Prevenian

I created this page in early February 2019, in case you were wondering.

Info
Prevenian is a language isolate spoken in parts of Iceland and Ghana along with some of Southern Asia. It has a script similar to that of English, French, Spanish, Latin itself and other Latin scripts due to it's influence from Icelandic, and has about 35,000 speakers.

History and Temporary Extinction
Prevenian originated from an older language now called Outdated Prevenian which starting being developed at roughly 985 AD. Outdated Prevenian had few clicks, only 30 letters and fit the design of Old English. After around 1200, Outdated Prevenian became extinct. Only 30 or 40 scholars and native people were just barely keeping it alive. Later, in the mid 18th century, new speakers decided to develop a new language which shares characteristics with Outdated Prevenian which eventually became modern Prevenian around the early 30s.

Dialects
3 dialects, the Icelandic, Indian, and Ghanaian dialects are spoken. The Indian dialect uses a tilde to indicate an "r" sound being added to consonant, and also has several other diacritics. There are also several other minor differences between the dialects.

Alphabet
As mentioned previously, because Prevenian has been under influence of Icelandic speakers, the Prevenian script is of Latin origin.

The Prevenian alphabet is of moderately large size & has 42 letters/ The Prevenian script has even evolved symbols for clicks alongside vowels and consonants due to being influenced from multiple nations.

Third Case
Unlike most Latin languages, Prevenian uses a Sᴍᴀʟʟ Cᴀᴘɪᴛᴀʟ case for the first word of every other sentence in a paragraph. However, only some letters have a small capital form; letter which do not have a small capital form use lowercase in substitue.

Ranking
Unlike in English or other similar languages, letters are ordered by what sound they represent. Vowels are first, dipthongs are second, consonants are third, semivowels are fourth, and other sounds like the Ghanaian click consonants are fifth.

Vowels & Dipthongs
Both long and short vowel categories have seperate symbols in Prevenian, thus 11 vowels are created (the 11th missing vowel being Æ, which is the [/eɪ/] sound as in aviation). 3 dipthongs or gliding vowels are also used. These are "ai", "oy", and "ow".

All long vowels are represented using macrons, except for the long-e which is shown as Œ. This is because the Latin latter ethel ("Œ") also represents the long E sound.

Also note the letter short U ignores syllable stress, so it can either represent the short U in custom, or the shorter-to-pronounce shwa which can also be found in custom.

Consonants & Semivowels
The list of consonants and semivowels is like that of English with some differences. First of all, adding a grave to a consonant adds an "h" sound to that letter. For instance, "b̀" produces the sound "bh". Secondly, the letter K has been ditched; C serves it's purpose and does not represent the S sound either. Several other letters like L have also been ditched. And finally, additional letters from African languages, Old English, and Sanskrit have also been added to the consonant bank.

Click Consonants
Because of African speakers modifying the language, Prevenian has evolved to have 3 clicks which are shown in the table below.

So to review, Prevenian has 42 letters [A,Ā,Æ,E,Œ,O,Ō,I,Ī,U,Ū,ﬅ,Ꜽ,Ȳ,B,C,D,Ð,G,H,Ƕ,J,M,N,Ŋ,P,F,Q,R,Ř,S,T,Þ,X,Z,Y,W,Ł,%̄,\̄,/͒].

Punctuation
Prevenian uses widely the same punctuation as English, with some differences. «Guillemets» are used to quote text which contains quotation marks; this custom is also used in the US state of Iowa.

For example:

In the book Cwms of the Exoplanets it was mentioned that the geysers on HE-5212j were « not caused naturally, but rather “a mix of left over asteroid debris and emitted nearby cold rays from the Y-type brown dwarf it orbits” ».

Another punctuation mark often used in Prevenian is the interrobang ‽, which usually asks a question in an exciting manner (it is often replaced by "?!" or "!?" in English and other languages due to it's lack of ASCII compatibility). An inverted interrobang ⸘ is also used to represent authority.

Syllables
Prevenian syllables can be both open or closed (meaning they can have a coda, but do not have to). However, like Siglitun and Mandarin, only a small number of coda consonants are allowed, specifically [b̀,ð,n,k,r,ř,x,z].

Letter Restrictions

 * 1) Consonant digraphs [th,hw,gz] etc. cannot be used in Prevenian because they already have single-letter reprenstation in this language.
 * 2) This also applies to dipthongs and the consonant combinations [le,ul].

Numerals
My language branches entirely off from most other number systems and uses a Base-28 (octovigesimal) and Base-24 (tetravigesimal) mashup system and shares traits with Mayan numerals. No words are used for numbers, and only symbols are used. Individual symbols are provided for a handful of 28's factors [1,4,7,28], much like in Mayan where symbols for factors of the base or 20's factors [1,5] are given seperate symbols.

Numbers 0 to 3
Counting from 0 to 3 is fairly easy. 0 has it's own symbol, and after that you just use dots, so 2 for instance is ••.

Numbers 4 to 6
Numbers four through six use the symbol ⁜ to represent 4 and add on previous numbers from that.

Numbers 7 to 13
Numbers seven through thirteen use the symbol --͖̄ for seven, ⁜ for 4, and • for 1 to construct larger numbers.

Numbers 14 to 27
Now we can just clone the --͖̄ symbol multiple times to express multiples of 7, and we can also use our previous symbols to get all the way up to 27.

Numbers 28 to 671
After 27, we add a 28s place above from the 1's place and keep on adding 28's, 7's, 4's, and 1's until we reach 671, or 28(24)-1. At this point, I will start skipping numbers for consistency.

Dual & Trial Form of Words
The singular vs. plural distiniction is not all in this language. There is also dual form using the suffixes -d, -ȳd, and -ed & a trial form using the suffixes -r, -ȳr, and -er. The plural uses -n, -ȳn, and -en as affixes.

Tense Markers
This conlang has more than 3 tenses. These tenses are based on an absolute tense system, and they each have singular, dual, trial, and plural forms.

Noun Cases
Prevenian has 3 noun cases, i.e. the nominative, the genitive, and the locative, however they do not come in the form of affixes. Instead, there are seperate words which indicate the noun cases (the only exception is the genitive case). The word "bif" is used for the nominative case and "vern" for the locative case. The genitive case, being the only case using a prefix or suffix, uses the suffix 'v.

Gender
Prevenian has 3 genders, namely male, female, and neuter. As you know, the male and female genders correspond to well... males and females. But the neuter gender includes undeveloped juveniles which do not have their gender determined yet, genderqueer people & things which don't have gender, but may need to be assigned a gender in a figurative fashion (e.g. "sister country").

Sometimes, Prevenian words use a gender marking to indicate the gender of a person or animal. This involves gender affixes, all of which are listed below:
 * 1) Masculine gender --> -wic
 * 2) Feminine gender --> -berv
 * 3) Neuter gender --> -nōkrā  /

Animacy
Much like in Navajo, strings of words which can be ordered in multiple ways are by default ordered by animacy in this conlang.

Animacy is divided like:

Example text
For the lexicon, please see the page Prevenian/Dictionary.