Norpalic

Setting
Nothing for now.

Overview
Norpalic is a language which I am creating to be simple and easy to learn, and a language in which things can be said very briefly. The vocabulary of Norpalic is completely a-priori, unrelated to that of any other language. The grammar of Norpalic is simple and highly regular. The grammar is influenced slightly by Welsh, which I can speak fairly well. Examples of the influence from Welsh include the way the passive voice is formed and the way possessive pronouns are formed. Norpalic has about 1000 root morphemes, all of which are only one syllable long and consist of just one consonant and one vowel. This one syllable : one morpheme ratio allows things to be said briefly. The basic word order is Subject-Verb-Object. Norpalic uses prepositions rather than postpositions and places adjectives, adverbs and other modifiers after the part of speech they modify.

Phonology
Norpalic has a very large phonemic inventory consisting of 63 consonants and 14 vowels (seven short vowels and seven long counterparts), as well as five diphthongs. Norpalic is notable in that it has ejective as well as implosive consonants, and has a very large number of sonorants. There are ten different nasal consonants and six approximants. Norpalic also has a voiceless flap /ɾ̥/ which contrasts with its voiced counterpart.

Consonants
Norpalic has the following 63 consonants:

Vowels
Norpalic has the following seven vowel qualities, each of which can occur phonemically long or short: /i e ɨ ə a o u/. Norpalic also has the following five falling diphthongs: /ai̯ ao̯ ei̯ eo̯ oi̯/. The vowels /e/, /ə/ and /o/ and their long counterparts are true mid vowels rather than close mid in terms of their height. The following table shows the vowels of Norpalic:

Root morphemes
Norpalic has about 1000 root morphemes, all of which are monosyllabic and consist of just one consonant and one vowel/diphthong in the order 'Consonant' + 'Vowel/diphthong'. The reason it is possible to create so many different monosyllabic Consonant + Vowel/diphthong combinations is because Norpalic has a very large phonemic inventory.

Word stress
Stress is weak and not phonemically contrastive. Stress is predictable and falls on the penultimate syllable of compound words. Root words are all monosyllabic, as mentioned above.

Orthography
Norpalic is written using the latin alphabet. The alphabet is completely transparent. The following table shows the spelling and IPA pronunciation of each consonant, vowel and diphthong:

Grammar overview
Norpalic has a rigid Subject-Verb-Object word order. Norpalic uses prepositions rather than postpositions and is strongly right-branching, with adjectives, adverbs and other modifiers occurring after the parts of speech they modify. Norpalic has about the same level of agglutinativity as English. Norpalic has five grammatical moods (imperative, conditional, subjunctive, optative, potential), and has a five-term evidential system (visual sensory, nonvisual sensory, infer, reportative, assumed). Mood and evidentiality are indicated by suffixes attached to the verb. Prepositions are used to convey the meaning of grammatical case. Norpalic has no grammatical gender. Tense and aspect are indicated by particles preceding the verb. Each root word in Norpalic belongs to a default part of speech. Suffixes are used to turn root words into a different part of speech from their default. The suffix <-li> (/-li/) turns a non-verbal root into a verb, the suffix <-te> (/-te/) turns a non-adjectival root into an adjective, and the suffix <-kwoo> (/-kʷo:/) turns a non-noun root into a noun. Norpalic has three grammatical numbers; singular, dual and plural. There are eight parts of speech present in Norpalic; the noun, pronoun, verb, adjective, adverb, postposition, conjunction and interjection.

Grammatical number
Norpalic has three grammatical numbers, singular, dual and plural (three or more of a thing). Norpalic uses the suffix <-sjo> (/-ɕo/) to indicate duality and the suffix <-lu> (/-lu/) to indicate plurality. Nouns and pronouns are the only parts of speech that are marked for number.

Nouns
Nouns in Norpalic are strongly isolating. They are marked by suffixes for grammatical number but not for case. Prepositions are used to express the meaning of grammatical case. The nominative and accusative cases are not marked for by prepositions though, but are indicated by word order. Compound nouns can be formed by combining together two root nouns, a noun and a verb, or a noun and an adjective, as well as by the use of suffixes. Norpalic is right branching when forming compound nouns, with the head preceding the modifier. Norpalic does not have any noun class system such as male versus female or animate versus inanimate, and nouns are not marked for definiteness (there are no words in Norpalic for 'a/an' and 'the'). Norpalic has a rich set of suffixes that can be attached to nouns to change their meaning.

