Elasian
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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
| 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] | x [x] | ´ [h] | |||||||||||
| voiced | (β)3 | (ð)3 | (ɣ)3 | ||||||||||||||
| Trills | r [r] | ||||||||||||||||
| Flaps | (ɾ)5 | ||||||||||||||||
| Approximant | y [j] | ||||||||||||||||
| Lateral approximant | (ʎ) | ||||||||||||||||
Vowels
| Front | Near-front | Central | Near-back | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Close | |||||
| Near-close | |||||
| Close-mid | |||||
| Mid | |||||
| Open-mid | |||||
| Near-open | |||||
| Open |
Phonotactics
Orthography
´ = spiritus post-vocalis asper
Grammar
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.
| word | diminutive | gloss |
|---|---|---|
| pet | petak | bird > little bird |
| ger | gerek | story > saying, proverb |
| kul | kulak | tribe > family |
| pasz | paszek | stone > pebble |
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"