endymia-conlangs

[endymia-conlangs]

Xyakàrasikàtut

fuck, I meant to save, not post!

spoken by the Xyakàrasta people (lit. translated as we who speak) is my lastest (wip) creation. It is a highly inflected language with probably the most oversized charts I could ever make. but first, I have to show you you the phonology!

(there's a fuckton more here so be ready)

Phonology

this here is the consonant inventory. you'd be right to guess I didn't mean that /q/ is a glottal plosive but I don't want to add a whole column for one uvular sound. I've also chosen to make the character ⟨j⟩ represent the sound /dʒ/. this is because I am lazy, speak English, and prefer ⟨y⟩ represent /j/ anyways. I also made ⟨c⟩ represent /tʃ/. now, for the vowels...

as you can see, I hate grids and don't think they really suit the liquid nature of vowels. all of the vowels here with diacritics are actually the result of dipthong flattening. specifically between the base character and whatever you wanna call the following phone in a dipthong. every vowel has a flat, acute, obtuse variant. the flat vowel is the base character without a diacritic (a, e, i, o, u). Acute vowels are marked with the uptick (á, é, í, ó, ú). and obtuse vowels are marked with the downtick (à, è, ì, ò, ù). acute vowels are some vowel plus /j/, and obtuse are some vowel plus /w/. although, dipthong flattening has happened to many and, for example has turned /ɪj/ to /i/ as well as changing others into the chart above. how does such a vowel system come into being? I dunno but it sure is fun!

"what are the allophonic systems like?" you may ask, thanks for asking! well when preceding /ɪ/, /i/, /j/, or /ɨ/, the sounds /h/, /x/, /s/, /z/, and /n/ become palatalized. this of course merges /x/ and /h/ into /ç/ because fuck you (not actually though that's mean please keeping reading my yap sesh). the rhotic /ɹ/ tends become the flap /ɾ/ inter intervocalically. as for where these sounds can occur? clusters can theoretically be infinitely long, except:

a fricative cannot directly follow a nasal or a plosive of different voicing or place of articulation (/pf/ is allowed, /ks/ is not)

if /l/ or /ɹ/ occur following a consonant, they become syllabic

nasals cannot follow stops

/s/ becomes voiced intervocalically

Grammar

nouns

there is a noun case system that accounts for amimacy or plurality in addition to whether something is a subject, object, instrument, or genitive/possessive.

this three-way animacy hierarchy is more of a grammatical category than fact, and the "plantish" or sometimes semi-animate largely contains abstract concepts like words and thoughts, in addition to things like plants, rivers, fungi, and sponges (the animal). the animate exclusively contains animals and people, while the inanimate is just things like rocks, cut lumber, tracts of land, and houses.

verbs

verbs are a little overcomplex, conjugated for past, present, and future, subject noun class, and one of 6 classes of evidentiality, the interrogative, the imperative, or finally the infinitive, all adding up to one extremely wide chart.

adjectives & adverbs

adjectives are largely similar to verbs except they don't mark for tense because that's always covered by the copula.

adverbs are, however, a little different

they flatten the semi-animate into the animate, and the paucal into the plural, as well as some of the evidentiality.

now, this is really simple by comparison as it's a pretty common system that word order is generally SVO, but due to all the headmarking and noun declensions and shizzle, you're also pretty much free to do whatever. what's a little odd, though, is that in the interrogative, it's fairly common to switch to OVS, but again, not madatory.

[endymia-conlangs]

it is not going well

am currently constructing the intro post of my first language

[endymia-conlangs]

man, don't you just love vowel hiatus

[endymia-conlangs]

am currently constructing the intro post of my first language

[endymia-conlangs]

first thing to get out of the way: I may be inexperienced but I am still the one in charge here. this blog exists as a place to share whatever monstrosity I create and to get a touch of help filling it out.

now, for who the hell I am!

I am a nobody whose name is Endymia and her primary blog is @netherator. I am a budding creator of conlangs and worlds to put them in.