Mihousapeja

=Setting=

(Note that this is a created language. I'm developing it for a book I'm writing)

The origins of Mihousapeja are uncertain. It is believed that it was spoken by an ancient race no longer seen in the world of Kaotijus. It's kept alive by the Hithula people (which many people think is a hybrid race between the ancient extinct race and the predominant kaoti people).

Mihousapeja is known to retain certain magical powers and it is used by the Hithulian to recite incantations.

General Information
The language is basically agglutinating, even the verb conjugation has an affix for each of its characteristics (tense, aspect, mood and person). The basic order of sentence is SOV and grammatical cases are expressed by postpositioned particles.

Consonants
Mishousapeja is constituted of voiceless sounds. Voiced versions of the consonants sometimes are used, usually with emphasis intention. Nasals are naturally voiced, however it's not a forced condition

Vowels
The vowels have an widely range of opening without phonetic distinction. As an example, 'e' can be anything between 'concert' and 'get'.

Romanized Alphabet
This is not the natural order and distinctions of case are made using English conventions just to make the romanization more pleasant to read. For the IPA sounds, see the table above (the ones without indication follow precisely the IPA graph). AEFHIKƘLŁMNOPƤQRSTƮUÜXÃẼĨÕŨÁÉÍÓÚ aefhikƙlłmnopƥqrstƭuüxãẽĩõũáéíóú

One who cannot use Unicode characters might use 'ph','kh','th' and 'll' to substitute the foreign letters.

The tilde (~) means nasalization of the vowel. The acute mark (´) is barely used and means denasalization when the consonants around make the vowel naturally nasal.

The letters 'l' and 'r' are liquid and change their sounds depending on the position of syllable (rhotics). Note that there are no distinction between trill 'r' and tap 'r', so both can be used.

Phonotactics
Mihousapeja is quite vocalic. However, there are some more consonantal words (usually the dark and evil words).

The basic rule is: (C)V(V)(n,m,s,f,l,r), with '' meaning optional phoneme. No doubled consonants or vowels are allowed and they're systematically suppressed (some sound mix might occur with vowels plus the semivowels 'j' or the dark 'l').

The initial consonant can be a cluster of consonants agreeing with the following rules: All syllables must have one or two vowels and they suffer diphthongization in any case. More than two consecutive vowels in the same word is avoided (they usually are separated with 'h' or 'q' if suppression isn't an option).
 * 1) Unaspirated stops (excluding 'q') + 'x' or 's' or 'r'.
 * 2) 'f' or 'p' + 'l'.
 * 3) Non-final syllables can end with an unaspirated stop (except 'q') if the next syllable begins with a stop ('tk' and 'tp' don't exist and possible borrowed words usually suffer metathesis in these cases).

Stress
The stress occurs naturally at the penult (second-to-last) syllable. Exceptions are forced nasalized vowels make their syllables stressed. At long words this exception cause an effect of 'double stress' when the nasal vowel is before the third-to-last syllable.

=Basic Grammar=

Genders
There are 2 genders: meisiar (animate) and meisiarie (inanimate). The meisiar gender is applicable to any living being and nothing else, as the meisiarie covers the rest. Meisiar is not used in plural unless the collection represents a single entity (only common for gods references). The meisiar gender is applied with the suffixes -e, -i or -ü, while the other has no inflection.

Numbers
Mihousapeja has 2 numbers: singular and plural. Singular is the word itself. Plural has 2 forms: -ian (used for collections and as plural for meisiar gender) and -asel (used for lots of the same stuff, like in 'staples'). If gender declension is necessary (for gods), it comes after the number.

Particles
As Mihousapeja has no case declension, postpositioned particles are used to indicate the grammatical function of words.

The transformation from locative to lative occurs using 3 prefixes:

Particles go after the word or construction they refer to.

Personal Pronouns
The meisarie gender is not defined to the singular 1st and 2nd person, as nobody would refer to himself or to whom he's speaking in the inanimate gender. For the plural persons, the meisiar gender is never used, but they are defined (maybe some plural entity used this form at some time).

There are three forms of 'we': the inclusive (me, you and the others), exclusive (me and my group, but not you nor your group) and presential (me and you, but not our groups).

Relative/interrogative pronouns
There are variables and invariables relative pronouns and they can be used as interrogative. The variable ones decline by gender and number following the standard rule.

Indefinite pronouns
If there are gender information then the indefinite pronoun must be declined. These pronouns are also used to represent place, time, way and reason.

Articles
There's two articles: sã (definite) and ru (indefinite). They are declined as shown in the following table:

Verbs
Mihousapeja declines its verbs in four ways: tense, aspect, mood and person/number. Each characteristic has its own affix and they agglutinate in order to conjugate the verb. The order for the affixes is tense-aspect-mood-person, considering that's actually two forms of aspects: one representing state completeness and other representing iteration. The present-perfect-perfective-indicative conjugation is considered the natural form of the verb and has no affixes but the person one. These affixes follow the derivation rule covered in another section.

Tenses
There are five distinct tenses (times): hoiti (present), kenia (recent past or simple past), kentu (remote past or past from past), lemia (near future or simple future) and lemu (far future or future from future).


 * Hoiti: -Ø-
 * Kenia: -oti-
 * Kentu: -oli-
 * Lemia: -ate-
 * Lemu: -ale-

Aspects
By completeness, there are the solil (perfect or retrospective) and solilie (imperfect or imperfective). Solil has no affix and solilie uses -ne-.

By iteration, there are three aspects: łeme (single action or perfective), topã (habitual action) and peki (constant action or iterative).


 * Łeme: -Ø-
 * Topã: -iƥü-
 * Peki: -ãme-

Moods
Four moods: oesi (certain or indicative), kieple (uncertain or subjunctive), oesinen (negative) and soqia (ordering or imperative). The soqia mood has only one form and does not decline by tense/aspect.


 * Oesi: -Ø-
 * Kieple: -uso-
 * Oesinen: -ne-
 * Soqia: -ukü-

Persons

 * I: -e
 * you(s.): -ü
 * he/she/it: -li
 * we (incl.): -ei
 * we (excl.): -pe
 * we (pres.): -the
 * you (pl.): -üle
 * they: -ete

Nominal Forms
These suffixes are added to the root of the verb. Participles may decline by gender and number if needed.


 * Keiso (infinitive): -plo
 * Koeli (present part.): -iol
 * Kãsi (past part.): -olia
 * Nofel (gerund): -eisen

Example text
E sã saia hul ƥei hułote

I the-SING NOM book ABS read-RECENTPAST-1sg

I (recently) read the book.

(Implicitly, perfect form, single action aspect and indicative mood are assumed).