Gaju

Gaju
Gaju
Pronunciation	[[Help:IPA|'gäɟu]]
Created by	–
Setting	Rttirria
Native to	Rtuha, Uya, northern Ttyami, northeastern Umairri, eastern Manamuki
Language family	Rttirrian South Rttirrian Old Gaju Gaju

Gaju (English: /'gɑːd͡ʒuː/, Gaju: ['kä˩cu˥], Rttirri: [ˈkɑcu]) is a minority language in Rttirria, spoken by the Gaju people in the eastern part of the country. It is a member of the Rttirrian language family, descended from the Proto-South-Rttirrian langauge that is also the ancestor of modern Rttirri, the nation's official language.

The language has been documented from the Old Gaju period in the 14th century. While it was used widely across much of eastern Rttirria at that time, its homeland has slowly shrunken over time into the countryside, small towns, and jungles as Rttirri has come to dominate the national landscape. The Gaju community, as well as some ethnically Rttirri Easterners resenting Western cultural influence, has pushed for greater recognition and representation of Gaju and other minority languages. In the 1970s, it became an official language of all of Rttirria; citizens have the right to receive voting ballots, drivers' license exams, court interpreters, and other official documents and proceedings in the Gaju language.

Gaju is a nominative-accusative language. Typically of languages in the Southeast Asian sprachbund, it is also primarily analytic and isolating in morphology, though it contains some elements of agglutinative and fusional languages. It has a large vowel inventory consisting of 9 vowels, and a moderate-sized consonant inventory of 26 consonants. It is variously written in the Latin alphabet, the Rttirri abugida—which is a Brahmic script—the Burmese script, and even Chinese characters.

History

Main article: Old Gaju

Gaju is a member of the South Rttirrian branch of the Rttirrian language family of Southeast Asia; the dialects of Proto-South-Rttirrian that would become Gaju split off from those that would become Rttirri around the 3rd to 5th century CE, probably in southeastern Rttirria.

Gaju is considered more linguistically innovative than Rttirri, having undergone many phonological and grammatical changes from Proto-South-Rttirrian that did not occur in Rttirri. The main such changes are summarized here:

• The loss of the retroflex series. */ʈ ɖ ɳ/ merged into /t d n/, while */ɻ/ became [w] and */ɽ/ merged with onset */ʟ/ as [l]. However, the original three vowels */a i u/ had developed allophones after retroflex consonants, and these became independent phonemes: /ɑ e o/. */ɑ/ would later raise and round to /ɔ/.
• Gradual development of a tone system. First, coda */ʟ/ disappeared and left a low tone on the preceding vowel, all vowels took a low tone before stops, and various grammatical particles and affixes took low tones—other syllables took high tones. From there, further phonological elision and grammaticalization of morphemes led to a contour tone system.
• The gradual allowance of a few nasal consonants in coda position: /m n ŋ/.
• The simplification of stop-stop clusters, which in Rttirri would develop into ejectives. The initial element of the cluster was fricativized, e.g. */tk/ > /sk/, and then an epenthetic /ə/ with a low tone was inserted, e.g. */ski˥/ > /sə˩ki˥/. In some function words and affixes, though, the second stop was lost altogether, e.g. */tk/ > /s/.
• The development of several unusual voiceless consonants. In clusters ending in */m n ɻ ɽ/, the first consonant (which was always voiceless) disappeared, which left /m̥ n̥ ʍ l̥/ as new phonemes.
• The development of the vowels /ɛ ɪ/, which started as allophones of /e/ and /i/ that dissimilated after palatal consonants.
• A chain shift from voiced stops, to voiceless stops, to aspirated stops.
• Much of Proto-South-Rttirrian's agglutinative morphology being lost, in favor of a more analytic system. For example, the subject and object verb prefixes became freestanding pronouns, and the adoption of the third-person singular and third-person plural pronouns (-ge and -di) as new accusative affixes on nouns contributed to the development of a noun case system.
• The reappropriation of the Proto-South-Rttirrian evidential particles as a fused politeness-aspect system.

Phonology

Consonants

	Labial	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Nasal	m /m/ hm /m̥/	n /n/ hn /n̥/	ny /ɲ/	ng /ŋ/
Plosive	p /pʰ/ b /p/	t /tʰ/ d /t/	ty /cʰ/ j /c/	k /kʰ/ k /k/
Fricative	f /f/	s /s/ sh /ʃ/	sy /ç/	kh /x/	h /h/
Affricate		ts /t͡s/ ch /t͡ʃ/
Approximant	w /w/ hw /ʍ/	l /l/ hl /l̥~ɬ/

In addition, the following consonants are allowed in loanwords: hng /ŋ̊/, hny /ɲ̥/, y /j/, hh /ʔ/, r /ɹ~ɻ/.

