Yuyši

Yuyši
r'etii yuyši
Pronunciation	[[Help:IPA|ˈretiː ˈjyʃi]]
Created by	Lili21 Proto-language created by Frrurtu
Date	Oct 2017
Setting	Calémere
Ethnicity	Yuyši people (Yuy)
Native speakers	5,700,000 (4E Ɛ1 / 2312)
Language family	Ivugi Yuyši

Yuyši, or the Yuyši language (r'etii yuyši [ˈretiː ˈjyʃi]), is a language of Calémere, spoken in the eastern Lower North of the continent of Ceránento; it is the most spoken native Ceránentian language, with about 5.7 million native speakers.

External History

Yuyši was created as part of a project started by Frrurtu on the "Constructed Languages" Facebook group, with the goal of developing daughter languages from a single source, the Ivugi language. The general idea about developing Yuyši was about applying a mostly CV syllable structure by having an historical equivalent of the Proto-Slavic law of open syllables modify Ivugi words - that alone is responsible for most of the changes; the lenition and ultimate vanishing of certain consonants - most notably original /β/ and intervocalic /g/ - also had a strong impact on the language.
The name yuyši is a direct descendant of the Ivugi adjective ivúgeaziz, while Ivúgi is reflected in the speakers' ethnonym, Yuy [jy].

Yuyši therefore has two different versions: one that fits the original alt-Earth setting and another one modified (in internal history and vocabulary) in order to fit into Calémere; for Calemerian purposes, it is treated as a language isolate. The differences between Earth Yuyši and Calemerian Yuyši are mostly lexical - for example a word like "Internet" is inuterunêtu in Earth Yuyši, while Calemerian Yuyši uses the Cerian borrowing denomoneresu. Unless specifically noted, Yuyši as treated in this page is Calemerian Yuyši.

Setting of Earth Yuyši

Earth Yuyši is a language spoken by a small number of speakers in the westernmost corner of Dzungaria, by the Dzungarian Gate, in villages at the foothills of the Dzungarian Alatau. The Yuy-speaking towns have historically been important as caravan stops, due to their location right at one of the most important passages on the route from Central Asia - and all points West - to China. This has opened the Yuyši language to foreign influences, from Turkic, Sinitic, and Mongolic languages, a few Indo-Aryan influences due to the historical spread of Buddhism, and more recently also from Russian.
Mandarin, Uyghur, and Kazakh are today the official languages in the Yuyši-speaking territories, but the language is not endangered as in the villages themselves it is the only daily spoken language. Estimates place the number of Yuyši speakers at about 75,000.

Yuyši has traditionally been unwritten - except for a few sentences recorded, in Perso-Arabic script, in earlier Chagatai and Uyghur texts - until 1958, when the six Yuy villages on the then Soviet side of the border began using a Cyrillic orthography for it; Yuy people on the Chinese side started using an informal orthography based on Chinese characters during the same period. The present-day Latin orthography was finally codified in 1995 by the whole Yuy community on both sides of the Sino-Kazakh border.

Phonology

Consonants

Yuyši's consonant inventory is average-sized, with 18 consonants, and does not contain particularly rare phonemes, though, due to historical reasons, /m/ is fairly rare. In some dialects of the Western Valleys, ł is still distinguished from w - as /ɫ/ - at least in onset position, but they amount to a very tiny minority of speakers anyway.

	Labial	Dento-alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Nasals	m m	n n
Unvoiced stops	p p	t t		k k
Voiced stops	b b	d d		g g
Affricates		ts ts	č tɕ
Fricatives	f f～ɸ	s s	š ʃ～ɕ		h h
Approximants and semivowels	ł w w	r r l l	y j

Vowels

Yuyši has twelve vowels (three of which nasal), with a striking feature being a somewhat odd length distinction in two vowels only - for many speakers, however, the long vowels have become closing diphthongs, while, especially in urban areas in the Eastern Yuyši-speaking area, they have completely merged with the short ones. There are also many phonetic diphthongs, which are, however, better analyzed as combinations of a vowel plus a semivowel.
Note that high-low vowels are only distinguished from high-mid ones when stressed; the orthography always marks a stressed high-low vowel with a circumflex, and the stressed high-mid ones with acutes when the stress is not on the penultimate. Other stressed vowels are graphically marked only when the stressed syllable is not the penultimate. The last nasal vowel is typically always stressed, so when they are present, stress is marked even on the penult if it does *not* fall on the last nasal vowel.

