Skerre
| Skerre | |
|---|---|
| Pronunciation | [/skɛr/] |
| Created by | Doug Ball |
| Date | 1994 |
Skerre
| |
Skerre, [skɛr], is a constructed language whose invention began in 1994 and continues to the present. The language has been inspired by many natural languages over its history, but the language presented herein is perhaps most inspired by Philippine languages like Tagalog, Oceanic languages like Tongan and Nêlêmwa, Pacific Northwest Coast languages like Coast Tsimshian, Lushootseed, and Siuslaw, and Caddoan languages like Wichita.
Introduction
The fictitious speakers of Skerre are small in number and live in the forests of the foothills of the western side of the Western Interior range. They are hunter-gatherers. Dialect variation among the different bands is not significant and is largely confined to lexical differences. The language appears to be an isolate, with no known congeners.
Phonology
Orthography
Skerre is written using the roman alphabet. The symbols employed follow expected IPA values, excepting that /kʷ/ is qu, /ɾ/ is r, /j/ is y, and /ɑ/ is a. (Additionally, /t͡s/ is always written without the tiebar.) Long vowels are written as double vowels.
Consonants
The consonant phonemes of Skerre are given in the chart below: Stops & Affricates t > ts k kw P Fricatives s h Nasals n Liquids R Glides j w Stops and affricates are voiced after nasals; pre-consonantal nasals assimilate to the place of the following sound. The phonemes /s/, > /ts/, and /n/ all palatalize before /j/. The precise articulation of /h/ depends greatly on the following vowel (or preceding one, if none follows).
Vowels
The vowel phonemes of Skerre can be divided into two classes, long and short: short: I, E, A∼a, o long: i;, E:, A:, o: The two sets of vowels vary both in terms of length (predominantly) and quality. There are no diphthongs and no tonal contrasts.
Stress
Stress regularly occurs near the right edge of words. Words with a final short vowel (with or without a final consonant) are stressed on the penultimate syllable, e.g. /kˈisi/ ‘ghost’. while words with a final long vowel (again, with or without a final consonant) are stressed on that vowel, e.g. /heˈtiː/ ‘sibling’s child’.
Phonotactics
Roots are almost all CVV(C) or CV(V)CV(V)(C) in shape (parentheses indicate optional sounds; VV indicates a long vowel). Consonant clusters occur (especially initially), but only at morphological boundaries.
Morphology
Skerre is a mildly synthetic language, though a number of important grammatical categories are expressed through function words. The syntax is strongly head-initial, with heads appearing before all kinds of dependents.
Nouns
Skerre has no grammatical gender and, in fact, nouns have no obligatory inflection. They can be simple, compound, or derived, with a fair number falling in the last category.
Number
Skerre nouns are not obligatorily marked for number, yet there are two number(-like) categories present: the distributive and collective. The distributive is marked with partical reduplication: the reduplicant consists of the base’s initial syllable with a long vowel, e.g. kina ‘bird’ – kiikina ‘various birds’. The distributive signals a number of individuated entities distributed over space, time, or types. The collective is marked with the prefix tin-, as in tinkina ‘flock of birds’. The collective signals that the group is to be considered as a whole.
Prenominals
Syntactic relationships between nouns and other parts of sentences are signaled by function words before the noun, which have been called prenominals. These function words encode both status (proper or common) and syntactic function (including what adpositions normally encode). The forms are: