Quibbertoot

From Linguifex
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Quibbertoot (native name kw'ibařsa ukwan) is the official language of Dagestan in Irta, by the Quibbertoot people (kw'ibařtutař, literally "womb people").

Diachronic history

Quibbertoot is a centum language, phonologically closest to Germanic languages. It's notable for preserving the PIE glottalics as weak ejectives though in some idiolects they are realized as unaspirated stops.

That said, Quibbertoot vowel phonology is very innovative, especially the way it vocalizes syllabic resonants.

Morphology

Quibbertoot nouns do not have grammatical gender. There is however a collective suffix -ař which is cognate with the feminine gender in late PIE.

Notably, cases in Quibbertoot are agglutinative and a somewhat open class. Quibbertoot exhibits suffixaufnahme with the genitive case -sa. The cases that directly continue PIE cases are:

  • the genitive -sa
  • the dative -mə
  • the instrumental/ergative -nā
  • the ablative -mət'

Morphological pluralization is generally uncommon in Quibbertoot and occurs for very few nouns, which have irregular forms.

Quibbertoot is an ergative language, like many Caucasian languages.

Verbs

A Semitic-style shift? or something close to Hittite?

Ablaut is very productive in Quibbertoot and has been subject to a lot of analogy -- some verbs have ablauting vowels which historically come from vowels in prefixes.

Evidentiality

Quibbertoot has a complex system of evidential and modal particles which are always placed at the beginning of the sentence. This is a relic of VSO order in proto-Quibbertoot.