Atuko

Main Goal and Brief History
Atuko is an isolated language (Made by me) that is spoken by Atukons (Atukohu) that live in an Island named Atukonia (Atukoma) that is located between Norway, Iceland, and Greenland. The language is isolated however Atukons are not much primitive. They are advanced enough to have a well-developed language with thousands of words. They have lack of interest to other cultures so they don't like to travel. That was the brief history but my main goal is to help anyone learn, and pronounce the language easily. Also one can use the language in daily life with someone that knows Atuko, or can speak the language with someone who doesn't know Atuko and confuse them :) Atuko has a lexicon with 2500-3000 words. For those who are interested, I will put a whole new page about the lexicon later on. (Actually, I don't have too much lexicon right now). We now move on to Phonology.

Vowels:
As you can see, there are only 3 vowels and 12 consonants. There are not much sounds and those sounds are really common. So I hope you won't have trouble pronouncing these sounds. If phonology is clear, we can move on to phonotactics.

Phonotactics
In Atuko, there are 3 rules about phonotactics.


 * 1) Consonant clusters are not possible.
 * 2) Words cannot end or start with a consonant.
 * 3) Stress is always at the middle or the last syllable depending on what you emphasize.

These are the phonotactics of Atuko. I think this is one of the most important things that makes Atuko pronounciation easy. Also the first 2 rules make Atuko sound like Hawaiian or Japanese. However Japanese, Hawaiian, and Atuko are not related at all. If you understood Phonotactics, we can move on to Orthography.

Orthography
Not much to say about Orthography but because of the isolation, Atukons have their own script. If I need to specify more, the script is a syllabary. But we will be looking for the Romanization. In Romanized script of Atuko, each sound is the same as in IPA. I guess Orthography must be clear because it is as simple as Toki Pona, so we can move on to the longest and one of the most important part: Grammar.

Word Order
Atuko has a free word order. Which means, you can basically put words anywhere in the sentence. But in Atuko, changing word order means changing what you emphasize. There is a main rule about it; Last element of the sentence is the non-emphasized one. To make it more clear, I want to show you the list.


 * 1) SOV= Emphasizes mostly subject and mildly emphasizes object
 * 2) SVO= Emphasizes mostly subject and mildly emphasizes verb
 * 3) VSO= Emphasizes mostly verb and mildly emphasizes subject
 * 4) VOS= Emphasizes mostly verb and mildly emphasizes object
 * 5) OSV= Emphasizes mostly object and mildly emphasizes subject
 * 6) OVS= Emphasizes mostly object and mildly emphasizes verb

So, in Atuko, you emphasize something by the word order and stress in Atuko. It might be a little bit confusing but emphasizing is not much important in Atuko. So you don't need to care much about it. I guess we can now move on to the type of the language.

Type
Firstly, Atuko is an agglutinative language. Which means there are huge amount of suffixes in Atuko and they are so important, and there are no prefixes at all. There will also be a list of suffixes, in the lexicon page for those who are interested.

Secondly, in Atuko, there are no genders unlike European languages. That means, He/she/it are all one word in Atuko. I think this is one of the things that make Atuko easy to learn too, because you don't need to memorize the genders of the object unlike French, Spanish or so.

Thirdly, subordinatives in Atuko, nouns come before adjectives unlike English and just like Spanish, Arabic or Toki Pona. For example, if you want to say "Large Door" you say "Door Large" in Atuko. I guess, those who know Spanish, Arabic or Toki Pona wouldn't have much trouble about this.

Lastly, in Atuko, there are no articles at all. "The" and "a" are not included in Atuko.

If the type is clear we can move on to Tenses.

Tenses
There are 3 tenses in Atuko; Past, Present, and Future however words don't change due to tense and you don't need to specify the tenses. You make or specify tenses like this in Atuko:


 * 1) Past Tense:English logic:I did this  Atuko logic:I do this before
 * 2) Present Tense:English logic:I am doing this  Atuko logic:I do this now
 * 3) Future Tense:English logic:I will do this  Atuko logic:I do this after

These are the tenses but as I mentioned earlier, you don't need to specify the tense. If you don't want to specify, you can just say "I do this". Tenses are really simple we could move on to suffixes.

Suffixes
As I mentioned earlier, Atuko is an agglutinative language, so there are huge amount of suffixes. But how are we going to put suffixes in order? You first need to make sure if the word is positive or negative. Like this:


 * 1) Do=Uwa
 * 2) Undo=Uwato

Then you add the person. Just like this:


 * 1) Undo=Uwato
 * 2) I undo=Uwatoku

Then you add the tense. Just like this:


 * 1) I undo=Uwatoku
 * 2) I am undoing (I undo now):Uwatokufo

I think this is practical enough but I may extend it afterwards. That's it, so we can move on to numbers.

Number
Firstly, you need to know that Atuko use Dozenal System (Base 12) and number chart is like this:

Like this, there are 12 single-digit numbers and you write the each digit's name in multi-digit numbers than to make it ordinal, you add the suffix "-no". Easier than most of the languages. It is nothing more than reading digits in dozenal system so we can move on to expressions.

Expressions
In Atuko, things are expressed just like in Toki Pona, Spanish or Swedish. You say, "I eat" instead of "I am eating". But if you want to add the tense, you could specify it like I mentioned in the Tenses part. It is really easy so now we move on to people.

People
People don't completely change due to belonging unlike English. That's because it's an agglutinative language. To emphasize the belonging, we only add a suffix. If you got it, I must say, that's all about Atuko for now. I will expand and develop more in the future but for now this is it.