Sisaidian Language

**Sisaidian** (Hoibį́wah/海邊話), sometimes also known as Sísáidwah (斯㴓地話) or Xerésírdípa, is a language spoken in the Isles of Pwek. It is a local dialect of Yue Chinese in the area that derives from Cantonese. The language obtained many loanwords from other languages, and have been affected by multiple sound changes. In addition, Sisaidian is most commonly written with the Latin Alphabet instead of Chinese Characters like in Cantonese. This made Sisaidian quite different from Cantonese superficially.

## Relationship with Other Languages

Sisaidian is a Sinitic language belonging to the Yue branch. It is a descendent of the Cantonese language. Despite being a close relative with Hong Kong Cantonese, it had retained several features of older Cantonese, making it slightly different in phonology. Considering the fact that Sisaidian grammar has also diverged from that of Cantonese, the mutual intelligibility between Sisaidian and Hong Kong Cantonese might only be about 50 to 75%.

Although unrelated to other languages in the Isles of Pwek, contacts with other languages has brought many loanwords into Sisaidian, especially from English. This has also impacted the grammar of Sisaidian, such as the plural form of nouns, which derives from the English plurals, and is absent in Cantonese.

## Phonology

As with most Sinitic languages, the phonology of Sisaidian is often analyzed as 3 parts: initials, finals and tones. Being a descendent of Cantonese, the phonology of Sisaidian is mostly similar to that of Cantonese, though it is considered less restricted in terms of its limitations on what phonemes are allowed.

### Initials

Instead of the aspiration contrasts of Standard Cantonese in stop consonants, it is more common in Sisaidian to have contrasts between voiced and unvoiced consonants. Sisaidian also allows consonant clusters in initials, a rarity within modern members of the sinitic family. Most consonant clusters observed contains either a stop or a fricative as the first element, and an approximant or a nasal consonant as the second element. These usually are the result of contraction of multisyllabic phrases into a single syllable, but they might also be the result of loanwords from other languages. Words containing the initial /kw/ and /ɡw/ might also be inherited from Cantonese /kʷʰ/ and /kʷ/ respectively.

The sound /ɹ/ and /v/ are not native to Sisaidian and almost exclusively occurs in loanwords.

### Finals

Finals can be further divided into vowels and codas.

#### Vowels

1Sometimes analyzed as [o].

There are 8 phonemic vowels [i y ɛ œ ɐ a ɔ u] in the Sisaidian language. All but 3 of them have shorter versions [ɪ e ɵ o ʊ] as allophones, which occurs before some codas. This adds up to a total of 13 vowels.

Despite listed above as short and long versions of the same vowel, [ɐ] and [a] are phonemically distinct. [ɐ] only occurs as a short vowel, and [a] only occurs as a long vowel. Both vowels can occur with and without any codas.

Sisaidian also has syllabic consonants as finals [m̩ ŋ̍ z̩]. These can either occur as a syllable themselves or with an initial at the front. Sisaidian vowels can also be nasalized.

#### Codas

Codas
 Unrounded
 Semivowel
 Nasal
 Fricative

Sisaidian only allows a selection of consonants and semivowels at the coda section of its syllables. The semivowel [y̑] is an allophone of [i̯] after rounded vowels. While it preserved the labial codas [m p̚] and the velar nasal coda [ŋ] from Cantonese, it lost the alveolar nasal coda [n], which became the nasal vowels in Sisaidian. The alveolar stop coda [t̚] and the velar stop coda [k̚] have merged and moved backwards in Sisaidian, becoming a glottal stop [ʔ]. However, their spelling were retained, and they are still pronounced sometimes in careful speech.

The coda [s] is special coda that originates from either English or Inglesh influences. It can be added to any other codas to form a cluster coda. However, when it is added to a syllable with the [ʔ] coda, [ʔ] would disappear. For example, the word *gwahimàts* ("monsters") is pronounced as [ɡwaːi̯˧.mɐs˩] and not [ɡwaːi̯˧.mɐʔs˩].

### Tones

It is generally analyzed that Sisaidian has 3 tones, which are the high tone (55), the middle tone (33) and the low tone (11). However, in analyzes which also consider phenomenons like tone sandhi and changed tones, a total of 9 tone patterns can be listed out, which corresponds to the 6 phonemic tones and 3 checked tones of Cantonese.

Tone sandhi in Sisaidian occurs to the 2nd (Yámßœŋ), 6th (Yòeŋhœi) and 9th (Yòeŋyap) tone patterns. Syllables with these tone patterns would be pronounced as the middle tone if they are next to syllables with the 1st (Yámpìŋ), 4th (Yòeŋpìŋ) and 7th (Yámyap) tone patterns.

