Yoskana

Yoskana
Yoskana is a naturalistic artlang created for The Forest's Edge, a fantasy short film about a half-elf who ventures through forbidden Elven woods in order to find her ancestry. Yoskana is the native language of the Elves in this fantasy world, and is sometimes referred to as Elvish. Yoskana is a language designed using the historical method, it is related with 6 other conlangs, and could be considered to be a fusional language.

Phonotactics
Yoskana has the syllable structure (C)(C)V(C).

-The consonant /ʤ/ may not be the onset of a word

-Stops and fricatives are realized as voiceless at word codas

-The valid initial consonant clusters are as follows: sf, sk, and st, sp, kr, pr, and tr in loan words.

-ʰm is pronounced as /p/ when syllable final and the next word begins with a consonant

-ʰn and ʰɲ are pronounced as /t/ when syllable final and the next word begins with a consonant

-Primary Stress is placed on the penultimate syllable of the stem word, in most cases

Nouns
In Yoskana, nouns decline according to case, and for many nouns, definiteness. There is no plural for regular nouns in Yoskana, however they can take on a form called the Collective. Collective nouns refer to groups or uncountable masses, when the suffix denoting the Collective is removed, these nouns signify one element, or member of that group. For example Lyidou (a soldier), would gain the suffix -s and become Lyidous as a Collective, meaning army.

Yoskana has four cases: Nominative, Accusative, Dative and Genitive. Most nouns only decline to show Dative and Genitive. This is done with the noun phrase initial clitic -Myu- for Dative, and -Taa- for Genitive. Many ad-positions in Yoskana do not require the use of these declensions.

Nouns are considered definite by default in Yoskana, and indefiniteness is achieved through suffixing on 3 of the 4 noun declension classes. Although Yoskana does not mark the plural, items which are plural are often marked as indefinite. Nouns may not be marked as both collective and indefinite.