	Front	Central	Back
High	i i		u u
High-mid	e(é) e ee eː		o (ó) o
High-low	ê ɛ êe ɛː ẽ ɛ̃		ô ɔ õ ɔ̃
Low		a a ã ã

Morphology

Verbs

Yuyši is a moderately inflected language, much less inflected than Ivugi was as sound changes have made the original morphology confusionary, leaving many verbs to even sound the same in some forms. Of the original inflections, only past, present, the infinitive, and the polite imperative (without stem alternation) remained.

What Yuyši did develop, however, is a distinct conjugation used with definite objects, formed by the fusion of the object marker u and the verb. It also developed four participles, two active (formed, in the proto-language, by lai- "in", later also "with" plus the corresponding present or past form) and two passive ones (reanalyzed from the older passive).

The forms of a regular Yuyši verb, dôy "to blow" (< Ivugi dvábi):

dôy "to blow"	Indefinite	Definite
Infinitive	dôy
Past	dõ	dônu
Present	dôła	dôło
Imperative	dô	du
Pres. act. participle	łedôła
Past act. participle	łedõ
Pres. pass. participle	kidôła
Past pass. participle	kidõ

Other forms such as the future are formed by the only verb which has a future - yuy "to be", which has łôła - and the present participle (or past participle for the future perfect), e.g. łôła łedôła "will blow", łôła łedõ "will have blown". The passive is analytic - formed by the conjugated form of yuy and the appropriate passive participle, e.g. yã kigã "was helped"; yã kigãõ "had been helped".

The verb "to be" is irregular, as it uses different stems:

yuy "to be"	Indefinite	Definite
Infinitive	yuy
Past	yã	yanu
Present	yo	yu
Future	łôła	łôło
Imperative	yo	yu
Pres. act. participle	łayo
Past act. participle	łayã

Stem and forms

Almost all Yuyši verbs have a single stem, which in the infinitive is usually mixed with an historical /i/ that marks the infinitive. Most stems end in vowels.

Yuyši infinitival endings and their underlying stems are:

• -ui /uj/ [y] — stem in -u
• -ôy — stem in -ô
• -oy — stem in -ó
• -ii — stem in -i
• -ey — stem in -e
• -êe — stem in -ê
• -êei — stem in -ee or -êe
• -ay — stem in -a
• -i — consonant stem
• -ãy, -õy, -ẽ — stems in -ã, -õ, -ẽ respectively.

Inflected forms are mostly regular:

• Past definite: stem + -nu
• Present indefinite: stem + -ła
• Present definite: stem + -ło
• Imperative indefinite: bare stem

The two exceptions are the past indefinite and the imperative definite forms.
The past indefinite form is formed by nasalizing the final vowel of the stem. This effectively means that for nasal stems this form is the bare stem; -i, -e, -ê, -ẽ stems all merge as -ẽ; -u, -o, -ô, -õ stems all merge as -õ, -a becomes -ã and -êe becomes -ãy. Consonant stems add -õ.

The imperative definite adds -u to consonant stem verbs; verbs in -u, -o, and -ô all have -u; those in -i have -uy; those in -a have -o, and -e -ê -êe become -ew, -êw, -êw. Nasal vowels are denasalized and have -nu after them, making this form identical to the past definite.

There is a small number of irregular verbs, apart from yuy (anything not included here is regular):

Verb	Past indef.	Past def.	Present indef.	Present def.
łayêe "to eat"	łayã	łayánu	łayło	łayłú
širíi "to go"	šidu	šibú	šida	šidó
łuy "to want"	łu	łõnu	uła	ułó
sami "to say" (and łami "to shine")	sakõ	sakenu	saka	sakó

Semantically, the past and present forms are often more translatable as a concept of perfective vs. imperfective aspect. The section on Conditional sentences contains some nice examples for this.

Nouns and adjectives

Yuyši nouns are for the most part uninflected - they don't mark neither gender nor number nor case nor any other thing.

