The Henaudute are a people of Arda. The oldest records in the Henaudute language are from the reign of Kentophre I the Inept (ken.tophre wun.êre), who died in 1547 AM.

The word hêna.udute is obscurely derived from the word hênate meaning "yellow". The form hênate is also used to refer to speakers of the Henaudute language, although properly it only applies to denizens of the Yellow Empire (rhaurar hênate).

Hêna.udute generally contrasts with tentha "foreign".

Sub-pages:

• Hênaudute Changes from Dele
• Hênaudute Lexicon
• Texts in Hênaudute

Kelthadmi Tekhtheu (keltha.dmî têkhtheu), the capital of the Yellow Empire, is situated where the Frigid River (phige têkhthe) flows down from the mountains on the southwest continent of Arda.

(Arda is a collaborative world-building project started awhile back, focusing on descending languages from a couple of proto-languages. There's a Yahoogroup for it, Arda-Lang. The whole project's kind of quiet lately; my guess is that it suffered from being a side project to most of the participants, and not something to focus on directly.)

Find Henaudute on the map of Arda for a decent idea where we're coming from. A more local map may be forthcoming.

The timespan of the language called "Henaudute" is from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries AM, making it an Ardan L2 lang; this makes it roughly comparable in timeframe terms to Hittite, Sanskrit, and Linear B. Earlier stages of the language do not survive. There is one major daughter lang, named Änä.

Forms in Henaudute are similar to forms in classical langs such as Greek or Latin, in that most words consist of a stem and an inflection.

The majority of inflections are suffixes.

tê-nu-re	an	dêphr-â	kheun.êd-a
be-PAST-3SG	DEF	vizier-NOM:SG:TAN	king-GEN:SG:TAN

He was the king's vizier.

However, infixing is also very common in verbs (a relic of the old Dele verbal system):

tho[nú]ino-re

be:lazy[PAST]-3SG

He was lazy.

There is also a slightly larger set of prefixes.

am-.ou-tha

COMP-old-ADJ:TAN

'elder' / 'older'

There are three noun classes ("genders") in Henaudute: tan- (fire), lûe (water), and garê (earth). These are ancient terms for what were probably once animacy categories.

Tan words are "high animate" words, referring to people, animals, "self-propelled" (staphtha) processes such as fire, and complex systems. Some words such as lam- (hand) also fall into this category.

Lûe words are "low animate" words, referring to simple systems, plants, aggregates, verbal nouns, parts of tan systems, and "non-propelled" (hun.taphthe) processes such as rivers.

• The difference between staphtha "self-propelled" (which can also be rendered as "automatic") and hun.taphthe "non-propelled" (which can also be rendered as "automatic"[!]) can be rather difficult to explain. However, things that are staphtha are viewed as having more control, i.e. a fire can be said to "choose" its direction more than a river, which has its course set for it. It is not certain whether this distinction has any predictive value, or whether it only arose to explain idiosyncratic class assignments.

Garê words are "inanimate" words, referring to parts of lûe systems, inanimates, diminutives, augmentatives, material/mass nouns, and metaterms such the names of letters or concepts standing for themselves (e.g. "the word 'rhops'").

The parent lang Dele was unusually rich in cases, having at least fifteen of them. Henaudute has lost many of them, retaining only eight. They are nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, inessive, abessive, illative, and ablative.

The functions of the Dele vocative case fell in with the nominative; the locative, with the abessive. The other lost case roles are expressed periphrastically.

The '+' indicates that the stem vowel is to be retained; the '-' that it is to be lost; and the '-j' that palatalization is to apply.

† -êsa for expected outcome *-ê by analogy with other ablatives.

Unlike regular nouns, which have many cases, pronouns only appear in the nominative and the oblique, historically formed by adding the Dele particle SU, "on".

Also unlike regular nouns, pronouns decline for number, but not gender.

As you can see, Henaudute can distinguish between "we, including you" (khen) and "we, excluding you" (then).