Esbnitt

Esbnitt (natively εκς'βνϋτ Eks'bnūt, "this language") is a language spoken natively by about 50000 people on the remote archipelago of Esalit (εκς'ςαλϋτ Eks-salūt, "this group of lands") in the Atlantic Ocean. It is a highly-inflected agglutinative language.

Not many texts exist because this language had no native script and adopted the Greek alphabet. The only texts found were messages to other countries.

Classification and Dialects
It is a highly inflected agglutinative language with nominative-accusative alignment and head initial phrases.

There are no dialects.

In formal use, adjectives are declined like standard nouns, but in casual use the adjective are used in their root forms itself. This wiki's translated texts use the declined adjectives.

It has borrowed many roots from Greek (for example, βιβλις "book")

Phonotactics
This language's word structure is either:

(C)C(V)C

or

C(V)C(C)

All consonant clusters are permissible except for td, k+kh, pb etc, where both the soft and hard forms exist. Also, no cluster with η+any letter is permissible, but most letters+η is permissible.(exceptions are ψ, κ, θ, η nd all vowels) As is seen in the word structure, no vowel clusters are permissible.

Writing System
This language originally was not written; an unknown people speaking Ancient Greek (they were not Greeks: the histories state that "The language was foreign to those people") introduced the Greek script which they officially adopted(with alterations). The full script is given below. Please note that:
 * 1) "Th" and "dh" are the alveolar plosives
 * 2) "J" and "c" are post-alveolar affricates
 * 3) "sh" is the retroflex fricative
 * 4) "l" is the alveolar lateral approximant
 * 5) "kh" is the second velar plosive
 * 6) long vowels are represented with a colon ":" instead of the standard IPA symbol
 * 7) the near-back near-close vowel and the first back close vowel are interchangeable.
 * 8) the schwa (mid central)  is represented with "a" and the open back with "a:"
 * 9) Here, diacritics for capital letters are not possible to type, but in writing and actual native printing, the diacritics are always positioned right above the letters.

Grammar
The grammar is highly complicated yet logical.

Nouns
Nouns are declined according to: The genders are: The numbers are singular and plural.
 * 1) Gender
 * 2) Number
 * 3) Case
 * 1) Masculine- used for male humans and male animals
 * 2) Feminine- used for female humans and animals
 * 3) Neuter/Inanimate- used for inanimate things, plants and animals with unknown gender.

The cases are Since all roots (and other words) end with consonants, the suffixes for noun declension are
 * 1) Nominative
 * 2) Accusative
 * 3) Locative
 * 4) Genitive
 * 5) Instrumental
 * 6) Dative
 * 7) Ablative

Verbs
Verbs are conjugated according to person, tense and number The numbers are as usual. The persons are First person (referring to 'I, me'), Second person (referring to "you") and Third person (referring to "he/she/it"). The tenses are past, present and future, with the prefix ψι for continuous.

Present tense conjugation
In past tense, ς gets replaced with ξ and η with ψ.

In future tense, ς is replaced with ςψ and η with κ (due to ηψ being near-unpronounceable)

Syntax
As said above in "Classificarion and Dialect", adjectives are declined in formal use. Pronouns are always declined(when they are used, which is uncommon). Numbers from one to four are declined. The number system is similar(but not in any way related) to Roman numerals, except here powers of 2 are used (8, 64, 128, 256, 512 etc.)

Word order is (Subject adjective)-Subject-(Object adjective)-(Object)-Verb.

Lexicon
Go to Esbnitt/Lexicon