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Alaia: Difference between revisions
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The prestige dialect of Alaia has 19 consonants, 4 monophthongs and 5 diphthongs. Words are always stressed on the penultimate syllable, and have a syllabic structure of (C)(C)V(C)(C) strongly adhering to the sonority hierarchy. Alaia's inflectional morphology uses suffixes exclusively, while derivational morphology makes use of prefixes, suffixes and circumfixes. Nouns inflect for four cases and two numbers, adjectives for gender and sometimes case and number as well, and verbs for 7 TAMs plus one non-finite form. Alaia's neutral word order is SOV. It has both prepositions and postpositions, adjectives and genitives usually precede nouns, and relative clauses follow nouns. Negation is achieved with a preverbal particle, subordination always by a subordinator. It is strongly dependent-marking. | The prestige dialect of Alaia has 19 consonants, 4 monophthongs and 5 diphthongs. Words are always stressed on the penultimate syllable, and have a syllabic structure of (C)(C)V(C)(C) strongly adhering to the sonority hierarchy. Alaia's inflectional morphology uses suffixes exclusively, while derivational morphology makes use of prefixes, suffixes and circumfixes. Nouns inflect for four cases and two numbers, adjectives for gender and sometimes case and number as well, and verbs for 7 TAMs plus one non-finite form. Alaia's neutral word order is SOV. It has both prepositions and postpositions, adjectives and genitives usually precede nouns, and relative clauses follow nouns. Negation is achieved with a preverbal particle, subordination always by a subordinator. It is strongly dependent-marking. | ||
===Outstanding features=== | |||
Some of the characteristics of the language the reader might find interesting are: | |||
* All '''content words''' (nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs) '''are at least two syllables long'''. (This is actually attested in the natlang Xhosa, which even adds a meaningless extra prefix to imperatives when the general rules say they should be only one syllable long.) | |||
* It has quite a number of '''affixes''' that derive verbs from verbs '''based on body parts'''. For example: arms-do means "to do sth with one's arms, to do sth with effort", finger-do means "to do something carefully", back-do means "to do sth with one's back, to do sth under pressure", etc. | |||
* It has '''affixes meaning "man/woman/boy/girl with X trait"''' (Japanese has a suffix meaning "girl with X trait": 眼鏡っ娘 ''meganekko'' 'girl with glasses', derived from 眼鏡 ''megane'' 'glasses'). | |||
* '''A few of its adverbs agree in gender with the subject or an object''' (in a similar way as in Levike's conlang above). Some of said adverbs are the Alaia equivalents of "well, badly, totally/completely, all, somewhat, not at all, also, even, not even, only". As you can see, it's mostly just the "core" adverbs that do it, place/manner/time/sentential adverbs generally don't do this. | |||
* A '''pseudo-duodecimal number system''', using base 10 for integers and decimals but base 12 for fractions (similar to the system attested in Classical Latin, see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals this article]). | |||
* '''There's an equivalent of sentential adverbs''' (like "frankly/honestly, surprisingly/curiously, sadly, (un)fortunately, hopefully, bafflingly, thankfully, ideally...", particularly when used at the beginning of the sentence followed by a little pause), but the equivalent is not adverbial in nature: '''it's verbs in the future tense''' referring to the rest of the sentence. For example, literally "it'll be sad" > sadly, "it'll be unusual" > curiously, "it'll be god-given" > fortunately, "it'll be god-resentful" > hopefully. Some are fully grammaticalized, e.g. the verb "to be sad" isn't actually used anymore, except in its future form as a sentential adverb. | |||
* '''It uses an auxiliary verb to form the imperative plural''', while using a bare form of the verb for the singular. (Actually attested in some languages.) | |||
* Practically '''every transitive verb can simply drop its direct object''' core argument and so become intransitive, if the direct object is obvious enough from context. Subjects can be dropped if they're obvious too. (Attested in Mandarin Chinese.) | |||
* '''It only has four basic colours: white, black, red-orange, green-blue.''' (Attested in Classical and Post-Classical Latin, with ''albus, niger, ruber, viridis.'' Notice how Isidore of Seville, in the 7th century, describes the colour of the sea as something between ''viridis'' and ''niger'', instead of saying it is ''caeruleus'' outright...)[/list] | |||
===Phonemic Inventory=== | ===Phonemic Inventory=== | ||