Ituyagul

Ituyagul (Ituyagul: It̠uyagul) is the language isolate spoken natively by the Hloqdadô people. Ituyagul is widely spoken on Hloqdadô Island in Southeast Asia.

The Ituyagul language is completely suffixing, ergative, and polysynthetic, with an extremely high degree of agglutination, with morphosyntatic verbal agreement. It is unusual for its 84 consonants and 36 vowels, but no phonemic diphtongs. Nouns, verbs, and adjectives are inflected for 172 cases, 18 aspects, 24 tenses, and 6 noun classes.

Consonants
Ituyagul the largest consonant inventory of all constructed languages, with 94 consonants in total. It has consonants in 11 places of articulation and 29 plosives, 14 nasals, 19 affricates, 21 fricatives, 5 trills, 1 flap, and 5 approximants.

Vowels
Ituyagul has 36 phonemic vowels, distinguishing between short and long vowels. There are no phonemic diphtongs; diphtongs do not occur in root words.

Phonotactics
Ituyagul has a (C/V)(g/C)V(C) syllable structure. C could be any consonant, j could be an optional liquid (l, r, j, w, ʎ, ɭ) and V could be a vowel. IF the initial is a vowel, g could be any consonant, but if it's a consonant initial, only (l, r, j, w, ʎ, ɭ) are permitted; they are the only letters permitted to form consonant clusters.

Writing System
Ituyagul uses the Latin script for writing.

Basic morphology
The morphology of Ituyagul is polysynthetic and exclusively suffixing, with an ergative–absolutive morphosyntactic alignment. Ituyagul nouns belong to one of six classes, each with a specific prefix with which the verb or an accompanying adjective agrees. The verb agrees with all arguments.

Nouns and verbs conjugate for 6 genders, 4 persons, 37 moods, 20 aspects, and 151 cases. Like most East Asian languages, classifiers are used.

Word order
Ituyagul sentences have a subject-object-verb (SOV) word order, like most languages in the world. Word order is determined by syntactic roles and pragmatic factors. Word order is consistently right-branching.

The four parts that a sentence usually contains are topic, focus, verb and the rest; however, any of the four parts may be empty. The topic and the rest may contain any number of phrases, but the focus may contain only one phrase.

Cases
In Ituyagul cases are divided between morphosyntatic, locative, and stative cases. Nouns and verbs conjugate for case. Other locative cases not included in the chart:
 * Approximative (niq)
 * Delative (yei)
 * Distantitive (vaz)
 * Distributive (cen)
 * Egressive (sên)
 * Ingressive (thu)
 * Intrative (ês)
 * Limitative (ńi)
 * Perlative (tal)
 * Pertingent (oṯs̱)
 * Prolative (tsat)
 * Proximative (mek)
 * Temporal (ix)
 * Terminative (uk)

Classifiers
Like many East Asian languages, classifiers play an important rule in Ituyagul.

Verbs
Verbs are the most important and complex part of Ituyagul grammar. They inflect for 18 grammatical classes: tense, aspect, mood, voice, politeness, causativity, clusivity, transitivity, valency, polarity, telicity, volition, mirativity, evidentiality, associativity, pluractionality, and reciprocity. It represents a real challenge for foriegn learners due to the high inflection.

Tense
All verbs inflect for 27 tenses, classified into non-potential, potential, and imperative. Potential tenses include the suffix -i, and imperitave tenses include the suffix -an.

Aspect
Aspect provides temporal information to the verb. Like English, aspect is independent from tense, but the seperation and aspect in Ituyagul is not maintained rigidly.