Pronouns
Norpalic has a simple set of personal pronouns distinguishing three persons. Personal pronouns are not affected by gender, animacy, formality or clusivity. Subjective and objective personal pronouns take the same form. The suffix <-lee> (/-le:/) indicates the reflexive form of a personal pronoun, and the suffix <-b'uu> (/-ɓu:/) indicates the intensive form. Norpalic does not have distinct forms for prepositional or disjunctive personal pronouns, and does not permit dummy personal pronouns. The following table shows the personal pronouns of Norpalic.

Possessive adjectives are formed by adding the adjectival suffix <-te> (/-te/) to the corresponding personal pronoun. Possessive adjectives occur after the noun they modify, like other adjectives. The table below shows each possessive adjective:

Possessive pronouns are formed the same way as they are in Welsh, by using the word 'one' or 'some' with the possessive adjective. The possessive adjective occurs after the noun, as do all other modifiers. To say 'mine' and 'yours', you would literally say 'one/some my' or 'one/some your'. Norpalic has only one demonstrative pronoun  (/n̥ə/), which corresponds to both the word ‘this’ and the word ‘that’ in English. There are five relative pronouns corresponding to the English words ‘who/which/that’, ‘whose’, 'what', 'whoever' and 'whatever'. There are two interrogative pronouns corresponding to the words ‘who’ and ‘what’ (such as in the sentence 'Who is in the garden?' or the sentence 'What is his name?'). Norpalic also has several indefinite pronouns.

Verbs
Mood

Norpalic verbs are marked by suffixes to indicate five grammatical moods; the imperative, conditional, subjunctive, optative and potential. A verb can be made emphatic by inserting the particle (/su:/) before the verb, which means 'indeed'.

Tense and Aspect

Grammatical tense and aspect are marked by particles that precede the verb. There are three tenses; past, present and future, and three aspects; perfective, habitual and continuous/progressive. The present tense and the perfective aspect are unmarked. The past tense is indicated by the particle  (/si/), and the future tense by the particle (/ŋai̯/). The habitual aspect is indicated by the particle (/ɡʲi:/), and the continuous/progressive aspect by the particle  (/də/). Tense particles precede aspect particles when occurring together.

Infinitive and gerund

The infinitive form of a verb is indicated by the suffix <-ka> (/-ka/). Gerunds (verbal nouns that refer to the action of the verb) are formed by using the suffix <-nry> (/-ɳɨ/).

Voice

Norpalic has two voices; active and passive. The passive voice is formed using the word  (/wa/), meaning 'to have/receive', followed by the object of the sentence followed by a possessive adjective. The sentence 'I am being enlightened', would be more literally translated from Norpalic to English as 'I am having my enlightenment'. The sentence 'mi si wa dree mite' means 'I was born', but more literally translates as 'I had my birth'.

Copula

The copula (used to link the subject of a sentence with a predicate) is formed using the word  (/sa/) meaning 'to be'.

Evidentiality

Norpalic has an obligatory evidential marking system distinguishing the following five evidential paradigms: visual sensory, nonvisual sensory, inferential, reportative, assumed. These are marked by the following suffixes which are attached to the verb: <-ngwai> (/-ŋʷai̯/) (visual sensory), <-kw'eo> (/-kʷʼeo̯/) (nonvisual sensory), <-xjy> (/-xʲɨ/) (inferential), <-tr'ë> (/-ʈʼə/) (reportative), <-mii> (/-mi:/) (assumed).

Negation
The word  (/tʼo/), meaning 'no' or 'not', makes a statement negative. Only one occurrance of this word is permitted per clause. If this word occurs twice within a clause, the two negatives cancel each other out and the result is a positive sentence. The word  always occurs before the word it negates. Examples of this are as follows:

Mi si t'o d'ee sju (I/me 'past tense' no see dog) = I did not see the dog

T'o mi si d'ee sju (No I/me 'past tense' see dog) = It was not me who saw the dog

Mi si d'ee t'o sju (I/me 'past tense' see no dog) = It was not the dog that I saw

Questions
Unlike in English, the word order in Norpalic is the same for questions as for statements. Questions with a yes/no answer are formed by inserting the particle (/ʐɨ:/) at the end of the sentence. The following example illustrates this:

Lhy sa trwaa = you are happy.

