Re: Old Languages

John Cowan eleca:

> Well, sort of.  Sanskrit is really a kind of offshoot from the main line
> that leads to the Neo-Indic languages, just as the Romance langs
> aren't direct descendants of Classical Latin.
And now, I present the language I've been working on for about a month or
so: Shanstanya.

Shanstanya is another language spoken in Telmona, in the south-west of the
Decstrandan subcontinent. A groups of Sanskrit-speaking Indians came to
Telmona and founded Candrstha:nam "the Land of the Moon". Their language
developed in a very different way to the Indian languages, possibly due to
the lack of Dravidian presence in Telmona (and my lack of knowledge about
Indian historical linguistics).

It has lost the retroflex/dental and the palatal/velar distinctions, and
most of the voiced aspirates have become fricatives (yes, this was inspired
by Andrew's comment a while ago).

Shanstanya does not posess gramattical gender, it distinguishes four cases
(nominative, instrumental, locative and genitive) and two numbers. Verbally,
there are only four tenses- present, past, imperfect and future and there is
only the indicative mood. Auxiliaries such as warton (f. vartate) and iston
(f. stha) are used to indicate other nuances.

It is written in a fully alphabetic script, derived from Brahmi, named
Licityan.

Some samples, when I have more vocab, wil be posted soon.

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