Boselenan

The Boselenan language (pfüülen boselenithii) is a heavily agglutinative VSO language, with grammar not particularly based on any natural language.

=Phonology and Orthography= There are two Boselenan alphabets, the 'regular' and 'extended' alphabets. The basic alphabet is the most used, consisting of 32 letters. It contains both letters with diacritics and digraphs which are all treated as independant letters in their own right representing their own phoneme.

Extended Alphabet
The alphabet shown above is the basic alphabet, the one used most often. There are three letters of the basic latin alphabet which are not used in Boselenan w, x and z, however they are retained in the 'extended alphabet' due to their use in foreign names.

The full extended alphabet complete with the foreign letters is as follows:

A Ä B C D DH E F G H I J K L M N NY O Ö Ọ P PF Q R S SH T TH U Ü V W X Y Z

Digraphs
There are five digraphs in use in the regular Boselenan alphabet: dh, ny, pf, sh and th. These letters all represent their own phonemes and are treated as letters in their own right. This means that they are placed after their parent letter in alphabetical ordering. So for example duugin comes before dhäu, and essäänyi comes before eshim.

Diacritics
There are four letters in Boselenan which are modified with diacritics. The umlaut is used on a, o and u, and the underdot is used below o, resulting in ä, ö, ü and ọ. These letters, like the consonantal digraphs, are all treated like letters in their own right.

Letter Doubling
As Boselenan has phonemic vowel length, vowels are doubled to indicate it. All vowels come in a long and a short variety, resulting in aa, ää, ee, ii, oo, öö, ọọ, uu and üü.

In addition, all consonants can be doubled. Fricatives and affricates are the only consonants that have a phonemic length, so ss represents a longer sound than s. Other letters such as the stops b, t etc do not have phonemic length, however are sometimes found doubled. Doubled bb, dd, gg, kk, ll, mm, nn, pp and tt have no phonemic difference from their single-letter counterparts and must simply be remembered.

Some letters when doubled represent slightly different sounds to their single-letter counterparts. A hh combination represents the sound /x/, which is equivalent to a geminated /h/. A jj combination represents the more fricated sound /ʝ/, equivalent to a geminated /j/.

When digraphs need to be doubled, the first letter of the digraph only is doubled, resulting in ddh, nny, ppf, ssh and tth.

=Basic Grammar=

Nouns
Because of it's very heavily agglutinative nature, nouns in Boselenan are altered for number, article, posession, quantity and several noun cases, which are added to the end of the noun in the form of a suffix.

Plurals and Quantity
The grammatical number is placed before any other suffix is added. Different suffixes are added if the quantity of the noun is anything specific between 1 and 10, and a 'general plural' form if the quantity is unknown or a number above 10. Otherwise, if the number is 11 or above, then the quantity is placed seperately after the plural form.

Examples:
 * E-mäthinna nosolkehcii ottasinyleb - "There are eight houses down that street"

Articles
Articles are placed after the quantity suffix (if there is one). There are two articles in Boselenan, the definate and indefinate. They are both added to the noun as a suffix. The definate article is the suffix -sen, and the indefinate article is -unyaad (or colloquially -unn). For example nosolsen "the house", nosolunyaad "a house", nosolshuunsen "the nine houses".