Outside of tone sandhi, some words in Sisaidian also change their tones due to lexical contexts. For example, words of the 4th tone pattern (Yòeŋpìŋ) may be changed into the high tone when they are used for forming adjectives in compounds, like *yą̀* ("person") in *yággoyą́* ("alone"). However, there are various situations where changed tones occur, and there are also various exceptions, making changed tones somewhat unpredictable.

## History

Cantonese has a long history in the Pwekish Isles. Although influences from other Chinese varieties were also present, the majority of Chinese people spoke Cantonese, and Cantonese influenced the local language Pwekish a lot.

During the late 1800s, in the German colonial period of the Isles of Pwek, many Cantonese people immigrated to the Isles of Pwek as miners for gold mines. The colonial government discouraged the usage of scripts other than the Latin script. The local Cantonese people started using the Latin script to write their language, thus causing the Latin script to be the most common writing system for Sisaidian. Cantonese in the Isles also started to diverge from the Cantonese of the mainlands. As a result, Sisaidian has kept the ß [ɕ], c [tɕ] and j [dʑ] initials and ze [z̩] final from Qing Dynasty Cantonese. Its aspirated initials have become unaspirated, and its unaspirated initials have become voiced. Moreover, it's tones have also been simplified. In terms of grammar, Sisaidian has evolved a system of grammatical genders and verb tenses after its seperation with the mainland Cantonese. Later in the English colonial period, a plural form for verbs was also taken from English into Sisaidian.

In 2022, Sisaidian has been listed as a national language of Ingland in the passing of the Inglesh Law of Language Protection. Sisaidian is seen as a seperate language from Cantonese on the isles.

## Orthography

As a descendent of Cantonese, hence a Sinitic language, Sisaidian was originally written with Chinese Characters, or Honjì as called in Sisaidian. However, as writing with their native script was forbidden during the Colonial Period, plus influences from Inglesh, multiple writing systems have been developed for writing Sisaidian.

### Latin Script

The Latin Script, known as Ròmajì in Sisaidian, is the most common script for Sisaidian. The alphabet used for Sisaidian is based on the Inglesh alphabet, with diacritics added to represent tones and nasalization.

### Ryutan Kana

Much like Inglesh in the Ryutan region, Sisaidian in Ryutan also uses the Kana syllabery. The usage of Kana in transliteration of Sisaidian is based on the Ryutan Inglesh usage of the Kana system. An extra Katakana ン, which is a smaller version of ン, is used to represent nasalized vowels. However, tones are not usually marked, which add to the difficulty in reading Sisaidian texts written in this script.

### Hanji Scripts

Sisaidian is also sometimes written with the Inglesh Hanji scripts. The Saun Hanji is generally considered to be more favorable for this purpose, as it represents pronunciations better visually. Some also uses the Coņkīk Hanji script for writing Sisaidian, as the structure of its characters are more flexible. Meanwhile it is extremely uncommon to use Ţukßiņji for writing Sisaidian, as the system just uses Honjì characters, which can lead to confusion.

All Hanji scripts treat the nasalization of vowels as a [n] coda, which was the actual origin of the nasalized vowels in Sisaidian. Much like the Ryutan Kana, tones are usually not marked in the Hanji scripts as well.

### Honjì Characters

Although the colonial government had banned the use of the native script of Sisaidian, which is the Honjì script, or basically Chinese characters, a minority of Sisaidian speakers still held on to their tradition of writing in the Honjì script in secrecy, allowing the script to survive to the present day. As restriction to the Honjì script relaxed, Sisaidian had already went through changes, which diverged it away from Cantonese. Since than, new characters have been invented to fit the vocabularies of Sisaidian. However, the majority of Sisaidian speakers still uses the Latin Script.

Some speakers of Sisaidian, who also know Cantonese, prefer to use a Honjì-Hanji mixed script to write Sisaidian. For example, while words than also exist in Cantonese can be written in Honjì, some vocabulary unique to Sisaidian may be written with Saun Hanji. The use of mixed script might be more common as the new Honjì characters created for Sisaidian are not comepletely standardized, though non of these scripts are as common as the Latin script, which is used officially.

## Grammar

Sisaidian grammar is very similar to Cantonese grammar, as Sisaidian is descended from Cantonese. However, due to the adoption of the Latin script, as well as seperation with Cantonese for over a hundred years, multiple differences in grammar has arisen as a result. The following are some features of Sisaidian grammar.

