Gondolan (Gändölansch)

[Parlox]

I hadn't done any conlanging in the past two years, although I've tried a dozen times to get back into it. Eventually I managed to work up to some intensive conlanging with a new project, Gändölansch. This has been my primary project for about a month or so, but it's already farther along than any of my old conlangs.

Gändölansch is a highly fusional language with SVO word order, ergative-absolutive (morphological) alignment, four speech registers, a complicated animacy hierarchy, and no dedicated adjectives and few dedicated adverbs.

Introduction
The Gondolans
The Gondolans first settled in the Safyln river valley and the north coast of the Oçodnes (amazon) sea somewhere around the year 120 B.C, quickly becoming a large minority in competition with the Pian people. Their language would be heavily influenced by the languages of the surrounding area, in particular Pianese.

Gondola (The land of the gondolans) would eventually come to encompass much of the Oçodnes sea, stretching as far as Ledvulos (Panama) and the eastern jungles (Central Brazil). Their empire would reign for 600 years before their inevitable collapse. In their glory days they would come to be the greatest state that Dêldas (South America) had ever seen.

In the modern day a small remnant of the once great Gondola survives, the Western Gondolan Empire. It's territory only covers a twelfth of Old Gondola's maximum extant, but has the best trained army in Dêldas, and probably the world. The WGE still commands substantial influence, despite it's puny size, among the modern descendant states.

The Language
Gondolan is an ergative-absolutive language. It displays highly fusional tendencies, a largely SVO word order, four speech registers, a complicated animacy hierarchy, and no dedicated adjectives and few dedicated adverbs.

Phonology
Consonants
/m n ŋ/ m n ng
/p b t d k g/ p b t d k g
/t͡ʃ d͡ʒ/ (s)ch gh
/s z ʃ/ s-c z sh
/f v θ ð ʁ h/ f v th dh j h
/ɹ̠ j ʀ ʀʲ/ r y ç çy
/l/ l

Lateral uvular trills can be seen in some western dialects and in the religious register.

Gändölansch has eight places of articulation, bilabial, dental, alveolar, post-alveolar, palatal, velar, uvular, and glottal. And seven manners of articulation, nasal, plosive, sibilant fricative, non-sibilant fricative, approximant, trill, and lateral approximate.

Unvoiced stops become their non-sibilant fricative equivalent word finally.
p > ɸ
t > θ̠
k > x
Although this doesn’t happen if the normally affected stop has a consonant before it, and is often interrupted if a previous word in the sentence also has a word final unvoiced stop that has a consonant before it. So…
Ag pont uruk /ag pont uɹ̠uk/, where otherwise if this allophony took place in any condition it would be /ag ponθ̠ uɹ̠ux/.

v > w word initially and after stops.
/l/ becomes /ɮ/ when paired with a voiced plosive or when a front vowel proceeds it.
/l/ becomes /ʟ/ syllable finally

k > ʔ syllable finally in most western dialects.

Any set word can only have one type of nasal consonant within it. This often crosses word boundaries. When a nasal combination breaks this rule, the preceding nasal is deleted.

Vowels
Gondolan’s vowel inventory is rather sizable, with every “radical” position vowel and a series of rounded front vowels, along with the extremely rare /ä/

/i u̜/ i u
/e ø o̜/ e ë o
/ɛ œ ə ʌ/ ê ü ö œ
/a ä ɑ/ a æ ä

Gondolan’s vowels are very lacking in allophony, with one of the only allophones being the reduction of /i/ to /ɪ/ before and after /j/.

Vowels lengthen before a liquid consonant or /h/.

Gondolan undergoes a form of weak top/bottom vowel harmony where vowels of upper "radical" position can only pair with other upper radicals and mid-vowels, and vice-versa. This is represented in both noun and verb inflection.

Most vowel diphthongs are permitted where they follow harmony rules, but tend to start with a vowel of a "radical" position, those being /i u a ɑ/.

Syllable Structure
The maximum permitted syllable is CFVFC, where F is any fricative, approximate, or trill. Every syllable must have a vowel nucleus.

Stress
In Gondolan, stress falls on the final syllable of a word if it ends in a vowel, but otherwise stress falls on the penultimate syllable.

“Complex Verbs” adopted from Pian always have their first syllable stressed in most dialects, unless it ends in /o/, then the final syllable is stressed. Note that some dialects, in particular the “capital” dialect treat complex verbs like any other verb in relation to stress.

[eldin raigmore]

approximate, trill, and lateral approximate.

You mean approximant,
rather than approximate.

[Parlox]

Gondolans orthography has gone through a bit of a reform, so I edited my initial post to represent that.

Also I'm working on a post about noun inflection, and it should be up soon. My posts here will be pretty sporadic and scatter-brained, and I'll mostly just talk about what's on my mind at the time.