Zlïke

Todo: change name to Zlïce

Zlïce (native name ihr zlïcer Zießammel) is a language of the country Zlïcerẅẅs in Central Etalocin. It's aesthetically inspired by German.

Phonology

Vowels: a e i o u w ë ï ẅ /ɑ ɛ ɪ ɔ ʊ ʏ ə ɨ ʊ/. Final unstressed e is pronounced as if written ë. Vowels may be doubled or glottalized; the latter is marked with the letter h.

In addition there are a few diphthongs: ei ëi ie ïe au ua /ɛɪ əɨ ɪə ɨə ɑʊ ʊɑ/.

Consonants: b p f pf d t th g c/k ch h s z ß m n ng l r j /b p v f d t t' g k k' ʔ ʃ ts s m n ŋ l ɾ j/

Final ejectives are realized as unreleased stops, whereas final voiceless stops may be spirantized as in Irish English or Liverpool English.

Dialects

There are two rough dialect areas, Upper Zlïce and Lower Zlïce. The former includes the dialect of the capital city Raudehn.

Morphology

Zlïce is polysynthetic in that it features noun incorporation with certain verbs. It is unlike most other polysynthetic languages in that word lengths are comparable to the average Germanic or Finnic language. These is because the morpheme count in an average Zlïce word is much smaller than in most polysynthetic languages.

Nouns

Zlïce nouns come in four genders: personal, human, animate nonhuman and inanimate. Technically the personal gender isn't really a noun gender because it only includes pronouns but it's treated as a gender for the sake of verb agreement.

Noun morphology includes case, number and incorporated adjective. Cases and numbers are mostly agglutinating suffixes while incorporating adjectives are prefixes with occasional umlaut, which manifests as vowel backing if the umlauting vowel is e, i or w. Occasionally adjectives cause suppletion of the noun.

Adjectives

Incorporating adjectives are a small closed class, with others being expressed as verbs.

Constituent order

Zlïce is predicate-first like Lushootseed.

Example:

Rahin an mëjinnen ei Schaapau ja Pfernpfuh.

The gardens in Furnifoo are indeed beautiful.