Alaia: Difference between revisions

In-universe, Alaia is a language spoken by nearly 5 million people in the Kingdom of Senjana, a kingdom that is based on a territory mostly composed of deserts with little life, but where a civilization flourished around its lake and along some of its rivers. Although the language is documented from as far back as nine centuries before the "current" stage (for this article), literacy was limited to a very few (not even much of the upper class knew how to write), and only became more widespread during the last century.

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.

* All content words (nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs) are at least two syllables long.^{{Xhosa: it even adds a meaningless extra prefix to imperatives when the general rules say they should be only one syllable long}}

* It uses a lot of parataxis, that is, it often uses clauses seemingly at the same level as the main clause where English and your typical European language would use a subordinate clause.^{{Classical Arabic, Classical Chinese}}

The phonemic inventory of the prestige dialect of Iknapu is shown in the following tables.

The prestige dialect does not have any rising diphthongs at all.

The following tables contain samples of Alaia's inflectional morphology.

The future and future-in-the-past forms have been largely replaced by the present and the imperfect respectively, and so are now largely confined to fossilized expressions (particularly sentential adverbs in the case of the future) and very high registers.

The following table contains the most common derivational affixes.

The notation "C" means that the consonant of the stem that would go in that position is geminated.

-syntax things go here