Alaia
| Alaia | |
|---|---|
| alaia | |
| Pronunciation | [[Help:IPA|aˈla.ja]] |
| Created by | Serafín |
| Date | 2015 |
| Native to | Kingdom of Senjana |
| Native speakers | 5 million () |
Odolic
| |
Early forms | Proto-Odolic
|
Dialects |
|
| Official status | |
| Regulated by | None. Spelling largely follows pronunciation of the most prestigious dialect. The language of a few rather recent authors is deemed worth imitating. |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | none |
A language within brackets in superscript form means that the previously mentioned characteristic is found in an identical or similar way in that language. For example, "{Xhosa}" stands for "something identical/similar exists in Xhosa". This is for people interested in those natlangs, and may even help justifying the naturalness of the conlang (but just "may").
Alaia is a conlang that started being created by user Serafín in 2015. It is the latest iteration of a series of similar conlangs, beginning with the conlang "Meftla" in 2009. It is influenced by Latin and Standard Arabic in all aspects except for the lexicon, though many particular details have also been taken from, or inspired by, many other languages. The lexicon is a priori.
In-universe, Alaia is a language spoken by nearly 5 million people in the Kingdom of Senjana, a kingdom that is based on a territory mostly composed of deserts with little life, but where a civilization flourished around its lake and along some of its rivers. Although the language is documented from as far back as nine centuries before the "current" stage (for this article), literacy was limited to a very few (not even much of the upper class knew how to write), and only became more widespread during the last century.
Typological overview dump
The prestige dialect of Alaia has 19 consonants, 4 monophthongs and 5 diphthongs. Words are always stressed on the penultimate syllable, and have a syllabic structure of (C)(C)V(C)(C) strongly adhering to the sonority hierarchy. Alaia's inflectional morphology uses suffixes exclusively, while derivational morphology makes use of prefixes, suffixes and circumfixes. Nouns inflect for four cases and two numbers, adjectives for gender and sometimes case and number as well, and verbs for 7 TAMs plus one non-finite form. Alaia's neutral word order is SOV. It has both prepositions and postpositions, adjectives and genitives usually precede nouns, and relative clauses follow nouns. Negation is achieved with a preverbal particle, subordination always by a subordinator. Polar questions are marked by a particle in second position, content questions by in-situ interrogative pronouns. It is strongly dependent-marking.
Outstanding features
- All content words (nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs) are at least two syllables long.{Xhosa: in fact, Xhosa even adds a meaningless extra prefix to imperatives when the general rules say they should be only one syllable long}
- It has quite a number of affixes that derive verbs from verbs based on body parts. For example: arms-do means “to do sth with one's arms, to do sth with effort’, finger-do means “to do something carefully”, back-do means “to do sth with one's back, to do sth under pressure”, etc.
- It has affixes meaning "man/woman/boy/girl with X trait".{Japanese has a suffix meaning "girl with X trait": 眼鏡っ娘 meganekko ‘girl with glasses’, derived from 眼鏡 megane ‘glasses’}
- A few of its adverbs agree in gender with the subject or an object. Some of said adverbs are the Alaia equivalents of "well, badly, totally/completely, all, somewhat, not at all, also, even, not even, only". As the reader can tell from this list, it's mostly just the "core" adverbs that do it, place/manner/time/sentential adverbs generally don't do this.
- A pseudo-duodecimal decimal number system, using base 10 for integers and decimals but base 12 for fractions.{Classical Latin, see this article}
- There's an equivalent of sentential adverbs (like "frankly/honestly, surprisingly/curiously, sadly, (un)fortunately, hopefully, bafflingly, thankfully, ideally...", particularly when used at the beginning of the sentence followed by a little pause), but the equivalent is certain verbs in the future tense referring to the rest of the sentence. For example, literally “it'll be sad” > sadly, “it'll be unusual” -> curiously, “it'll be god-given” -> fortunately, “it'll be god-resentful” > hopefully. Some are fully grammaticalized, e.g. the verb “to be sad” isn't actually used anymore, except in its future form as a sentential adverb.