Vowels

	Front	Central	Back
High	i /i/		u /u/
Near-high	ê /ɪ/
Mid	e /e/	ơ /ə/	o /o/
Near-low	â /ɛ/		ă /ɔ/
Low		a /ä/

Tones

Gaju distinguishes four tones: high, low, rising, and falling. They are distinguished in the Latin script as follows:

• High: a â ă e ê i o ơ u
• Low: ạ ậ ặ ẹ ệ ị ọ ợ ụ
• Rising: á ấ ắ é ế í ó ớ ú
• Falling: à ầ ằ è ề ì ò ờ ù

The rising and falling tones are uncommon, being found only in loanwords and in a small number of native words where elision of VCV sequences has caused high-tone and low-tone syllables with the same vowel to occur adjacently to each other.

An example of four words distinguished only by tone:

• High: ga ("day"), cognate to Rttirri ya
• Low: gạ ("room, chamber"), cognate to Rttirri yau
• Rising: gá ("sir"), cognate to Rttirri yaya ("socialite")
• Falling: gà ("garbage"), a borrowing from Thai กาก gàak

Phonotactics

Gaju places very tight restrictions on syllables: maximally, CVN syllables are allowed, where C is any consonant and N is any of the voiced non-palatal nasals: /m/, /n/, or /ŋ/.

Loanwords containing syllables ending in a consonant other than one of these, or containing consonant clusters, usually make use of an epenthetic /ə/:

• pânsệlợ [pʰɛn˥.sɪ˩.lə˩] "pencil"
• âlợchợbợlợ [ɛ˥.lə˩.t͡ʃə˩.pə˩.lə˩] "algebra"
• shợnânụpaị [ʃə˩nɛ˥nu˩pʰä˥i˩] "comics" (from Rttirri)

Orthography

The Rttirri native script in handwritten form, as it is used for Rttirri.

The Rttirri script was codified in the mid-14th century. It was based on the Pallava script, which is a Brahmic abugida that is also the ancestor of the Thai, Lao, Burmese, and Khmer scripts.

As an abugida, the Rttirri script is written with consonantal letters that are mutated for the different vowels. /i/ is the inherent vowel - for example, the character for /m/ is pronounced /mi/, but when given the diacritic for /u/, it is pronounced /mu/.

Although the orthography of Rttirri has become fairly non-phonetic, Gaju has only been consistently written in the Rttirri script since the late 19th and early 20th centuries, so relatively few sound changes have occurred since then.

In the late 19th century, when Rttirria was a colony of Britain, English linguists designed a Latin transcription system for Rttirri and, with it, other indigenous languages such as Gaju. Some Gaju separatists and nationalists choose to use this Latin script, or other scripts such as Burmese or even Chinese characters, to write their language.

Vocabulary

Gaju has historically featured very few of the Sanskrit and Arabic loanwords that abound in Rttirri. However, the Gaju community's close proximity to Myanmar has given their language numerous loanwords from local languages, such as Burmese, Thai, and the Karen languages. It has also taken on some loans from Rttirri.

Grammar

Gaju morphology is significantly more analytic than that of Rttirri.

Verbs

The following slots are allowed for affixes on the verb.

Verb Slot	Allowable Inputs
Mood	fa- (polite imperative) nang- (subjunctive) kan- (conditional) khă- (imperative)
Tense	-bu-/-bo-/-du-/-do-/-ju-/-jo- (past) -mi-/-me-/-ni-/-ne-/-nyi-/-nye- (future)
Verb Root	any verb
Auxiliary Verb	-(k)ạng ("to be able to") -(ạ)kạ ("to need to") -(d)ẹng ("to want to") -(g)ụng ("to force to") and others

The particular tense affixes chosen depend on the first syllable: specifically, the initial consonant's place of articulation and the height of the vowel. There are few irregular verbs. This system has been maintained from Proto-South-Rttirrian and is greatly simplified in Rttirri.

	Labial	Alveolar	Palatal, Velar, Glottal	Starts with vowel
/i/, /u/	-bu- -mi-	-du- -ni-	-ju- -nyi-	-j- -ny-
Any other vowel	-bo- -me-	-do- -ne-	-jo- -nye-

Example:

Ma gịka-ge ma mạ nye-gạkung.

