| abstract | - Ban'si is the language of the raccoon-ish inhabitants of Bassa, who were originally human, but were the victims of a widely propagated transformation virus. They are slightly shorter than humans, and are known for being swift, agile and ressourceful. Ban'si descends from the Romance languages that its once human speakers used to speak. It has evolved a lot from there, and grammar in particular has become very different. It has also had some limited influence from asian (a bit of vocabulary) and african languages (mostly grammar-related). Phonetically, Ban'si is a fairly dense language, so it has moderately short words despite having a relatively simple phonemic inventory. It has 18 consonants, 7 vowels (plus nasal variants), phonemic length in both vowels and consonants, and a tone system that isn't based on levels or contours but rather on upsteps and downsteps. Grammar-wise, Ban'si has the unusual feature of removing upstep and downstep tones in words to convey grammatical information (possessive). Ban'si also relies on reduplication and a wide variety of pronouns and clitics to indicate information such as person, voice, transitivity, negative, plural, verb tense and mode, and so on. It is generally a rather analytic language - not completely isolating, but it still has very few true inflections. The sentence order is SVO, and modifying adjectives and adverbs always follow what they are modifying.
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