Lhy sa trwaa zryy = are you happy?

The particle is not used for questions that don't have 'yes/no' as their answer. Norpalic only has one word to mean 'yes' and one word to mean 'no' for answering all 'yes/no' questions, unlike languages such as Welsh which has several different words for 'yes' and 'no' depending on the grammatical tense, aspect, person and mood. To answer negative 'yes/no' questions, you would always say 'yes' to give an answer that agrees with the valence of the question, and answer 'no' to give an answer that does not. So to answer the question 'Did you not like it?', you would answer 'yes', or 'yes, I did not like it' to say that you did not like it, whereas in English you would answer 'no', or 'no, I did not like it'. In Norpalic, answering 'no' to the question 'Did you not like it?' always means "No, I did like it", and never means 'No, I didn't like it'.

Colour terms
Norpalic has root words for the primary colours red, blue and yellow, and for the secondary colours green, orange and purple. It also has root words for black, grey, white and brown. Other colours can be formed by agglutinating two or more root colour words into a compound word e.g. 'tho' (blue) + 'ghji' (green) = 'thoghji' (turquoise), 'tho' (blue) + 'kao' (purple) = 'thokao' (violet).

Adjectives
Adjectives in Norpalic can take either the attributive, absolute, predicative or nominal form. Adjectives are strongly isolating and are not marked for grammatical number. The comparative degree for adjectives is formed by adding after the adjective the word (/ɳo/) meaning 'more', and the superlative degree is formed by adding after the adjective the word (/ɳɨ:/) meaning 'most'. Attributive adjectives in Norpalic generally occur in the following order: quantity; quality; color; size; shape; age; opinion; purpose. Other orders are permissible also. Adjectives and other modifiers are not marked for restrictiveness.

Numbers
Norpalic has the following cardinal numerals: gjoo (zero), zrai (one), tw'u (two), laa (three), nii (four), zre (five), lhwao (six), hëë (seven), b'o (eight), dwe (nine), dr'e (ten), baa (one hundred), kw'uu (one thousand), trw'ëë' (one million). The number eleven is written as , literally 'ten and one', twelve is written as , literally 'ten and two', and thirteen is , literally 'ten and three', and so on. Twenty is written as , literally 'two ten'. Twenty-one is written as , literally 'two ten and one', and twenty-two is written  literally 'two ten and two'. Numbers are formed with this pattern of placing two cardinal numbers side by side to multiply, and using the word  (meaning 'and') to add. So the number 534 would be written as , literally 'five hundred and three ten and four', and the number 7396 would be written as , literally 'seven thousand and three hundred and nine ten and six'. Ordinal numbers are formed with the adjectival suffix <-te> (zraite=first, tw'ute=second, laate=third), and multiples are formed with the suffix <-ru> (zrairu=single, tw'uru=double, laaru=triple). Fractions are formed with the suffix <-noo> (tw'unoo=half, niinoo=quarter), collectives with the suffix <-bee> (tw'ubee=by twos, laabee=by threes), and repetitions with the suffix <-lwai> (zrailwai=once, tw'ulwai=twice, laalwai=thrice).

Word order
Norpalic has a rigid Subject-Verb-Object word order. The language is right branching, with adjectives, adverbs, determiners, numerals, possessors, relative causes and other modifiers coming after the part of speech they modify. Norpalic tends to order adpositional phrases in the format Time-Manner-Place instead of Place-Manner-Time.

Word formation
Norpalic has about 1000 root morphemes. Norpalic morphology makes heavy use of suffixes. The use of suffixes as well as compounding allows for a large vocabulary to be formed from a small number of root morphemes, which decreases the memory load of the language. Compound words in Norpalic are different from English in that the initial root rather than the final root is basic to the meaning. The word <k'unruu> means 'songbird', but literally translates as 'bird song' (k'u = bird, nruu = song), and the word <nruuk'u> means 'bird song' but literally translates as 'songbird'. Norpalic uses reduplication to indicate that an action is continuative. The sentence <Lhy dë twoi> means '(s)he is sleeping' (twoi = to sleep), but the sentence <Lhy dë twoi twoi> means '(s)he is still sleeping'.