Darahti

General information
Darahti (native, nom. "nDaráhca") is a language spoken on the outer fringes of the Eastern Swamps. Its closest neighbours are the Eastern Wargs (of the Wargish language family) and as such, Darahti has acquired a moderate amount of Wargish morphological, syntactical and phonological elements. It is a member of a mostly-defunct language family once spoken across a wide strip of the eastern shore that has mostly been supplanted and/or suppressed by Wargish tongues. Nowadays, it only has a small handful of living relatives, all of which nearly extinct; Darahti is the most widely-spoken member of its family.

Consonants
/p b t d c ɟ k ɡ/ /f θ s h/  /m n ɳ ŋ/  /w r j ɰ/

Vowels
/a a: e e: ø ø: ɨ ɨ: ʉ ʉ: ɜ ɜ: ɞ ɞ: ɤ ɤ: o o:/ 

Allophony
Non-initial voiced plosives become fricatives: {/b d ɟ g/} > {[β ð ʝ ɣ]} / V_V Voiced plosives coming after nasals are realised as plosives: {/b d ɟ g/} > {[b d ɟ g]} / N_ Sonorants assimilate in place of articulation to a plosive if one is present in the cluster: /L/ > [ɑPOA] / P[ɑPOA]_; _P[ɑPOA]

The phoneme /h/ is pronounced as [xʲ] before front vowels and [x] otherwise, unless it undergoes a particular kind of assimilation when before plosives: {/hp ht hc hk/} > {[fp θt ɕtɕ xk]}

Phonotactics
In Darahti, there are very few clusters permitted; a consonant cluster must consist of either a homorganic combination of fricative or nasal and a voiceless plosive (with the exception of /h/ as noted in the allophony section, and /ŋ/ which doesn't require homorganic clusters), or of an obstruent-sonorant or sonorant-sonorant combination. Syllables can be either open or closed. Two consonants belonging to different syllables are not counted as parts of a cluster.

Nouns
A Darahti noun can belong to one of seven "genders" or more accurately noun classes. Each noun is straightforwardly assigned a class based on semantic criteria. The seven classes are straightforwardly analysed and labelled.

Darahti also features a simplistic noun inflection, where nouns inflect for three cases and two numbers. There are two marginally different inflection patterns for nouns that end in consonants and vowels:

Prepositions go with either the nominative or dative; no preposition goes with the accusative.

Verbs
Darahti verbs are rather peculiar; while they agree in number and person, they also agree for noun class. All of this is done in rather baroque ways: intransitive verbs agree with the person and class of the nominative while transitive verbs agree with the person of the accusative argument and either its class or the class of the nominative. This marking split is indicated morphologically. Such marking has strong ergative tendencies.

A Darahti verb is made up of the following components linearly strung together:

The only obligatory parts of the verb are the stem and class prefix; person inflection can be left to context and TAM can be left out if understood. Verb infinitives are made by suffixing <-(ę)y> onto an inflected verb.

Class Prefix
The class prefix in Darahti is a constant element in the verb system. The class element in verbs functions a bit differently from that in nouns as it has eleven classes that do not match up cleanly with noun classes. The eleven classes are straightforwardly analysed and labelled but are roughly paired with the nominal seven.

Each of the class agreement morphemes has two allomorphs: a prevocalic and a preconsonantal one.

Aspect and Mood
Darahti features a partially conflated aspect and mood inflection system: the suffixes aren't transparently fused nor actually separable but their rough independent shapes can be seen. The suffixes all carry a thematic echo vowel in case the stem ends in a consonant.

Tense
Darahti has a moderately simple system that differentiates between the absolute past and nonpast, and a relative past and nonpast. There's also a single atemporal or gnomic marker that marks general timeless information.

Person
Darahti marks verbs for the singular and plural, as well as three persons. In the third person, it has a distinction between proximate and obviate.

Vocabulary


Animals

 * uþ-pǫpá
 * cat, small feline


 * uþ-na
 * dog, canine

Biological

 * -ę́ñe-
 * to eat, consume

Example text

 * úþę́ñetẃretø uþpǫpárít uþna
 * úþ-ę́ñe-tẃr-et-ø uþ-pǫpá-rí-t uþ-na-$$\varnothing$$
 * c-eat--- c-cat-- c-dog-
 * the cat ate the dog up (at once)


 * xę́ñetẃretø uþpǫpárít ęxet
 * x-ę́ñe-tẃr-et-ø uþ-pǫpá-rí-t ęxet-$$\varnothing$$
 * c-eat--- c-cat-- c-cherry-
 * the cat ate the cherry fruit up (at once)