Europaico: Difference between revisions

The following table gives the consonants in the Latin script orthography, a phonemic transcription in IPA (between slashes) and the corresponding glyph in Europaico's native alphabet.

Palatal and post-alveolar consonants other than /j/ will be referred collectively as 'palatals'. All of these consonants might alternatively be pronounced as a palatalized alveolars (/nʲ/ for ''ň'', /tʲ/ for ''ť'' and so on) if that's easier for the speaker.

As most auxlangs, Europaico is very lax with its phonotactics, only requiring the following elements to be met:

This allows for clusters in the source languages to be preserved in Europaico (including the relatively complex ones allowed word-initially in Slavic languages). This, of course, can be marketed as a feature allowing vocabulary to be integrated into the language with as little distortion as possible (or be regarded as an awful decision for an auxlang).

Polysyllabic words bear fixed, predictable prosodic stress determined as follows:

== Orthographies ==

The letters of Europaico's variant of the Latin alphabet are as follows:

This orthography uses the Western Romance strategy of contrasting a soft ''C'' (read as /ts/ before ''E'' and ''I'') and a hard ''C'' (read as /k/ otherwise), with ''Ç'' being used to force the soft /ts/ pronunciation and the triigraphs ''que'' and ''qui'' for /ke/ and /ki/. Even though ''G'' lacks a soft pronunciation, Europaico also requires the trigraphs ''gue'' and ''gui'' for /ɡe/ and /ɡi/ in order to fit the expectations for a Romance-like orthography (Slavic carons aside).

The letters of the script, in its own alphabetic order, are as follows:

In the Europaico script, the sequences involving a 'palatal' consonant (the ones bearing a caron in the Latin orthography) and the vowel /e/ may be spelled as either the palatal followed by ''Eta'' or as the non-palatal version followed by ''Yeť'':

Both alternatives might be used indistinctly, a feature which would allow the script to suit each speaker's tastes better and which clearly wouldn't cause any problem down the road like problems with collation or the like.

Slavic languages generally distinguish between three grammatical genders: feminine, masculine and neuter. This distinction (that doesn't necessarily match the natural/societal concepts of gender and animacy) is carried over into Europaico although in a somewhat simplified way. The gender of a singular noun in Europaico can usually be determined from its ending:

Luckily, the association of ''-a'' to the feminine gender is widespread among Romance languages as well, while Catalan and written French share the tendency of having consonant-final masculine nouns.

For the most part, European languages tend to use two different strategies for marking plural in nouns:

Europaico is all about seeking consensus (aside from when it's not) so, naturally, it adopts both strategies. For instance, feminine nouns such as '''''zena''''' (woman) form their plural by both changing the final ''-a'' to ''-e'' and by adding a final ''-s'': '''''zenes''''' (women, coincidentally the resulting ''-a'' / ''-es'' alternation is also found in Catalan and Asturian).

At least, Europaico plurals are all regular being formed according to the following patterns:

Gender agreement marking in articles and adjectives does not distinguish between masculine and neuter nouns in the plural, grouping both into a plural 'common' class (generally presenting the suffix ''-is'') contrasting with the plural feminine class (with the ''-es'' prefix). This depends on the inherent lexical gender of the noun rather than its ending, ''nočis'' will still take feminine plural adjectives ending in ''-es'' despite having a final ''-is''.

The resulting articles are as follows:

==== Possessives ====

Should anyone care for a non-canonical feature in what is already a ''fauxlang'', the resulting inflectional paradigms were something like this:

Articles would also be inflected, although genitive forms for all articles weren't really decided before the idea was abandoned.

Some recommended strategies for adapting names to include the right ending include:

==== Placenames ====

Perhaps the most common option among modern auxiliary languages is to use the name locals use for the place in their own language. This seems like a very reasonable thing to do (which, of course, precludes Europaico from doing it) although it has a few problems.

The second strategy, perhaps more common among earlier auxiliary languages, was to draw most names from a single source, usually an internationally 'prestigious' source such as English, French or Latin. This is the sort of reasoning that would suggest that we do indee pick internationally-recognizable names such as ''\''Austria'' and ''\''Viena'' for Austria and Vienna, where 'internationally-recognizable' means 'names speakers of major Western European languages are likely to have heard'. The colonialism undertones of that are problematic enough to stay away from that idea.

Europaico Adjectives are required to agree with the corresponding noun in number and gender (although masculine and neuter forms are conflated into a single common gender) with the following endings:

Adjectives are generally placed after the respective noun in Europaico. Thus we'd find ''la zena mega'' for 'the large woman', ''el muz mego'' for 'the large man', ''les zenes megues'' for 'the large women' and ''lis muzis meguis'' for 'the large men'.

Europaico pronouns are derived from Romance languages and feature contrasts common in that branch such as a case distinction between nominative and accusative forms and gender contrasts for plural pronouns.

Notes:

Europaico pronouns ''might'' optionally be dropped when in subject position. This hardly ever results in ambiguity as verbs conjugate to agree with their subject. Still, it is ''preferred'' to keep subject, even if redundant, for additional clarity, with pronoun ellipsis being more of a stylistic choice to avoid repetition.

These usages are summed up in the following table:

==== Possessive pronouns ====

Each pronoun has an associated possessive which works in a similar way to an adjective, being placed after a noun and requiring agreement markers for the number and gender of the possessed object with the following suffixes:

For instance, we would have ''el muz min'' for 'my husband', ''la zena mina'' for 'my wife' and ''lo miesto mino'' for 'my city'. Possessive pronouns do not indicate the gender of the possessor thus ''lis ďeťis linis'' could correspond to English 'his children' or 'her children'.

The reflexive possessive ''sin'' is used to indicate possession by the subject, being mandatory when it refers to a third person and optional for the first or second person, much as discussed for accusative ''si''. For example: