Dilba

Dilba
iktiil Dilba
Pronunciation	[[Help:IPA|ʔɛhˈtɛil dɛlˈvä]]
Created by	Resangir
Setting	Lamuella
Language family	Lamuellan Dilba

Introduction

Dilba (formally iktiil Dilba 'our tongue Dilba', assumed pronunciation [ʔɛhˈtɛil dɛlˈvä]) is an extinct language that was spoken by the Dilb people on the planet Lamuella.

The Dilb people migrated to another desert planet when the Lamuellan climate had become too moderate for them to live. When Lamuella was much later colonised, numerous hieroglyphic scrolls and rock inscriptions were discovered. By these means, the Dilba grammar and a large part of the lexicon have been reconstructed. The original pronunciation was subject to controversy but after compiling works of Dilba grammarians, a relatively plausible phonology has been established.

In this article, the Dilba hieroglyphs are mostly represented by Latin letters. Since the cultural contact with England, the Latin alphabet is also used on Lamuella. However, at this time the phonology has not been reconstructed yet, so the pronunciation of the Latin letters is rather unintuitive.

Grammar

Most Dilba words, referred to as root words, are obtained from consonantal roots by inserting vowels, adding affixes and mutating the root consonants. In the following, these three morphological operations shall be discussed separately.

Vowel Insertion

Root words have two vocalic positions, i.e. positions where vowels can be inserted. Root words that are built up by only one root consonant lack the second vocalic position.

• First vocalic position:

  	Definite	Indefinite
  Singular	a	i
  Plural		u

  The terms used in the previous table might be deceptive. The indefinite forms are used to introduce the number of a subject of speech. Whenever there is no need to give information about the number, the definite form is used. The singular indefinite form can also be used emphaticly while the plural indefinite often yields collective nouns. In the following article, the terms singular and plural will always refer to singular indefinite and plural indefinite.

• The second vocalic position is always before the first vocalic position. This vowel connotes a deixis in either first (i), second (u) or third (a) person. By default, the second vocalic position is filled by y or left blank at word beginnings. Possibilities of translation are:

  	First person	Second person	Third person
  Possessive	mine, our	your	his, her, its, their
  Local demonstrative	this (close to me)	this your's (close to you), also pejoratively	yonder
  Temporal demonstrative	this (just said / happened)	–	yonder (said / happened before)
  Referring to speaker	said by me, us	said by you	said by him, her, it, them

For example, the declension of gt = man with the vocalic positions _g_t is:

	No deixis	First person	Second person	Third person
Definite	gat	igat	ugat	agat
Singular	git	igit	ugit	agit
Plural	gut	igut	ugut	agut

Suffixes

There are four cases which are formed by attaching suffixes to a word. Dative, locative and ablative will be called local cases. To these three case endings, postpositions can be attached, whose meanings may change depending on the used case. The suffixes and their conjunction with the postposition s 'in' are shown in the following table.

Nominative	gat	the man
Dative	gata	to the man	gatas	into the man
Locative	gati	at the man	gatis	in the man
Ablative	gatu	from the man	gatus	out of the man

By attaching the suffixes y after consonants or h after vowels, status constructi to the forms above can be build. The status constructus of the nominative corresponds to the case genitive, the use of status constructi of the local cases will be discussed later. The forms above will be referred to as status absoluti.

Nominative	gaty	of the man
Dative	gatah	to the man	gatasy	into the man
Locative	gatih	at the man	gatisy	in the man
Ablative	gatuh	from the man	gatusy	out of the man

There are three main ways to translate these status constructi (with k_z_k = 'bird'):

• as genitives: gaty kyzak = the man's bird
• as adjectives: gaty kyzak = the male bird
• as attributes: kyzakih gat = the man at the bird (compare with gat kyzaki = the man is at the bird)

In addition, the status constructi can be used as new nominative absolutus forms. E.g. kazakih could be translated as 'something at the bird'. The new locative absolutus kazakihi would mean literally 'at something at the bird' and is used for 'close to the bird'. However, this application of the status constructi is quite seldom. For historical reasons, the status constructi of local cases with or without postpositions are also called inverse postpositions.

The proper name iktiil Dilba is an older form of iktilih Dilba and is translated literally 'Dilba at my tongue' (translation as attribute).

Consonant Mutation

There is a group of consonants, so-called root consonants, that have two mutation grades. In Dilba hieroglyphs, these mutations have not been distinguished but sometimes the consonants which are allowed to be mutated are marked. When it is necessary to label mutated consonants in this article, this will be done by subscript numbers: t₁ and t₂ are the possible mutations of the unmutated t₀. That a consonant is allowed to be mutated, will be announced by a subsript hash: t_#.

By now, we can understand the informations included in the lexical form of a root word: The consonant root, the vocalic positions and the consonants which are allowed to be mutated. For example, the complete lexical form of 'bird' is k_#_z_k_#. Note that the vocalic positions are important properties of a root word as there is in general no relation between roots that differ only in vocalic positions. E.g. the word _k_#z_k_# means 'mountain' and is not related to 'bird' at all.