1PL.NOM parent-ACC PL 1PL.GEN FUT-visit

We will visit our parents tomorrow.

Noun phrases

Nouns can take the following cases:

Case	Suffix
nominative	(none)
accusative	-(g)e (singular) -(d)i (plural)
dative	-(ty)á
ablative	-(d)a
locative	-(l)í
comitative	-(ă)dă
instrumental	-(w)àm
vocative	-(a)să

The particle tan, once used to mean "behind"—its Rttirri cognate, fani, is still used that way—has been reconfigured as a genitive marker.

cat PERF Mary GEN lap-DAT PST-jump

Motị nam Meợrị tan nakợtị-tyá bo-fala.

The cat jumped into Mary's lap.

The following adpositional particles are used:

Postposition	English Translation
nụbom	above
bom	below
nọm	in front of
nặng	in back of
feso	outside
tafợng	far from
tyà	across
bim	between (2 people/things)
jen	among (3+ people/things)
fom	except
tu	only
nim	around
pala	about
dung	for
mishu	like, similar to

Cases other than the nominative may be used alongside adpositional particles.

Shilia lashi fú khợti nam bụki-lí hwọ nụbom bo-fala.

fox red very quick PERF dog-LOC lazy over PST-jump

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

Pronouns

The following pronouns are used. They were not affixed to the verb, but stood in the place of other nouns.

	Singular		Plural
	Nominative	Accusative	Nominative	Accusative
1st person	na	ni	ma	mi
2nd person	kom	kim	tsa	tsi
3rd person	la	ge	daa	di

Genitive pronouns follow the nouns they modify. The third-person singular plural is a recent innovation, derived from fòkom ("there").

English	Old Gaju
my	nạ
your	kọm
his/her/its	fóm
our	mạ
all of your	tsạ
their	dặ

Gaju essentially has no grammatical gender. However, speakers may optionally substitute hni for the third-person singular pronoun la, derived from hnini ("girl"), to explicitly communicate that someone is female. The accusative form of hni is hni ke, and the genitive is hni fóm. This usage is generally prescribed against and avoided in formal speech.

Derivation

Words can be derived into other parts of speech with the following suffixes:

		From...
		Noun	Verb	Adjective or Determiner	Adverb
To...	Noun	-	-bum	-dom
	Verb	-syợto (to do an X-like thing)	-	-dosyợ
	Adjective or Determiner	-we	-bi	-	-bi
	Adverb	-dem			-

Aspect

The following particles can be used to express aspect and politeness; the default is imperfective impolite.

	Informal	Formal
Imperfective	—	tya
Perfective	nam	nyem
Habitual	shu	tya shu

The following question words are used:

English	Gaju
who/whom	ta
what	ti
when	dịn
where	dáng
why	dịtạ
how	dúng

Word order

Due to Gaju's case system, subject and object are not distinguished by their order as in Old Gaju or in Rttirri, so they (and any other noun phrases) can be placed in any order. However, subject-object-verb (SOV) word order remains the standard for clauses, with object-subject-verb (OSV) being a common alternative.

The noun is always the head of the noun phrase, and modifiers are added in the following order:

Noun + case suffixes / Adjectives / Determiners, or plural particle (ma) / Possessive pronouns

A common usage of OSV word order is to draw attention to the object, such as to evoke pity:

Lạ-ge chang kung fóm nam la bo-bom.

child-ACC beautiful three 3SG.GEN PERF 3SG.NOM PST-abandon

He abandoned his three beautiful children.

Conjunctions

The following conjunctions are used, and can be applied both to noun phrases and to clauses:

Postposition	English Translation
pu	and
she	or (inclusive)
shem	or (exclusive)
fa	but
kinya	because
khợtom	before
nặku	after
mamu	until
wặku	although

Relative and independent clauses

Relative particles are marked with the particle ùùtyu, which can be declined for case.

Dáng demo ma ợtyu-ge na bu-pịpu?

where dumpling PL that-ACC 1SG.NOM PST-bake exist

Where are the dumplings that I baked?

Independent clauses are demarcated with the particle shu.

La nam du-dị shu la lă-tyá ợta-dẹng.

3SG.NOM PERF PST-say that 3SG.NOM home-DAT go-want.

She said that she wanted to go home.

See also

• Rttirri
• Verse:Rttirria