Pokutii

From Linguifex
Jump to navigation Jump to search


Pókutiì [pókuʈî:], "Our language", is the language of both Agurnum (Aguúnjuù [agǔɲû:]) and its colonies in the Land of Rain of Grundet.

Currently I am not working on this, but hopefully I can return to this important language later.

Grammar

Morphologically somewhere between isolating and agglunative.

Mutation:

Consonantal change from voiceless to voiced (or corresponding pair) in the first syllable indicates singular to plural transition. Mass nouns always begin with voiced consonants.

Tone change indicates person in verbs.

Phonology

Consonants

Bilabial Alveolar Retroflex Palatal Velar Glottal
Nasal n ɲ
Plosive p b ʈ ɖ k g
Fricative ɸ h
Lateral app. ɭ

Co-articulated approximant: [w]

Longer duration of consonants is indicated in the script by doubling the letter: pellee [peɭ:e:]

In romanization, palatal nasal is written /nj/ [ɲ]

Vowels

Front Back
Close i u
Near-Close ɪ ʊ
Close-Mid e
Open-mid ɔ
Open a ɑ ɒ

Longer duration of vowels is also indicated in the script with double letters.

Tones

Pókutìi has five distinct (phonemic) tones: low, mid, high, rising and falling which alter the pitch of the neighbouring syllables as well (tone sandhi). In romanization these are shown with acute accent (high & rising in long) and grave accent (low & falling in long): á [á], à [à], aá [ǎ:] and aà [â:].

Middle, dipping and peaking tones arise from tone sandhi (?)

Orthography

Pokutii.jpg

Dúloopewu is the official, slightly featural abugida of Pókutiì used in formal writing. Faster demotic Peewu is approaching syllabic script since vowel marks are fused into the consonant graphemes.

Graphemes can be fused into one larger like matryoshka dolls. The script is written from left to right or from bottom to top (when turned 90 degrees counter-clockwise) and sometimes with a combination of these ("fan writing" from left bottom vertically up and then horizontally to rigth).