Shataranjan

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

There are two main descendants, 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.

' Note: out of universe, this is a revamp of an attempt of making an oligosynthetic language. '

Consonants
Shataranjan's consonant set is dominated by affricates and fricatves, with some stops and nasals. One of the distnctive features of Shataranjan is that it lacks approximants. Another important detail is the lack of labiodental consonants, as Shataranjans are unable to articulate such sounds.

Vowels
Vowels come in pairs and have a long and short variant each. There are also syllabic nasals, namely m̩ <*m>, n̩ <*n>, ɳ̩ <*ṇ>, ɲ̩ <*ŋ́> and ŋ̩ <*ŋ>.

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.

Syntax
Shataranjan is an agglutinative-polysynthetic language. Its form of polysynthesis is based on the hierarcy of parts-of-speech - that means, the head and its subordinate morphemes are subjected to being united into one word. As such, one sentence usually only has 2 to 5 words even having a high number of morphemes. Adjectives, adpositions and determiners are incorporated into the subject or the object along with the noun. Adverbs and occasionally pronouns are incorporated into the verb along with the corresponding verb form. Note that pronouns are separated from the verb by a Shataranjan punctuation sign, transcribed with a dash.

The language follows a VSO (Verb-Subject-Object) word order. Because of this and the ergative-absolutive alignment, a sentence always starts with a verb and ends with an absolutive part-of-speech.

Lexicon
See Shataranjan/Vocabulary.