### Syntax

Sisaidian generally has the basic sentence structure of SVO, or Subject-Verb-Object. This structure is not always consistent, as Sisaidian is topic dependent, and the topic can often be placed at first in a sentence, thus altering the sentence structure. However, the structure of VO, or Verb-Object, is usually kept. This structure is very oftenly seen in many phrases, such as *ßìk fą̀h* ("having a meal", literally "eating rice"), *hą̀h gáhi* ("shopping", literally "walking the street"). Some of these phrases even evolved into single-worded verbs, which will be talked about in the Vocabulary section.

Much like other sinitic languages, Sisaidian is seen to be a mix between being head-final and head-initial. As explained above, verb phrases often have the VO structure, which is a feature of head-initial languages. For noun phrases, modifiers such as adjectives and relative clauses precede nouns, with the attributive particle *geh* added in between. Adverbs can either precede or come after verbs or adjectives, depending on the vocabulary. Much like in Cantonese, several single syllable attributive modifiers can come after the nouns they modify. These, however, are usually combined into single words with the proceding nouns already. Several examples include *gáigóŋ* ("rooster"), which is a compound of *gái* ("chicken") and *góŋ* ("male"), and *yèhţéŋ* ("green coconut"), which is a compound of yèh ("coconut") and ţéŋ ("pale green").

### Nouns

Nouns in Cantonese do not usually have cases, a characteristic of an isolating language. This is not the case for Sisaidian, as Sisaidian is somewhat of a fusional language. Nouns in Sisaidian have 2 inflections: a genitive case and a plural form. The genitive case is formed by adding the suffix *-ge* to the noun. This is a feature derived from the Cantonese genitive particle *嘅*, and is a cognate with the Sisaidian attributive particle *geh*. The plural form is formed by adding the suffix *-s* to the noun, which is derived from either English or Inglesh plural suffix *-s*.

Sisaidian also have grammatical genders, which is derived from a simplified class system from Cantonese. Nouns are classified either as a common gender (or the *go*-gender) or a neuter gender (or the *jet*-gender). The gender of the noun decides which article or counter is used. The class system also still exists, which determines the article or counter word one can use for a noun. The class system is related to the obvious physical properties of the noun.

### Pronouns

Pronouns in Sisaidian also have genitive case and plural forms, both are descended from Cantonese.

### Verbs

Verbs in Sisaidian are inflected through tenses. Verb inflections in Sisaidian include past tense, continuous tense, perfect tense, potential form and negative form. These inflections are added to the verb by means of affixes.

There are also several auxiliary verbs in Sisaidian that procede other verbs to represent the meaning of capability and willingness. For example, *hói* ("can") and *wuy* ("will") are often put in front of other verbs.

The construction of questions in Sisaidian is somewhat special. It involves both the infinitive and negative form of the verb in the same sentence, which are put together consecutively. For example, "*ẞìk m̀ßik yeh?*", which means "Do you eat?", contains both the infinitive (*ßìk*) and negative (*m̀ßik*) forms of *ßìk* ("to eat"). For some verbs with more than 1 syllable, the infinitive form is replaced with the first syllable of the verb itself. This is considered informal and is only done in colloquial forms. For example, "*fą́hœi m̀fą́hœi?*" is literary while "*fą́h-m̀fą́hœi?*" is colloquial for "Do you go back?".

### Adjectives

Adjectives in Sisaidian can function as verbs themselves and does not require a copoula. An attributive suffix *-ge* is often required for adjectives to be placed in the attributive form, when they precede the nouns they modify, though some adjectives do not require such a change in form. Unlike verbs, adjectives can only be conjugated through the negative form, which is formed by adding the *m̀-* preffix, and the potential form, which is formed by adding the *-dóu* suffix. They do not have inflections for tenses.

### Adverbs

Adverbs generally precede the adjectives or verbs they modify, though there are exceptions. Most adjectives can be converted into adverbs through the addition of the suffix *-góm* or *-déy* (literary).

### Particles

Much like other Sinitic languages, Sisaidian has many modal particles. Many sentence final particles are used in addition to express the tone of voice and to stress the meaning.

## Vocabulary

Sisaidian inherited most of its vocabulary from Cantonese. It also absorbed numerous vocabularies from other languages. Some languages which have influenced Sisaidian th most in terms of vocabulary is Inglesh, English and Pwekish. There are also some vocabulary loaned from modern Cantonese.

## See Also

* Cantonese in the Isles of Pwek
* Inglesh Language
* Pwekish Language
* Cantonese Language