Alaia

Alaia
alaia
Pronunciation	[[Help:IPA|aˈla.ja]]
Created by	Serafín
Date	2015
Native to	Kingdom of Senjana
Native speakers	5 million ()
Language family	Odolic Alaia
Early forms	Proto-Odolic Old Alaia
Dialects	Iknapu (most prestigious) Ammaka Arpate Keassu Sili Atta Ulpane Vedeti
Official status
Regulated by	None. Spelling largely follows pronunciation of the most prestigious dialect. The language of a few rather recent authors is deemed worth imitating.
Language codes
ISO 639-3	none

A language within brackets in superscript form means that the previously mentioned characteristic is found in an identical or similar way in that language. For example, "^{Xhosa}" stands for "something identical/similar exists in Xhosa". This is for people interested in those natlangs, and may even help justifying the naturalness of the conlang (but just "may").

Alaia is a conlang that started being created by user Serafín in 2015. It is the latest iteration of a series of similar conlangs, beginning with the conlang "Meftla" in 2009. It is influenced by Latin and Standard Arabic in all aspects except for the lexicon, though many particular details have also been taken from, or inspired by, many other languages. The lexicon is a priori.

In-universe, Alaia is a language spoken by nearly 5 million people in the Kingdom of Senjana, a kingdom that is based on a territory mostly composed of deserts with little life, but where a civilization flourished around its lake and along some of its rivers. Although the language is documented from as far back as nine centuries before the "current" stage (for this article), literacy was limited to a very few (not even much of the upper class knew how to write), and only became more widespread during the last century.

Typological overview dump

The prestige dialect of Alaia has 19 consonants, 4 monophthongs and 5 diphthongs. Words are always stressed on the penultimate syllable, and have a syllabic structure of (C)(C)V(C)(C) strongly adhering to the sonority hierarchy. Alaia's inflectional morphology uses suffixes exclusively, while derivational morphology makes use of prefixes, suffixes and circumfixes. Nouns inflect for four cases and two numbers, adjectives for gender and sometimes case and number as well, and verbs for 7 TAMs plus one non-finite form. Alaia's neutral word order is SOV. It has both prepositions and postpositions, adjectives and genitives usually precede nouns, and relative clauses follow nouns. Negation is achieved with a preverbal particle, subordination always by a subordinator. It is strongly dependent-marking.

Outstanding features

Some characteristics of the language that the reader might find interesting are:

• All content words (nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs) are at least two syllables long.^{{Xhosa: it even adds a meaningless extra prefix to imperatives when the general rules say they should be only one syllable long}}
• It has quite a number of affixes that derive verbs from verbs based on body parts. For example: arms-do means “to do sth with one's arms, to do sth with effort’, finger-do means “to do something carefully”, back-do means “to do sth with one's back, to do sth under pressure”, etc.
• It has affixes meaning "man/woman/boy/girl with X trait".^{{Japanese has a suffix meaning "girl with X trait": 眼鏡っ娘 meganekko ‘girl with glasses’, derived from 眼鏡 megane ‘glasses’)}}
• A few of its adverbs agree in gender with the subject or an object (in a similar way as in Levike's conlang above). Some of said adverbs are the Alaia equivalents of "well, badly, totally/completely, all, somewhat, not at all, also, even, not even, only". As the reader can tell from this list, it's mostly just the "core" adverbs that do it, place/manner/time/sentential adverbs generally don't do this.
• A pseudo-duodecimal number system, using base 10 for integers and decimals but base 12 for fractions.^{{Classical Latin, see this article}}
• There's an equivalent of sentential adverbs (like "frankly/honestly, surprisingly/curiously, sadly, (un)fortunately, hopefully, bafflingly, thankfully, ideally...", particularly when used at the beginning of the sentence followed by a little pause), but the equivalent is not adverbial in nature: it is verbs in the future tense referring to the rest of the sentence. For example, literally “it'll be sad” > sadly, “it'll be unusual” -> curiously, “it'll be god-given” -> fortunately, “it'll be god-resentful” > hopefully. Some are fully grammaticalized, e.g. the verb “to be sad” isn't actually used anymore, except in its future form as a sentential adverb.
• It uses an auxiliary verb to form the imperative plural, while using a bare form of the verb for the singular.
• Practically every transitive verb can simply drop its direct object core argument and so become intransitive, if the direct object is obvious enough from context. Subjects can be dropped if they're obvious too.^{{Mandarin Chinese}}
• It only has four basic colours: white, black, red-orange, green-blue.^{{(Post-)Classical Latin: albus, niger, ruber, viridis. Isidore (7th c.) describes the colour of the sea as sth between viridis and niger, instead calling it caeruleus}}
• It uses a lot parataxis, that is, it often uses clauses seemingly at the same level as the main clause where English and your typical European language would use a subordinate clause.^{{Classical Arabic, Classical Chinese}}

Phonemic Inventory

The phonemic inventory of the prestige dialect of Iknapu is shown in the following tables.

Consonant phonemes

		Labial	Dental/Alveolar	Postalveolar	Velar
Plosives/Affricate	Voiceless	p	t	c [tʃ]	k
	Voiced	b	d	j [dʒ]	g
Nasal		m	n
Fricative	Voiceless	f	s	sh [ʃ]	x
	Voiced	v	z	(zh [ʒ])1
Rhotic			r [r ~ ɾ]2
Lateral			l

¹/ʒ/ is a marginal phoneme, mostly used in borrowings and in words used in the standard language borrowed from dialects.
²[ɾ] is the most common allophone of /r/ in syllable-final position, although [r] can also appear there. [r] is used in all other phonological contexts.

All consonants can appear long except for r.

Vowel monophthong phonemes

	Front	Central	Back
High	i		u
Mid	e [e ~ ə]1
Low		a

¹/e/ is pronounced [e] in stressed syllables, [ə] in unstressed ones.

Falling diphthong phonemes

Falling to i	ei [ei ~ əi]1	ai	ui
Falling to u	eu	au

¹/ei/ is pronounced [ei] in stressed syllables, [əi] in unstressed ones. The prestige dialect does not have any rising diphthongs at all.

Morphology

-show sample noun, adjective and verb inflection

-show a comprehensive list of the derivational morphemes, putting the ones derived from body parts apart. include examples

Syntax

-show the duodecimal-ish number system

-show the contexts where adjectives gain the inflection of nouns