Toto

Toto is a language which doesn't have adjective recursion or clause embedding. There are a finite number of utterances in Toto.

Orthography
Toto is spoken by red bottle-like organisms which make sounds that cannot be made by humans, but can be split into "vowels", sounds which can appear on their own, and "consonants", which cannot. There are eight vowels and eighteen consonants, and all twenty-six letters of the Latin alphabet are used in the orthography.

Consonants:b, c, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, m, n, p, q, r, s, t, x, z

Vowels:a, e, i, o, u, v, w, y

Note that "a" in Toto does not sound remotely like any human vowel, not even [a], and this holds for all the other sounds.

Phonotactics
Combinations of consonants and vowels can be used to form syllables, of which there must be only one nucleus. The nucleus is (by definition) always a vowel, and is the loudest sound in the syllable.

The syllable structure is (C1)(C2)V(C1), where:


 * C1 is all consonants
 * C2 is all consonants and vowels
 * V is the syllable nucleus.

Words in Toto are generally pronounced with front-heavy syllables. For example, "gunqu", meaning "ocean", is pronounced "gu-nqu" rather than "gun-qu".

The vowels and consonants have aspects which predict the likelihood of sounds occurring within a syllable, which are described as "brightness". There are four different levels of brightness: light, light-medial, dark-medial, and dark. Sounds have a higher likelihood of occuring in a syllable if they have the same brightness.

This means there is more likely to be a word like "gunqu" than "genqe".

Also, words tend to have only one kind of vowel with each brightness. This means that a word like "gunqu" is more likely than "gunqw".

These are not hard constraints, just patterns.

Possible Phrase Structure
All possible Toto sentences fit into this mold:

(Noun) - (Modifier) - Verb - (Noun) - (Modifier)

This may seem overly simplistic, but that is because Toto is very simplistic. There can only be one adjective per noun and one or two nouns per verb.

Verbs
Verbs in Toto conjugate for multiple things. The verb conjugation is like this:

Verbs conjugate for how important the action is to the larger goal of what is being conveyed.

Toto has active-stative alignment which is mostly fluid-S.

Verbs conjugate for whether the agent of the phrase appears in front of the noun or behind the noun.

Nouns
Nouns in Toto decline for whether they've been mentioned before in conversation.

The noun that appears in front of the verb is the focus.

Toto wfpip dot. - It is Toto that a dog speaks. Dot bifpip Toto. - It is a dog that speaks Toto.

Adjectives
Noun and verb modifiers (hereby called adjectives) are often just nouns or verbs.