New Karanesa

New Karanesa Karanesa
Progress: 74%
Type
Agglutinative
Alignment
Austronesian
Head direction
Initial	Mixed		Final
Primary word order
Subject-verb-object
Tonal
No
Declensions
No
Conjugations
Yes
Genders
None
Verbs conjugate according to...
Voice		Mood
Person		Number
Tense		Aspect

New Karanesa (IPA: [kaˈranɛsa]) is a Nentan language spoken in Quillan. Derived from the former prestige language in the Quill Kingdom, Imperial Karanesa, New Karanesa is a constructed language maintained to make reading of Karanesa Empire-era and earlier works easier. It is assumed to be mostly compatible with Imperial Karanesa, though they are separated by time, so its compatibility is impossible to evaluate for certain.

Introduction

Main article: Rokadong

Etymology

Karanesa is derived from Karane (a people group and the name for one of the Quillan calendar's epochs) + -äsa ("from the").

Phonology

Main article: New Karanesa phonology

Consonants

Consonant phonemes

	Labial		Alveolar		Retroflex		Palatal		Velar
Nasal	m	mː	n	nː	ɳ		ɲ	ɲː	ŋ	ŋː
Stop	p	b	t	d	ʈ	ɖ	t͡s	d͡ʒ	k	ɡ
Fricative	ɸ		s	z	ʂ	ʐ			x	ɣ
Approximant				l				j		w
Trill				r						(ʀ)

Notes

• The alveolar nasals and stops are prescribed a dental place of articulation, with the tongue touching the teeth. However, because New Karanesa is essentially always a second language, whether or not they are pronounced dental or alveolar depends heavily on which the speaker's native language has.
• Voiced plosives /b d g/ become fricatives [β ð ʒ] when a front vowel is adjacent to them.
• The voiced velar fricative [ɣ] is commonly pronounced uvular [ʁ], and may even be a uvular trill [ʀ].

Vowels

Vowel phonemes

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i		u
Close-mid	e ej	ə	o ow
Open-mid	ɛ		ɔ
Open		a	ɒː

Notes

• Imperial Karanesa's long vowel [ɒː] is preserved, as seen in this table. However, it is often pronounced with the same quality as its short equivalent.

Prosody

New Karanesa is generally described as mora-timed, with short vowels and coda sonorants each providing one mora to the syllable, and long vowels and diphthongs providing two moras.

Stress and pitch

New Karanesa is a stress or dynamic-accent language, where stressed syllables are louder and may be lengthened slightly. The Karanesan family does not have a pitch accent system, unlike Rokadong.

Stress is usually described as phonemic in Karanesa. However, Karanesa does have a strict limit on stressed syllables: there cannot be an

Phonotactics

New Karanesa is a (C)(S)V(S) language, where S is an sonorant. However, a syllable cannot have all three slots filled simultaneously; it can only fill two.

New Karanesa's diphthongs are /aj aw/ and any combination of /j/ + back vowel or /w/ + front vowel.

The following strings of phonemes that may occur due to affixes or compounding are not allowed:

• Any phoneme followed by itself; if a conflict occurs, one is dropped for consonants. Vowel handling under this rule differs between dialects, though usually either they combine to a long vowel, or the latter vowel is given hard attack.
• Two consecutive consonants that differ only in voicing; if a conflict occurs, then the voiced vowel is kept unless the prior vowel is short (/i u ɛ ɔ a/) and unstressed, then the unvoiced consonant is kept.

Orthography

Main article: New Karanesa orthography

New Karanesa may be either written using the Latin alphabet or the Nentan script.

Romanization

New Karanesa consonants are written as seen in the IPA, with the following exceptions:

• /ɲ/ is written as ny
• /ɲː/ is written as nny
• /ɳ/ is written as nr
• All other retroflex consonants are written as a doubling of its alveolar counterpart
• /ŋ/ is written as nh
• /ŋː/ is written as ng
• All other geminated consonants are written as a doubling of its short counterpart
• /ts/ is written as c
• /dʒ/ is written as j
• /x/ is written as h
• /ɣ/ is written as rh
• /ʃ/ is written as sh
• /j/ is written as y in the onset (and in i-on-glide diphthongs) and i in the coda (in i-off-glide diphthongs)
• /w/ is written as w in the onset and u in the coda (in diphthongs)

New Karanesa's short vowels are /i u ɛ ɔ a/; these are written with <i u e o a> respectively. The long vowels /ej ow e o ɒː/ are written like their short vowel versions, but with an acute accent <í ú é ó á>. The schwa is written as <ä>, though it remains unwritten if nonfinal and its onset is not a sonorant.

Syntax

Constituent order

In transitive sentences, New Karanesa tends to place the agent before the verb and the objects after the verb. However, New Karanesa does not have a subject in the Indo-European sense, so this word order is notated "AVO" rather than "SVO". Additionally, the verb can be moved from agent trigger into patient trigger with the prefix ko. Both the agent and direct object can also be marked individually as such with kwa and po respectively. As a result, the word order of New Karanesa is relatively free, though AVO is the most common word order, followed by OVA.

Noun phrase

Adjectives and determiners follow the noun they apply to. Much as in the natural language Spanish, numerals are often considered adjectives, but are placed before the noun, rather than after it. Prepositions and case particles precede the noun they apply to.

When placed in the genitive, a noun is considered an adjective, and is placed after the noun it applies to.

Verb phrase

Adverbs are considered a form of adjective, and follow the verb they apply to. However, unlike adjectives, adverbs take on the same tense affix as the verb they apply to. This is likely a holdover from when all adjectives were stative verbs.

Other resources

• Rokadong on Star Dragon's Den