Ditab

Ditab (Dîthâabh /ɖiː˧˩θ̠aːaβ˥˩/) is a language of Verse:Méich Bhaonnáiqh (Bech Baddochaqh?) inspired by Iau, Proto-Lakes Plain, Dinka, Formor's avian conlang C’ą̂ą́r and Semitic languages (particularly chanted Tiberian Hebrew). It's the ceremonial language of a group of uplifted parrots of the space colony Bădháchôth. (Most other uplifted passerines speak languages that sound much more exotic to humans due to the more limited number of humanlike consonant sounds they can produce.)

Background

Assumptions about the birds' vocal tracts:

• The birds are parrots; unlike other passerines they have internal tongue muscles, allowing them to pronounce retroflexes
• Their tongues are pointed but can still be widened to make stops
• They can produce tongue height

Ditab is a ceremonial language and doesn't use all the things the avian syrinx can do. Depending on the parrot species, uplifted parrot vernaculars may use syrinx articulations, use more register and tone contrasts or even produce two pitches at once.

Todo

A reading tradition of Ditab with a Modern Hebrew accent: no tones or vowel or consonant length (so there will be a lot of ambiguity; Ditab isn't actually spoken that way)

• edhibh cabhechith (fill in tones and vowel lengths) -> ediv kveyit

Phonology

Ditab has

• 5 consonants:
  • voiced rostral (beak) fricative: b̞ (written b)
  • voiced subapical retroflex stop: ɖ (written d)
  • voiceless subapical retroflex stop: ʈ (written t)
  • voiceless lamino-palatal stop: c (written c)
  • voiceless choanal stop: ʡ (written q)
• 15 vowels: i ị e ẹ a /ï ɪ̈ ë ɛ̈ ä/ + in ịn en... nasalized counterparts + ix ịx ex... creaky counterparts
  • archiphoneme ă (shva na3, by default /ä/)
• ia /i:a/
• 6 pitch accent patterns (level, rising, falling, falling-rising, rising-falling, one like Swedish tone 2)
• There is a three way length distinction as well, in both consonants and vowels.
  • Short, long and overlong vowels are written ă a aa
  • Short, long and overlong consonants are written bh b bb

All five stops have continuant allophones (roughly [β̞ ɻ θ̠ j ʕ]) after vowels, unless they're geminated.

Word structure

Final stress like Tiberian Hebrew

Most words are underlyingly either open syllable -V: (e.g. o), or "closed syllable" with nucleus -V: and allowed "codas" -C, -V, -VC, -CC, -(unstressed syllable) (e.g. och, o.o, o.och, o.chebh, o.c)

Extrametrical elements occur too: â.c-ca [â:.c:-cà:] (like -k in TibH vattėbh-k 'and she wept')

Orthography

Ditab has an ASCII friendly orthography in addition to the 'default' one, where some vowels are written with consonant letters. It also has a Hebrew orthography with cantillation marks for tones and weird matres lectionis (like nun, mem, samekh, ayin etc.)

Morphology

Ditab morphology is entirely suffixing except for adjectives. Adjectives are a small closed class and work by infixing and/or changing the vowels in the noun according to a predictable umlaut pattern.

There is no grammatical gender, and two declension classes:

• Class one nouns mark the construct state with the suffix -bẽ́.
• Class two nouns mark the absolute state with -bẽ́.

Verbs inflect by aspect but not tense. Curiously, the imperfective and perfective forms are interchanged when the verb follows the interrogative particle củ-, the negative particle bách- or the conjunctive particle ădhùbh-, or other preverbs/conjunctions, reminiscent of Old Irish verb allomorphy.

Ditab has Slavic-style verbs of motion: walk, run, fly, soar, fly by flapping wings, travel by a vehicle, swim, ... each with a unidirectional and a multidirectional counterpart.

Ditab is borderline polysynthetic in that some verbs have to incorporate their objects. Ditab also uses bipersonal inflections (like both Old Irish and Biblical Hebrew, but bipersonal forms are always used when the object is definite)

Syntax

Ditab is strictly OVS. Cleft constructions are common.