Introduction

This grammar is the result of five years of study, conducted among the feayr pack at Ushilshiváshinari (located on the south coast of Feayra, at the northern extreme of Suthániìlmùi Bay) from the year 6352 to 6357 d.s. (by the Aetherean Regnatorial Calendar). It is the first effort of its kind to provide a working description of a language spoken north of the Brumese border.

I extend deepest thanks to my second family at the waterfall; without the gallant efforts of my teachers Thalúruùn and Ashíne, the farsightedness of kalvái Olúohaì, and the friendship (and frequent forgivenesses) of the pack entire, this study would not have been possible.

I regret that as of this writing, this study is in many ways incomplete. Coming to Ushilshiváshinari as I did, with no prior exposure to the language and no other literature to fall back on, my efforts have been focussed almost entirely on simply understanding and documenting the language of the pack there. As such, I have only been able to collect meager crosslinguistic data to inform diachronic reconstructions, and a general survey of the languages of the Far North is still a distant dream.

However, I believe the material provided herein serves a powerful purpose, establishing Feayran speech as much more than the prattling of savages as many southern readers of Hamilaan's journals are prone to believe. It is my hope that this work will open the doors to a broader curiosity among academics in the south, considering the northern shifters not as exotic creatures to be captured and displayed, but as a people--a culture to be respected, preserved, investigated, and learned from.

In this first section, I shall discuss some of the ethnographic aspects of the feayr (or at least, those of the pack at Ushilshiváshinari) that shall prove most critical to a working understanding of the language. Later sections will discuss the phonology, morphology, syntax, and pragmatics themselves.

History of the Region

The inhabitants of Ushilshiváshinari are descended from the first documented feayr to be contacted by southern explorers; Etevyn Hamilaan, chartered for exploration into the north by the Thromese king Järkkymon, set foot on the shore of Suthániìlmùi Bay in the early spring of 6084. He spent a grand total of 43 days on Feayran soil, 22 of them with the feayr at Ushilshiváshinari, with the remaining time spent on a headstrong cartographical excursion further inland which left his men sick and frostbitten. His journal, condemning the feayr as savage brutes and the land as one of the Seven Gates, spared the north further molestation apart from occasional raids by Talambrian slavers seeking exotic merchandise.

The pack at Ushilshiváshinari has changed little since Hamilaan's landing. The feayr hold a tremendous attachment to the place of their birth, and in my investigation of them I was often surprised by how firmly the land bound them, not only in place but in time. I found little evidence in the oral tradition that the pack had moved from Ushilshiváshinari in several hundred years.

Unfortunately, Hamilaan's transcription of native words in his journal is woefully imprecise, offering little hard evidence for linguistic comparison; thus, I am unable to speculate about the degree to which the language has changed since that time. However, if the feayr's oral tradition is as powerful as I suspect it to be, the language may have remained surprisingly static over the generations.

Self-Referents

The terms feayr, Feayra, and Feayran were all coined in Hamilaan's journal. The internal name for the feayr species is kimáaihaìanitu, meaning "moon's children," and the language's endonym is Lóahimàeshte, or "Word of our kin."

Ethnographic Sketch

The feayr at Ushilshiváshinari are a highly territorial community of hunter-gatherers. Their community unit or váiruù (termed "pack" by Hamilaan) consists of 27 members at the time of this writing, which, as I gather from occasional inter-pack festivals, is quite a respectable number. Socially, I am told, they are usually matriarchal, although my pack's chief (or kalvái) Olúohaì is an exception to this rule. The pack is not very specialized; mature members usually alternate between days spent hunting and days spent caring for young.

Cosmologically, the feayr follow a kind of animism, believing that spirit is transmitted via water through all living things and that consumption of a living thing entails absorption of its soul. Much of their culture and tradition is occupied by showing proper respect to the spirits of their prey and their territory in order to avoid incurring their wrath by insulting them. My limited contact with members of other packs has suggested that these elements are fairly consistent in the broader region around Suthániìlmùi Bay.

Physiological Considerations

As a species, the feayr are physiologically distinct from humans in a number of ways which have considerable impacts on their language--here I discuss the more crucial of these differences.

