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. Polar questions are marked by a particle in second position, content questions by in-situ interrogative pronouns. It is strongly dependent-marking.

Outstanding features

• 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 decimal 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 certain 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.^{{Classical and Post-Classical Latin: albus, niger, ruber, viridis. Isidore (7th c.) describes the colour of the sea as sth between viridis and niger, instead of calling it caeruleus}}
• It uses a lot of 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 from foreign languages and in words used in the standard language taken from particular dialects.
²[ɾ] is the most common allophone of /r/ next to a consonant, although [r] can also appear there.

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

Inflectional morphology

The following tables contain samples of Alaia's inflectional morphology.

Inflection of kasa 'foot'

	Singular	Plural
Nominative	kasa	kasat
Accusative	kasar	kasart
Genitive	kasai	kasan
Instrumental	kasas	kasast

Some human nouns have an alternative nominative plural ending -l, meaning 'the distinguished [noun]' e.g. rune 'man' has both runet 'men' and runel 'the distinguished men' for its plural forms.^{{Classical Arabic}}

Inflection of pirke 'red'

		Singular			Plural
		Masc.	Fem.	Neut.	Masc.	Fem.	Neut.
Non-substantive		pirke	pirku	pirka	pirke	pirku	pirka
Substantive	Nominative	pirke	pirku	pirka	pirket	pirkut	pirkat
	Accusative	pirker	pirkur	pirkar	pirkert	pirkurt	pirkart
	Genitive	pirkei	pirkui	pirkai	pirken	pirkun	pirkan
	Instrumental	pirkes	pirkus	pirkas	pirkest	pirkust	pirkast

As the table shows, non-substantive attributive adjectives within noun phrases only inflect for gender, while substantive adjectives have the same inflection nouns have.

Inflection of tresin 'to fly'

Infinitive	tresin
Present	tresi
Imperfect	tresik
Perfect	tresis
Pluperfect	tresirk
Future	tresish
Future-in-the-past	tresix

The future and future-in-the-past forms have been largely replaced by the present and the imperfect respectively, and so are now largely confined to fossilized expressions (particularly sentential adverbs in the case of the future) and very high registers.

Derivational morphology

The following table contains the most common derivational affixes.

Derivational affixes

To nouns, adjectives, adverbs

To verbs

acca... - group of [noun] teC... - community of [noun] cai... - collection of [noun] pu... - origin of [noun] ris... - place where [noun] is sold ru...u - quality of [adj.] jana...a - quality of [adj.] an...e,u,a - agent of [verb] xin... - place where [verb]ing occurs leu... - very [adj.]; thing beyond [noun] us... - full of [noun] ciC... - lacking [noun] ...ark - [adj.]-ly

a...in - to [noun] ...in - to [noun] iC... - resultative of [verb] me... - causative of [verb] jin... - to [verb] as a surprise tril... - to [verb] with one's eyes; [verb] carefully gui... - to [verb] with one's mouth; [verb] by speaking kun... - to [verb] with one's forehead; [verb] with purpose, deliberately tei... - to [verb] with one's arms; [verb] with effort krar... - to [verb] with one's back; [verb] under pressure

The notation "C" means that the consonant of the stem that would go in that position is geminated.