- It uses an auxiliary verb to form the imperative plural, while using a bare form of the verb for the singular.
- Practically every transitive verb can simply drop its direct object core argument and so become intransitive, if the direct object is obvious enough from context. Subjects can be dropped if they're obvious too.{Mandarin Chinese}
- It only has four basic colours: white, black, red-orange, green-blue.{Classical and Post-Classical Latin: albus, niger, ruber, viridis. As an interesting example, Isidore of Seville (7th c.) describes the colour of the sea as sth. between viridis and niger, instead of calling it caeruleus.}
- It uses a lot of parataxis, that is, it often uses clauses seemingly at the same level as the main clause where English and your typical European language would use a subordinate clause.{Classical Arabic, Classical Chinese}
Phonemic Inventory
The phonemic inventory of the prestige dialect of Iknapu is shown in the following tables.
| Labial | Dental/Alveolar | Postalveolar | Velar | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plosives/Affricate | Voiceless | p | t | c [tʃ] | k |
| Voiced | b | d | j [dʒ] | g | |
| Nasal | m | n | |||
| Fricative | Voiceless | f | s | sh [ʃ] | x |
| Voiced | v | z | (zh [ʒ])1 | ||
| Rhotic | r [r ~ ɾ]2 | ||||
| Lateral approximant | l | ||||
| Approximant | u [w] | i [j] | |||
1/ʒ/ is a marginal phoneme, mostly used in borrowings from foreign languages and in words used in the standard language taken from particular dialects.
2[ɾ] is the most common allophone of /r/ next to a consonant, although [r] can also appear there.
All consonants can appear long except for /r, j, w/.
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| High | i | u | |
| Mid | e [e ~ ə]1 | ||
| Low | a | ||
1/e/ is pronounced [e] in stressed syllables, [ə] in unstressed ones.
| Falling to i | ei [ei ~ əi]1 | ai | ui |
|---|---|---|---|
| Falling to u | eu | au |
1/ei/ is pronounced [ei] in stressed syllables, [əi] in unstressed ones.
The prestige dialect does not have any rising diphthongs at all.{Classical Latin, Classical Arabic}
Morphology
Inflectional morphology
The following tables contain samples of Alaia's inflectional morphology.
| Singular | Plural | |
|---|---|---|
| Nominative | kasa | kasat |
| Accusative | kasar | kasart |
| Genitive | kasai | kasan |
| Instrumental | kasas | kasast |
Some human nouns have an alternative nominative plural ending -l, meaning 'the distinguished [noun]' e.g. rune 'man' has both runet 'men' and runel 'the distinguished men' for its plural forms.{Classical Arabic}
| Singular | Plural | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Masc. | Fem. | Neut. | Masc. | Fem. | Neut. | ||
| Non-substantive | pirke | pirku | pirka | pirke | pirku | pirka | |
| Substantive | Nominative | pirke | pirku | pirka | pirket | pirkut | pirkat |
| Accusative | pirker | pirkur | pirkar | pirkert | pirkurt | pirkart | |
| Genitive | pirkei | pirkui | pirkai | pirken | pirkun | pirkan | |
| Instrumental | pirkes | pirkus | pirkas | pirkest | pirkust | pirkast | |
As the table shows, non-substantive attributive adjectives within noun phrases only inflect for gender, while substantive adjectives have the same inflection nouns have.
| Infinitive | tresin |
|---|---|
| Present | tresi |
| Imperfect | tresik |
| Perfect | tresis |
| Pluperfect | tresirk |
| Future | tresish |
| Future-in-the-past | tresix |
The future and future-in-the-past forms have been largely replaced by the present and the imperfect respectively, and so are now largely confined to fossilized expressions (particularly sentential adverbs in the case of the future) and very high registers.
Derivational morphology
The following table contains the most common derivational affixes.
| To nouns, adjectives, adverbs | To verbs |
|---|---|
| acca... - group of [noun] teC... - community of [noun] |
a...in - to [noun] ...in - to [noun] |
The notation "C" means that the consonant of the stem that would go in that position is geminated.