Casuma

Casuma is a Germanic language spoken in western Europe. It is the official language in the Casum Republic, and a minority language in surrounding areas in England, France and Spain.

General information
Casuma is a fusional nominative-accusative head-initial language. It is spoken by approximately 90 million people in Casum and approximately 1 million in surrounding areas. It is an isolate within the Germanic language family. Notable features include a surviving dual number and the retention of Proto-Germanic nasal vowels. There are many loans in Casuma from French, Spanish, Basque, and the Celtic languages. Morphologically, Casuma has four noun cases and three grammatical numbers. In addition, verbs conjugate for person and number, three tenses, three moods, and two voices. The three grammatical genders were only preserved in the pronouns.

Consonants

 * (d͡ʒ) only appears in loan words
 * /l/, /m/, /n/, and /r/ can appear syllabically.
 * /ɾ/ is an allophone of /r/ word-finally after a vowel for many speakers and is not a seperate phoneme.
 * /χ/ is an allophone of /h/ after a consonant.
 * voiced consonants become voiceless before another voiceless consonant. the digraph dh is pronounced /tχ/.

Diphthongs
In addition, /j/ and /w/ can form a diphthong before any vowel or a triphthong before a dipthong.

Nasal vowels
There are also two nasal dipthongs /ɑ̃ĩ/ and /ɑ̃ũ/, spelled ąi/aį and ąu/aų respectively.

Alphabet
The Casuma alphabet has 32 letters, and does not transcribe the language to a 1:1 grapheme:phoneme ratio.
 * Loan words are often transcribed phonetically to avoid pronounciation errors. For example, center is spelled sentr, and jelly would be spelled dzheli.
 * The letter Cc (representing /k/) can appear in loanwords and isn't changed to k when it appears, but it is changed to Ss when it represents /s/. Also, the letter Xx is changed to ks and Qq is changed to a k.

Determiners
Articles and determiners decline for case along with the noun.

The definite article
The definite article can be used with singular and plural forms of nouns.

The indefinite article
The indefinite article is the number 1. Similar to other Germanic languages, it cannot be used with plural forms of nouns.

Nouns
Nouns in Casuma decline for four cases. Nouns follow five different declension patterns depending on the ending of a noun: a noun can decline differently if it ends in a nasal consonant, a consonant other than a nasal, a front or near-front vowel, a central or back vowel, and a nasal vowel.
 * the Nominative case is the unmodified form of a noun and denotes the subject.
 * the Accusative case marks the direct object
 * the Dative case marks the indirect object
 * the Genetive case shows posession

Front and near-front vowel endings
The only truncation in this type of declension occurs in the accusative singular.

Nasal vowel endings
In the nominative plural, the accusative, and the genetive singular, the nasal vowel will be replaced by it's non-nasal counterpart and then the bolded case ending will be added on. In the genetive plural -es will be infixed between the final consonant and the nasal vowel. In the dative case, the truncations will be the same no matter which nasal vowel the noun ends in.

Verbs
The Casuma verb is fairly simple compared to other germanic languages. Few strong verbs survive from Proto-Germanic and irregular verbs are rare. Verbs conjugate for 3 moods (indicative, subjunctive, and imperative) and three tenses. The present and past tense are indicated by inflection of the verb, and the future tense is indicated by an auxillary verb.

Strong verbs
There are few strong verbs surviving in Casuma, and they take a different conjugation than weak verbs. These are zäwan (to see), helpan (to help), näman (to take), and ghäban (to give). Dual-number pronouns take the plural conjugation.