Skerre

Skerre
Pronunciation	[/skɛr/]
Created by	Doug Ball
Date	1994
Language family	Skerre Skerre

Skerre, [skɛr], is a constructed language whose invention began in 1994 and continues to the present. The language has been inspired by many natural languages over its history, but the language presented herein is perhaps most inspired by Philippine languages like Tagalog, Oceanic languages like Tongan and Nêlêmwa, Pacific Northwest Coast languages like Coast Tsimshian, Lushootseed, and Siuslaw, and Caddoan languages like Wichita.

Introduction

The fictitious speakers of Skerre are small in number and live in the forests of the foothills of the western side of the Western Interior range. They are hunter-gatherers. Dialect variation among the different bands is not significant and is largely confined to lexical differences. The language appears to be an isolate, with no known congeners.

Phonology

Orthography

Skerre is written using the roman alphabet. The symbols employed follow expected IPA values, excepting that /kʷ/ is qu, /ɾ/ is r, /j/ is y, and /ɑ/ is a. (Additionally, /t͡s/ is always written without the tiebar.) Long vowels are written as double vowels.

Consonants

The consonant phonemes of Skerre are given in the chart below:

	Dental	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Labio-Velar	Glottal
Stop	t	t͡s ⟨ts⟩		k	kʷ ⟨qu⟩	ʔ
Fricative		s				h
Nasal		n
Liquid		ɾ ⟨r⟩
Glide			j ⟨y⟩		w

Notes:

• Stops and affricates are voiced after nasals; pre-consonantal nasals assimilate to the place of the following sound.
• The phonemes /s/, /t͡s/, and /n/ all palatalize before /j/.
• The precise articulation of /h/ depends greatly on the following vowel (or preceding one, if none follows).

Vowels

The vowel phonemes of Skerre can be divided into two classes, long and short. The two sets of vowels vary both in terms of length (predominantly) and quality. There are no diphthongs and no tonal contrasts.

	Front	Central	Back
Close	ɪ iː
Mid	ɛ ɛː		o oː
Open		ɑ~a ɑː

Stress

Stress regularly occurs near the right edge of words. Words with a final short vowel (with or without a final consonant) are stressed on the penultimate syllable, e.g. /ˈkisi/ ‘ghost’. while words with a final long vowel (again, with or without a final consonant) are stressed on that vowel, e.g. /heˈtiː/ ‘sibling’s child’.

Phonotactics

Roots are almost all CVV(C) or CV(V)CV(V)(C) in shape (parentheses indicate optional sounds; VV indicates a long vowel). Consonant clusters occur (especially initially), but only at morphological boundaries.

Morphology

Skerre is a mildly synthetic language, though a number of important grammatical categories are expressed through function words. The syntax is strongly head-initial, with heads appearing before all kinds of dependents.

Nouns

Skerre has no grammatical gender and, in fact, nouns have no obligatory inflection. They can be simple, compound, or derived, with a fair number falling in the last category.

Number

Skerre nouns are not obligatorily marked for number, yet there are two number(-like) categories present: the distributive and collective. The distributive is marked with partical reduplication: the reduplicant consists of the base’s initial syllable with a long vowel, e.g. kina ‘bird’ – kiikina ‘various birds’. The distributive signals a number of individuated entities distributed over space, time, or types. The collective is marked with the prefix tin-, as in tinkina ‘flock of birds’. The collective signals that the group is to be considered as a whole.

Prenominals

Syntactic relationships between nouns and other parts of sentences are signaled by function words before the noun, which have been called prenominals. These function words encode both status (proper or common) and syntactic function (including what adpositions normally encode). The forms are:

	Proper	Common
Absolutive	a
Ergative	tsa
Genitive	i	e
Locative	hi	te
Dative	ye	ya
Ablative	soo	sowa
Comitative	ni	ne

As indicated above, the proper–common distinction is neutralized in the absolutive and ergative prenominals. Some example noun phrases:

(1)

ye Tsotar.
DAT.P (name)
to Tsotar.

(2)

ya sakar.
DAT.C child
to the child.