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'''Czecklish''' (''Čeklis'' [tɕɛkˈlis]) is a constructed, a priori and naturalistic language from the Liberec family of languages, descended from the hypothetical Proto-Liberec language. The closest genetic relatives to Czecklish are Ostritzisch (2,451 speakers) and Leśna (4,752 speakers). Czecklish itself is spoken in the tiny village of Chrastava, with a total of 5,112 native speakers. Czecklish is heavily influenced by the West Slavic and Romance language families. The greatest substrata are Czech, Polish and Italian. Despite being in the very midst of the Standard Average European Sprachbund, Czecklish morphology is definitively non-Indo-European. Czecklish is an agglunitative, polysynthetic and noun-incorporating language. As such, it's verb conjugation and noun declension is (over)complicated and difficult. A unique characteristic of Czecklish morphology is that it utilizes polyexponential formatives to encode multiple grammatical categories. That is to say, one bound morpheme can be used to express different grammatical categories simultaneously. These morphemes, which serve as function words, are known as screeves in Czecklish linguistics. Like Georgian screeves, Czecklish screeves are a number of combinations that indicate person, number and TAM categories. Contrastive to the Georgian screeve, though, screeve endings in Czecklish encode all TAM categories - Tense, Mood and Voice. Czecklish is also unusual in that adjectives and adverbs are completely absent, being replaced with auxiliary participles and attibutive verbs. | |||
==Background== | ==Background== | ||
The | The Czecklish language, along with its relatives, have only been discovered recently. In 2004 Jans Hochbäcker recorded and described the newly-found languages briefly in his article about the linguistic diversity of the Czech Republic. Shortly after its brief mention in the said article, his discovery was forgotten until about 2010. Since then, a team of six German linguists have recorded as much about Czecklish as possible. It is speculated that is may be the only other pre-Indo-European language in Europe besides Basque. The impossibility of linking Czecklish with its Indo-European neighbors in Europe has inspired many scholars to search for its possible relatives elsewhere. Besides many pseudoscientific comparisons, the appearance of long-range linguistics gave rise to several attempts to connect Czecklish with geographically very distant language families. All hypotheses on the origin of Czecklish are controversial, and the suggested evidence is not generally accepted by most linguists. Some of these hypothetical connections are as follows:<br /> | ||
* Indo-European: Possibly a mixing of a Indo-European and Proto-Liberec. Hansing proposed that the grammatical morphology came from Proto-Liberec, while the lexicon is derived from Indo-European. Many historical linguists consider this hypothesis unrealistic, as the first Indo-European loanwords entered Czecklish vocabulary in the 200s. It would be highly improbable that a mixing had occurred before the arrival of the Romans. There is evidence of language contact before the Roman conquest of Germania, though. The frequent trading between PL and PIE peoples during the late Neolithic and Chalcolithic did result in some loanwords (68 total), but nowhere near the number proposed (>1,600).<br /> | |||
* Tyrsenian: This relation is proposed mainly on geographic location. The closest Tyrsenian language to the Liberec sprachraum is Rhaetic. As Rhaetic itself is unclassified - being either a language isolate or Indo-European - this classification is controversial. So little is known about the Tyrsenian languages that the claim of genetic relation is ridiculous. Almost all linguists reject this hypothesis, but for the few that support it as an option. Those that do claim that Rhaetic was an isolate, and that the geographical location of Proto-Liberec was most likely in Austria, near the Alps.<br /> | |||
* Northwest Caucasian: This the most likely candidate. Northwest Caucasian is a language family renowned for their highly agglutinative verbal systems. Systems so complex as to contain the entirety of the syntactic structure in the verb. Liberec is also highly agglutinative and also has complex verbal systems. Other similarities between the two families are ergative-absolutive alignment, and left-branching. However, the geographical distance and cultural differences make a relationship between Czecklish and Northwest Caucasian doubtful.<br /> | |||
==Phonology== | ==Phonology== | ||