Ditab

Ditab /tibak/ is a language of Ldon Źama inspired by Iau, Natqgu and Semitic languages (particularly Biblical Hebrew).

Phonology

Ditab has 4 consonants: b d t k, and a large inventory of vowels (about as many as Khmer), with 3 tones (level, rising, falling).

All four consonants have fricative allophones /β ð θ x/ after vowels, unless they're geminated.

Orthography

Ditab has an ASCII friendly orthography in addition to the 'default' one, where some vowels are written with consonant letters.

Morphology

Ditab morphology is entirely suffixing except for adjectives. Adjectives are a small closed class and work by infixing and/or changing the vowels in the noun according to a predictable umlaut pattern.

There is no grammatical gender, and two declension classes:

• Class one nouns mark the construct state with the suffix -bẽ́.
• Class two nouns mark the absolute state with -bẽ́.

Verbs inflect by aspect but not tense. Curiously, the imperfective and perfective forms are interchanged when the verb follows the interrogative particle kủ-.

Tibak is borderline polysynthetic in that some verbs have to incorporate their objects. Tibak also uses bipersonal inflections.

Syntax

Ditab is strictly OVS.