologically reduced form of kakapama "making a thunderous noise", from ka + kapa + ma. (These examples show phonologically reduced forms, which is a rare way of deriving words, and not a historical sound change.) Interest Of Others I've gotten a few compliments on it, which really makes me feel happy. Dictionary Yes Etymologies No Grammar No Sample Texts No Unique Script Yes Primer No Babel Text No Lexicon Size 2,000 Submitted By NA Date Submitted Monday, March 22, 2004 Updated By Andrew Leventis Date Edited Saturday, September 04, 2004 Date To Headline Saturday, September 18, 2004 < Andal, languages of  Andanese  An'dorian >
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