There are, however, a few nouns which have "collective" forms, which are reanalyzed former plurals (ya "egg(s)", eë "pack(s) of eggs" (< agár, agér); nučã "boy(s)", nučẽ "group(s) of boys" (< nutsi-áng, nutsi-éng)). They are, however, better treated as separate lexical entries as there may have been some semantic shifts, on top of sound changes having often obscured the relationship (ari "month", êy "year" (< área, áyir), sa "day", sêy "time" (< zax, záyir)).
With the original singular and plural forms having become increasingly lexically separated, sometimes only the Ivugi plural has a descendant word in Yuyši, for example uti "leg(s)", trê "tooth/teeth", niła "hair".

Adjectives are postnominal and mostly uninflected; they only have a comparative form (used only when they lack a comparison term), made by adding -u at the end, and a superlative form made by adding -wá. For example, isê (< ezái) "dark" inflects as isêw "darker" and isewá "darkest". Some forms are irregular, like ha "happy", habu "happier", habá "happiest".

When there is a comparison term, original Ivugi forms such as ezáigo ási were reanalyzed as *ezái goási, giving rise to a new comparative term meaning roughly "more than": waši, which has the alternative form waše used before definite nouns (a contraction of *goási plus the definite article). "Darker than the night" is thus, in Yuyši, isê waše su.

Particles and mutation

Yuyši has a definite article which has two context-conditioned forms - e before consonants and r' before vowels. Due to historical changes, however, the article triggers mutation of the initial consonant of the noun, often deleting it entirely. For example, "pack of dogs" and "the pack of dogs" are gẽ and e ẽ respectively; "sun" and "the sun" are pã and e fã.

The mutating consonants are:

• g, h, f → ∅
• p → f
• b → m
• k → h

Other particles that trigger mutation are:

• fu "no, none, kein" — li yo gõ "I'm a dog"; li yo fu õ "I am not a dog".
• ra "about, because of" — lẽ yerõ ra õ "we were arguing/fighting because of a dog".
• tsu "between" — ta yã tsu õ sa esê "it was between a dog and a spider".
• waši "more than" and waše "more than the" — ta yo iki waši mêtu "it is stronger than a duck".

Other particles (that do not trigger mutation):

• ẽka "like, such as" — e nučã yo ẽka gõ "the boy is like a dog".
• hẽ "from" — li yo hẽ Yuyšutó "I am from Yuyšutó."
• ku "with" (instrumental)
• łe "with" (comitative)
• łêti "in, at" — lẽ bẽšiła łêti Tikesutsó "We live in Tikesutsó."
• nẽ "to, towards"; also dative marker
• šẽ "through"
• so "of"

Pronouns

Yuyši pronouns, unlike nouns, have a basic infection system, given by fused forms of some particles and pronouns:

Pronoun	Uninflected "Nominative"	*u + "Accusative"	so + "Genitive"	łe + with	nẽ + to
1SG	li	uli	sôli	łêli	nili
2SG	de	udi	sałdi	łêdi	nẽdi
3SG	ta	tu	sałta	łayta	nina
1PL	lẽ	úlẽ	sáliru	layiru	niniru
2PL	tre	uderu	sałte	lête	nẽte
3PL	nê	une	sãle	łanye	nine

In modern Yuyši, saw (< Ivugi zag) is used as a formal V pronoun. It does not contract with any preposition, so it has the forms saw - saw - so saw - łe saw - nẽ saw.

Numerals

Yuyši has a base-10 numeral system, with root numbers from 1 to 11:
1 ši
2 sopú
3 dê
4 nê
5 elá
6 gaw
7 eku
8 gii
9 nas
10 čii
11 pi

Numbers from 12 onwards are analytical and formed as "X from ten": 12 is sopú hẽ čii, 13 is dê hẽ čii and so on. The tens are:
20 supêči (21 is ši hẽ supêči and so on)
30 derêči
40 nerêči
50 lelêči
60 gêeči
70 ikurêči
80 yurêči
90 natsêči

100 is šigra, and further hundreds are formed by suffixing -(u)gra to the root (sopúgra, dêgra, nêgra, elagra, gawgra, ékugra, giigra, nasugra). 1000 is šikú and thousands are formed by adding -(u)kú (sopukú, dekú, nekú, elakú...).
Units above 100 are said in the form "100 with X", thus 101 is šigra łe ši, 134 is šigra łe nê hẽ derêči, and so on. Thousands are added first, before the hundreds, joined with sa: 3543 is dekú sa elagra łe dê hẽ nerêči - literally "three thousands and five hundred with three on forty".

