Shataranjan

Shataranjan is the successor language of Old Shataranjan.

Changes compared to Old Shataranjan
Shataranjan has lost much of its oligosynthetic properties. It is now a polysynthetic language, having many new morphemes coming from the expansion of Shataranjan culture.

Setting
Shataranjan is the main language of Shataranjans, inhabitants of the tidally-locked planet of Shataran, located around 500 light years from the Solar System.

There are two main dialects, the one spoken on the always bright side which eternally is illuminated by their star, and the other spoken in the darkness of the hemisphere facing against the star. As the two sides are constantly at war, the two dialects never became different languages, as a result of common interactions.

Phonotactics
The phonotactics are relatively simple. The most complex cluster possible is CCVCC, and a fricative cannot follow its equivalent affricate. Short vowels tend to appear more commontly before affricates.

Transliteration
There are two systems of transliteration of Shataranjan into Human languages, one Latin-based and the other Cyrillic-based.

Latin
All affricates are created by combining the plosive and the fricative glyphs or digraphs.  take the place of ʈ an ɖ respectively, while  takes place of both ɟ and ɢ.

/ɲ/ and /ç/ are both written as  and  before a vowel, and  and  at the end of a word or before a consonant. A long vowel is marked by duplication (e.g. /a/ = ; /aː/ = ).

Cyrillic
Affricates act the same as in the Latin transliteration, with the notable exception of gj = гь. The cyrillic transliteration allows for the use of ю, я and sometimes ё after palatal consonants instead of ь+V.

Grammar
Shataranjan is a language with a high degree of inflection and agglutinative-polysynthetic morphology. It is an ergative language, meaning that it does not distinguish between the subject of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive verb. It has a Verb-Subject-Object syntax.

Verbs
Verbs are the morphemes that start any sentence, since VSO is the syntactic order. The verb be - dzelh - will be used as an example for conjugation. To create the imperfective aspect, one adds -oopf at the end of a verb before the agent.

Nouns
Nouns are inflected according to case and number. Shataranjan has four cases: Ergative, Absolutive, Dative and Genitive.

The plural form of a noun is formed by gemating the final vowel of the root word.

Declesion of nouns ending in a consonant: Declesion of a noun ending in -a or -e: Declesion of a noun ending in -i:

Adjectives
Adjectives decline by case and number as well, following the same declesion pattern as nouns with the same ending, instead of according to nouns they refer to. They have a comparative and superlative form. The comparative form is formed by adding the prefix pfo- (if the adjective starts with a consonant) or pf- (if it starts with a vowel) to mean "more", while "less" is formed with the prefixes qqha- or qqh-, depending on the starting letter of the adjective. The superlative form is formed by adding the prefix etlha- or etlh-, again depending on whether the adjective starts with a vowel or not.

Example sentence
dzelhevlom-ketsharoshaatu

джэлъэвлом-кэтшарошаату

be.PRS.SG.3-3SG.ERG weapon.SING.ABS-black.SING.ABS

lit. "It is a black weapon".