User:The Kaufman/Sandbox/Verblang

Ummm... Nothing to say. The title explains everything.

...maybe make it the 2nd version of Wati? < on hold

Consonants
Abuse of /ts/ incoming, ahaha.

There are 3 additional qualities: labialization, ejectivization and aspiration, indicated by , <'> and  after a consonant. Only voiceless plosives, , and may become ejective or aspirated. Labialization is available only to ,,  and their voiced counterparts.

Vowel length
Lengthening is indicated by doubling the vowel.

Vowel harmony
Wati features a complex vowel harmony, which some early linguists have considered different for each affix. In fact, the vowels depend on each other.

Some basic rules:
 *  is neutral.
 *  can't occur in a syllable next to a syllable which contains  or .
 * Similarly,  can't occur in a syllable if the previous syllable contained  or .

Tones
Wati has two contrastive tones, high tone (indicated by an acute accent) and low tone (unmarked).

Syllable structure
The syllable structure is either CV(C)(C), VC(C) or CCV(C)(C), with no plosive clusters allowed. An exception is  in the onset. A 3-consonant cluster /tsks/ occurs in syllables of 2nd group (example: waats'átsks "space-consuming"), though some people pronounce it as /tskəs/, and V syllables are allowed word-initally (example: aaki "swim").

An ejective ends a syllable unless there's a maximum legal consonant cluster before it or if it's word-initial. Therefore, /waats'átsks/ is realized as /waats'.átsks/ and not */waa.ts'átsks/.

Nouns
Cases, as such, don't exist. The objects are represented by verbal markers.

There are, though, some affixes as -ts'i (which expresses locative).

Pluralization is expressed by the suffix -maki. Simple nouns (i.e. those that can't be expressed with a root that can be used in verbs) and suffix-less nouns also take this suffix.

Words ending in a consonant cluster take the suffix -áki: ask > ask'áki.

The suffix -ma is indefinite, and the suffix -máhi is definite.

Verbs
Verbs conjugate for many different categories, one of which is person. The persons of Wati are familiar to English speakers, as there are only 3 of them and 2 numbers.

There are also consonant-ending verbs

Adjectives
Adjective affixes are quite plentiful. One of such suffixes is -átsks, which makes the meaning of an adjective negative, e.g. waats' "spacious" and waats'átsks "space-consuming"; taksas "special", taksasátsks "strange, odd"