Nouns are counted by using classifiers: su is the most generic one. The pattern is "thing counted + su + numeral". As nii is the classifier for animals, "seven dogs" is gõ nii eku. The order does not change with larger numerals — "3543 dogs" is gõ nii dekú sa elagra łe dê hẽ nerêči.

Correlatives

Category ↓ / Type →	Proximal	Distal	Interrogative	Negative	Assertive exist.	Universal	Positive altern.
Attributive	gê this (one)	tifê that (one)	ka? which (one) ?	fu no	íre some(thing)	ẽrê every(thing)	yu another
Thing			hê? what?"	fuyê nothing			yučê something else
Person	gerá this one	tiferá that one	ra? who?	furá no one	íra someone	enirá everyone	yurá someone else
Time	gô now	tifô then	hô? when?	fuô never	ío sometime, somewhen	ẽrô always, everytime	yuô sometime else
Place	ge here	tifé there	he? where?	fué nowhere	íe somewhere	ẽré everywhere	yué elsewhere
Manner	geú thus, hereby	tifú thereby	hu? how?	fuyú no way	íu somehow	ẽrú everyway	yuyú otherwise
Reason	gi herefore	tifí therefore	hi? why?	fuí for no reason	éyi somewhy	ẽrí for every reason	yuí for another reason

Syntax

Conditional sentences

Conditional sentences are formed by the if clause beginning as łôli a... (łôli, translatable as "if", being a relic of the Ivugi subjunctive of "to be"); the other clause is introduced with fã a (then, literally meaning "it comes that" — fã is present of fãy "to come").

Łôli a li šida nẽ Tikesutsó, fã a ninetikło dó sa hefí.

If I go to Tikesutsó, I'll visit my parents.

Irrealis sentences use fãõ a (fãõ being the past indefinite form of fãy) instead of fã a, and the if-clause is in the past.

Łôli a li yã łayta, fãõ a yo habu.

If I had been with him/her, I'd be happier [now].

Fãõ a ta irenu, łôli a isã.

(S)he would have managed to do it, if (s)he had continued.

Basic vocabulary

• aftu "leader"
• saw "superior, senpai
• ẽku "lower grade, kōhai
• ikúy "snake"
• keráy "tribe"
• hi "forest"
• põšilẽ "light" (< Ivugi punzi-léang "bright light")
• yê "arm"
• áwra "seed"
• enáy "kiss"
• čiruši "apple" (< eatsi-rúsi "red fruit")
• dikałišê "kumys" (< dghalzi-seal "guarded, stored milk" - with simplification of earlier *dikałišisê)
• seniši "horse" (< sanísik "runner")

Texts

From The Lord of the Rings: the Fellowship of the Ring

English: It is a gift. A gift to the foes of Mordor. Why not use this Ring? Long has my father, the steward of Gondor, kept the forces of Mordor at bay. By the blood of our people are your lands kept safe. Give Gondor the weapon of the enemy; let us use it against him!

Yuyši: Ta yo yôna. Yôna nẽ burá so Môrudoru. Gê irá hi fu ye kišiła? Dó sôli, a yu dikáłuši so Gõdoru, garetsẽ tsučatenu rẽši so Môrudoru. Kó sałte yo kidikała ku buda so nẽru sáliru. Yêku nẽ Gõdoru gači so burá; yuy iwôči a lẽ šiło ga ta!

Gloss: 3SG. be.PRES.IND. gift. | gift. to. foe. of. Mordor. | this. ring. why. not. be.PRES.IND.INTERR. use-PART.PASSIVE-PRES. | father. mine. REL. be.PRES.DEF. steward. of. Gondor. long_time. keep_away-PAST.DEF. army. of. Mordor. | land. yours. be.PRES.IND. protect-PART.PASSIVE-PRES. with.INSTR. blood. of. folk. ours. | give.IMPER-DEF. to. Gondor. weapon. of. enemy. | be. may. that. we. use-PRES.DEF. against. 3SG.