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The language of the Teonim of Teon, sometimes Teonea (from Teon + hea, "country, land"), a region that surfaces and submerges most often within the Black Sea, sometimes the Caspian. It is surmised that the Teonim are perhaps from the Caucasus, or--given their vanishing propensities, their scant but bizarre appearances in our history--from somewhere else entirely. They are a little different from us. They have twelve fingers and twelve toes and a base-twenty-four system of numbers. Eyecolor expresses a kind of "blush" response. They are ingenious at hiding these features from us. Otherwise, they seem entirely human. They are dressed, in my wallpaper decoration, in traditional seventeenth-century formal attire. (Pictured is an aristocratic couple engaged to be married.) Some etymologists surmise that the very name Teon may be related to its common verb teoned, "to run, flee"--describing a place of refuge, a place to run to; or a place that is itself in flight. The winged, rampant (or should I say volant) feline is its favorite mascot.
A formal language for written and declaimed use. Informal Teonaht has many dialectical features, abbreviations, truncations, and idioms, but I have not yet started recording these. The language I've presented here is "received standard." What you would find in a newspaper.
NOT an auxiliary language like Esperanto; not an "ideal" language; not a language that corrects the errors of other languages, or makes reparations in the area of gender or class, or which attempts to smooth out spelling conventions; it is not a "logical" language; it is not devoted to making its grammar easy or clear or commonsensical, although it does have certain efficiencies. While it evolved pretty much on its own, it shows clear influence by Latin, German, Welsh, Old Norse, Old Irish, Old English, Hebrew, Sumerian, and, yes, modern English--one of the strangest of the existing natural languages.
NOT a finished language; not a static language. While its basic structure has been set for years, now, it is always in a state of flux, like a real language--only with an evolution that has been sped up. Also, it will take me more than a summer to get all its grammar and vocabulary documented on line. And even that may change.
Possibly Indo-European. There are many Indo-European words in its lexicon, and its structure follows some typical IE patterns described below; but there are also a vast number of unattested words and grammatical developments that are unique to Teonaht.
Zero-copula in the present tense.
OSV, occasionally SOV. An "object-initial" language is the rarest of language types. Teonaht is strict about the subject's position, especially if a pronoun, in preceding the verb, but it typically heads the sentence with the object, a feature that may have been enforced literarily. It often exhibits the more common SOV structure by putting the nominative first when focussed, but then "echoing" it with the subject pronoun before the verb. The verb is always final in main clauses.
Both head initial AND final. Adjectives generally follow the noun whereas prepositions precede it, a development you find in Latin and French (originally SOV like most IE languages). Teonaht pays very little attention to the Greenburgian rules about placement of adjectives and postpositions in OV languages. There is quite a bit of option whether you precede or follow the noun with plural and possessive articles and conjunctions. You can say either hman uo deygrin, "bread and butter," or hman deygrinjo, "bread butter and." A lot of syntactic decisions in Teonaht are made on the basis of rhythm and rhetoric. Its speakers care what "sounds good."
Largely analytic: as in English, the majority of nouns, with the exception of the Nenddeylyt nouns which show accusative marking, have little or no case inflection, but the pronouns do. Syntax, prepositions, and affixes or clitics make the functions of words unambiguous. Likewise, the majority of verbs do not inflect, but express tense and aspect through a variety of what I call "moveable clitics" which can detach from the end of the verb and reattach to the beginning of the pronoun. Teonaht likes the verb to be final, and absolute in form.
Exhibiting what I call "The Law of Detachability," which allows clitics to do what I describe above: this is probably Teonaht's most distinctive feature, enabling suffixes to "detach" from the end of words and "prefix" to the beginning of those or other words. This capacity is most noticeable in the formation of tense marking: in main clauses, Teonaht prefers to remove the tense and aspect suffixes and prefix them to the preceding pronoun: ry ennyvel, "I ate" becomes elry ennyve. Gerald Koenig of the New Generation Language Project was impressed enough with this feature that he asked me if he could borrow it for NGL.
Largely morphologically accusative. Like most other IE languages, Teonaht makes a clear distinction between the nominative and the accusative/dative, i.e., between the subject, whether agent or participant, and the object and oblique objects, especially in the dual case system of its pronouns.
A "Split Nominative" with some active tendencies. Teonaht distinguishes between two types of nominative, which I am here designating as "agent" (A) and "experiencer," (E); the symbol that Dixon and other linguists use to designate "experiencer" or "participant" is (S), but since this universally represents the intransitive subject, I've chosen (E) instead, since experiencers are often transitive subjects as well as intransitive: the agent (A) and the "experiencer" or non-agent (E) express volition and non-volition respectively (rather than transitivity and non-transitivity). In other words, the subject that shows volitional, agentive action is marked differently from the subject that shows little volition and agency, but rather experience or "quality"--a semantic feature that requires marking in its verbs, its fronted tense particles, and its articles, but NOT its pronouns. Thus Teonaht can identify subjects of volitional intransitives as agents-- "the man (A) walks"--and subjects of non-volitional transitives as participants--"the girl (E) heard the sound". I have also invented my own terminology for the categorization of these verbs: vt for "volitional transitive"; vi for "volitional intransitive" (sometimes called the "unergative"); ni for "nonvolitional intransitive"; nt for "nonvolitional transitive"; and av for "ambivolitional"--a verb that can change its valency as either volitional or non-volitional, transitive or intransitive. Teonaht does not normally allow the patient (P), or what I prefer to call the object (O), to function in the participant role (as in ergative languages), which is why I am tentatively calling it an active accusative language with a split-nominative. There is only one instance which violates this rule: the "medio-passive" (or "subject-patient construct) in which the "subject" of the verb in the middle voice gets objective (or patientive) marking. This may be a holdover from an old ergative system, or a borrowing, or an over correction.
It may help to examine the terminology supplied by older Teonaht grammarians: there is always one term for the object (and it changes from grammarian to grammarian), but two terms for the subject Euab, or "self": Pelme, or "mind/intention," and Eskkoat, or "shadow," "silhouette." It is as if the Agent is seen as the thinking, intending subject and the Participant as the shadow of the self, perhaps even not the self. Inanimate things can govern transitive verbs, but they are usually marked as Participants. "Object" is usually termed Ouar, "other," and very often Tsorel, the archaic word for "city" (sometimes Mûndya or Nirhhterli, "world"). It is entirely typical of the early Teonaht grammarians to name the parts of speech after the parts of an inhabitable structure, for they saw language to be a means of moving through space, categorizing it, living in it, making it coherent.
Sally Caves
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