User:Frrurtu/Sandbox

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

Gaju (English: /'gɑːd͡ʒuː/, Gaju: ['gäɟu], 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

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/.

Vowels

	Front	Central	Back
High	i /i/		u /u/
Near-high	ii /ɪ/
Mid	e /e/	uu /ə/	o /o/
Near-low	ee /ɛ/		aa /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 aa e ee i ii o u uu
• Low: à àà è èè ì ìì ò ù ùù
• Rising: â ââ ê êê î îî ô û ûû
• Falling: ǎ ǎǎ ě ěě ǐ ǐǐ ǒ ǔ ǔǔ

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.

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) khaa- (imperative)
Tense	-bu-/-bo-/-du-/-do-/-ju-/-jo- (past) -mi-/-me-/-ni-/-ne-/-nyi-/-nye- (future)
Verb Root	any verb
Auxiliary Verb	-(k)àng ("to be able to") -(à)kà ("to need to") -(d)èng ("to want to") -(g)ùng ("to force to") and others

Nouns

Nouns can take the following cases:

Case	Suffix
nominative	(none)
accusative	-(g)e (singular) -(d)i (plural)
dative	-(ty)â
ablative	-(d)a
locative	-(l)î
comitative	-(aa)daa
instrumental	-(w)ǎm
vocative	-(a)saa

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	nà
your	kòm
his/her/its	fôm
our	mà
all of your	tsà
their	dàà

Independent particles

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

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

The following question words are used:

English	Old Gaju
who/whom	ta
what	ti
when	dìn
where	dâng
why	dìtà
how	dûng

See also

• Rttirri
• Verse:Rttirria