Shapeshifting

The feayr possess an innate ability to change at will between a humanoid and canine shape. With further practice, they can learn to take the forms of other animals as well. (It is rare, but not unheard of, for handicapped children to be born without this capability--my hosts assumed I was one such individual.) This ability manifests linguistically in verbalizing derivational systems for animal terms, usage of an equative case, and the absence of feayr/non-feayr grammatical distinctions.

Dichromatism

The feayr are dichromats; whereas human retinas have three types of color receptors, feayr retinas appear to have only two. This was a source of some confusion, but after a variety of tests which my consultants found perfectly bizarre, I am fairly confident in my conclusion that the feayr not only conflate red and yellow under a single color term, but are actually incapable of distinguishing between them. I believe this accounts in part for the general restriction of Feayran color terms, and more broadly, the fact that the language caters less to vision than to the other senses.

Smell

Unlike their sense of sight, the feayr's sense of smell, both in their canine and humanoid shapes, is far more acute than that of a human. This is most apparent in the language's wide array of terms for various smells, as well as its noun class system.

Stance

"Stance," a paradigm akin to politeness register in other languages, is one of the most-marked categories in Feayran. It derives from an omnipresent cultural perception of the ever-changing social hierarchy within the pack; a similar system appears to exist in all the other feayran languages I had contact with during my study.

Major Stances: Leading and Following

The vast majority of social interactions are colored by two stances: vùurái, or "leading" stance, and kìiráu, or "following" stance. It is important to note that two conversers will never use the same major stance simultaneously--one leads, and the other follows.

In some relationships, stances are static. When elders speak with children, the former is always leading while the latter is always following; similar customs hold for interactions between teacher and student, kalvái and pack member, etc.

However, in circumstances where there is no obvious disparity of rank, the leading/following frame becomes much more flexible. Stance is then determined by an intricate system of criteria which are environmentally and conversationally dependent. Thus, throughout the course of a conversation, speakers may exchange stance roles multiple times. Some criteria for determining stance roles in the absence of rank differences include:

Expertise. A speaker may assume leading stance if she has more experience or skill in the topic of conversation.
Territorial claim. If the conversation is taking place in one of the interlocutors' homes, that individual usually takes leading stance. Territorial claims can be subtler than overt ownership; e.g., if a number of individuals meet at a neutral location, the first to arrive usually holds a weak territorial claim, though this effect fades as the conversation continues.
Assistance. When one speaker asks another for help, the petitioner usually takes the following stance.
Pragmatic Focus. Stance switching can also be used as a cue for turn-taking in discourse. Leading stance is typically ceded to the speaker who is providing the driving force of the conversation. Leading-stance speakers will switch to following stance as a signal to their audience that they have finished what they wished to say and are relinquishing pragmatic focus to someone else.

Minor Stances: Romantic, Companion, and Challenging

I also documented usage of three other stances, although these occurred in very restrictive circumstances, and my consultants refused to use them during elicitation sessions. Thus, my data regarding them is limited. I present them here in order of usage frequency, with Romantic being the most attested, Companion the least. In all the instances I recorded, whenever one speaker adopted one of these stances, the other would match.

Romantic stance, áivuìal, appears to be used exclusively within mated pairs.

Challenging stance, káurhr, is taken when two individuals attempt to assume leading stance and both refuse to back down to following stance. In all the instances I observed, the usage of challenging stance was not prolonged and promptly degraded into some form of altercation to decide dominance.

Companion stance, elèeshái, is the least attested stance in my dataset, so I am reticent to make too many strong claims about its significance. From what I can tell, it implies a very deep degree of friendship, intimacy, and trust between speakers.

Pseudo-stance: Inanimate References

The inanimate stance is a "pseudo-stance" in that it can never be assumed by the speaker or audience. Instead, I use the "inanimate stance" to cover the class of inflections used to refer to third-party inanimate objects, to which the speaker has no stance.

In regard to location, there is an interesting interplay between the inanimate and following stances. Inanimate stance is used to refer to particular small-scale locales, such as a particular clearing, tree, or patch of dirt. On the other hand, following stance is used to refer to large-scale locales such as plains, lakes, forests, and territories.

Additionally, following stance may be substituted for inanimate stance as a personifying device when referring to natural phenomena.