Bentovian

Tsrovesh/Lexicon

Tsrovesh/Swadesh list

Bentovian
croveš
Pronunciation	[/tsʁoˈveʃ/]
Created by	IlL, Praimhín
Setting	Verse:Tricin
Language family	Lakovic Bentovian

Tsrovesh (croveš /tsʁoˈveʃ/) is a Lakovic language spoken in Tseretia in Talma, inspired by Modern Hebrew, Georgian, and Armenian.

Introduction

Tsrovesh vocabulary is much less purist than Classical Windermere or Tergetian; Tsrovesh has many loans from an ancient (unnamed) pre-Lakovic substrate, often called the Kodṛcha-Tzameshut Archeological Complex (KTAC).

It went through some of the strangest sound changes in Lakovic.

Classical Tsrovesh is a prominent classical language of Talma, and its grammar is much closer to Windermere or Häskä than to Modern Tsrovesh.

Todo

f -> ɸ -> h? vowel reduction into 'a'?

A breathy voice vowel split

ikcav = "topic"?

be- = agentive? (beda = doctor; the root is a Windermere loan)

mic- = adverb prefix? (micloxer = furiously)

Dialects

Tsrovesh is fairly dialectally uniform. The dialect spoken in the eastern region of Kadzovetia aspirates voiceless stops.

Phonology

Orthography

Tsrovesh is most commonly written with the Windermere alphabet.

Consonants

		Labial	Dental	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Nasal		m /m/	n /n/		[ŋ]
Plosive	voiceless	p /p/	t /t/		k /k/
	voiced	b /b/	d /d/		g /g/
Fricative	voiceless		s /s/	š /ʃ/	x /x/	h /h/
	voiced	v /v/	z /z/	ž /ʒ/	r /ʁ/
Affricate	voiceless		c /ts/	č /tʃ/
	voiced		dz /dz/	j /dʒ/
Approximant			l /l/

Syllabic resonants: ṃ ṇ ḷ ṛ ṿ

Vowels

Bentovian vowels

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i /i/		u /u/
Mid	e /e/		o /o/
Open		a /a/

Consecutive vowels are prohibited.

Phonotactics

Tsrovesh phonology is slightly less restrictive than Israeli Hebrew but much more so than Georgian. As in both languages, initial consonant clusters appear frequently in Tsrovesh. Initial clusters of the form l/r + consonant are allowed (Are those really syllabic resonants?). For example:

• croveš (the name of the language)
• ldag (door)
• šmer (man)
• cnaxat (dream)
• gzin (to shine)
• vna (to live)
• lvar (to play)
• tkešet (regardless)
• švili (for me)

Medial consonant clusters are also common:

• ertma (spider)
• detkvis (limestone)
• opxram (reed)

All final clusters are prohibited.

Stress

Stress is always penultimate.

Morphology

Nouns

Plurals by redup: crov 'a language' > circrov 'languages'

Definite suffix -i: lakov 'a person' > lakovi 'the person'

Somewhat agglutinating; no grammatical gender

Honorifics?

Verbs

some uncanny hebrew or nahuatl prefixes (like mitz-)

me- for the present imperfective? (it could use a welsh-like grammatical shift of progressive -> imperfective)

bare verb stem = subjunctive

past tense ablaut (like gzin -> gazan; lvar -> laver)

Ablaut patterns:

• C(ə)CiC -> CaCaC
• C(ə)CaC -> CaCeC
• C(ə)CoC -> CaCuC
• C(ə)CeC -> liCCaC
• C(ə)CuC -> liCCeCon

ə may appear as /a/ in some verbs, like žacem -> ližcam

Regular past tense: li-(VERB)-et (an example: masar "to dance" -> limasaret "danced")

Pronominal suffixes

-ili, -eč, -ek, -eš, -eb?

Syntax

Constituent order

Finnish relex

Noun phrase

The adjective comes before the noun in Tsrovesh:

udvanit ertmati = the happy spider

(udvanit = happy, ertma = spider)

But relative clauses are placed after the noun:

ertma, ža-ves šmeri lixavenet = spider who the man killed

Sentence phrase

Conjunctions

et = and

-eb = and (used like Latin -que)

Numbers

Windermere 1-5: doan, rath, stiw, smech, müets

azar, kin, šelvi, sṃči, mevti, cohi, avci, lucebi, azorbi, kteva?

kteva azareb, kteva kineb, kteva šelvib, ktela sṃčib, ... (could those be KTAC words?)

20 = ktela mekin