Elasian

Background

It came to me whilst doing something completely unrelated; I had a flash of insight and from then I knew: I shall express the diminutive by -ak! Unfortunately, no suitable language on which to tack this on was found. Thus, one has to be made: petakun meret — the language of the little birds.

Phonology

Consonants

Cra-,didn't save the table. Remember! p t k b d g r s(apicoalveolar voiceless) , s (double s, lamin. SEE kez+s) actually no, ts dz ps ks S(voiceless laminal shhh, post R allophone of s), Ph~f bh~v TH DH X (allophones of p t b d g, think Mediterranean, Gr kai Castilian) l, upsidedown y (l+i+V) Bet, bethet, bethetsen ~ bet, betet, betetsen (ortg.) kedz, kedzig (stative verbal pattern, cf. mirig- to be red) Kedzsen > kessen

Phonology and Orthography

		Bilabial		Labiodental		Dental		Alveolar		Postalveolar		Palatal		Velar		Glottal
Nasals		m [m]		(ɱ)1		n [n]								(ŋ)2
Plosives	voiceless	p [p]				t [t]								k [k]
	voiced	b [b]				d [d]								g [g]
Affricates	voiceless							sz [t͡s]		(ʃ)
	voiced							z [d͡z]
Fricatives	voiceless	(ɸ)3				(θ)3		s [s̺]4						x [x]		´ [h]
	voiced	(β)3				(ð)3								(ɣ)3
Trills						r [r]
Flaps						(ɾ)4
Approximant												y [j]
Lateral approximant												ly [ʎ]5

Vowels

	Front	Near-front	Central	Near-back	Back
Close
Near-close
Close-mid
Mid
Open-mid
Near-open
Open

Orthography

´ = spiritus post-vocalis asper

Morphology

Nouns

Nouns are inflected for five cases - nominative, accusative, genitive, dative and the instrumental. In addition to this they are inflected for grammatical number. This is carried out by affixes to the stem of the word which is a predominantly agglutinative process wherein the case marker is first attached and thereafter the grammatical number. Some fusion of elements can be detected in the language, thus providing an alternate analysis of e.g. the plural genitive -un as a single morpheme instead of one composed of -o(genitive) + -en(plural).

arak, arax, arako, araká, arakem

araken, araxen, arakun, arakán, arakemen

Derivational morphology

The Elasian language features a very robust derivational system enabling the transformation of nouns to verbs and back again (shifting syntactic category), the diminution of nouns, verbs and adverbs are all possible and likewise so with augmentation.

Diminutives and augmentatives

Diminutives are handled for animate words with the suffix ak. For naturally inanimate nouns this becomes ek.

E.g.

pet —> petak (bird, little bird)

ger —> gerek (story, saying~proverb)

kul -> kulak (tribe, family)

Collective nouns

Elasian also features ways to form a collective noun; this is extensively used for concepts such as a puddle (of water), days, groups of animal and such. Take for example the word ter ('a moment') from which the Elasian word for a day teret is derived. It can be broken down into ter and the inanimate collectivising morpheme -et ('a group of moments, a day').

Syntax

Word order

The default unmarked word order in Elasian is subject-object-verb as in I apples eat. The alternate word order OSV is permitted when seeking to emphasise the object; an inversion of subject and object occurs, e.g. truth I speak.

Generally speaking, qualifiers precede the noun they modify. This does not go for class IV verbs to which a large semantic space of description goes; they correspond partially to what we would term adjectives, in truth they're more akin to stative verbs and are treated as such and thus go after the noun they modify.

petaken mirigeni

"(the) little birds red.are"