Yaksōnian

Yaksōnian (natively known as Venēmīas) is a language that was formerly spoken in areas around Yaksōn in the northwestern side of the Prorinian peninsula in the planet Levarianqueva (derived from Yaksōnian Levāriānqlēva /lɛˈwɐː.rɪ̯ɐːnˌq͡ʟeː.wa/, which translates to "Realm of the Gods"), an earth-like planet orbiting a sun-like G2V star 43 light years away from Earth with traces of human colonization of the system, which is inhabited by a sapient, nocturnal descendant of American alligators on Earth.

Closely related languages were formerly spoken in Prorin and surrounding areas in 10,000 BC (Before the Collapse), but as millenia progressed, it began losing ground to the Qlerevi languages, spoken by ancestrally nomadic groups that eventually became sedentary, and took advantage of Yaksōnian disunity to expand further west towards the Ezen Ocean. The final Yaksōnian city, the city of Venēm, was a prospering city, managing to defend itself from outside invaders and even expanding into the surrounding areas, until a series of corrupt kings and the rediscovery of human technology led to the collapse of the Venēmian empire into a series of city states. This allowed for Meyānisian invaders from the west to take over in 53 AC (After the Collapse), taking advantage of the disunited nature of the Venēmian remnants and reverse-engineered human technology which was found all over the eastern sides of the Prorinian peninsula, razing the city of Venēm to the ground and setting up a long-lasting rivalry between the Yaksōnian and Meyānisian peoples.

This marked the temporary end of Yaksōnian as a native language for the commoners, but it survived as the language of the nobility of future Yaksōnian kingdoms and empires. This ended up working in the nobles' favor, as Yaksōnian and the Qlerevi languages were two totally different mutually unintelligible languages, so that the commoners were unable to leak the nobles' plans to the rest of the kingdom unless they learned the language, which often took years and often decades just for an average peasant to master it. Plus, the conservative nobles wanted to distance themselves from the invaders who absolutely destroyed and ruined Yaksōn using sonic weaponry, implementing strict language laws and prescriptivisms that said that the Yaksōnian language was the only one allowed to be spoken in nobility, government, and the military. Eventually, the commoners were assimilated in language to match the language of "high culture" and nobility, with little language change occuring over the past two thousand years due to strong prescriptivist policies enforced by the higher classes, so that a person who was living in the current year would be able to understand what people said two thousand years ago. Regardless, the language had loaned some lexical and grammatical influence to Qlerevi languages spoken in the western side of the Prorinian peninsula, and is a historically significant language even in the current year (2354 AC).

This language is an a priori naturalistic conlang, with main inspirations from Indo-European languages such as Tocharian (main), Old English, Russian, Latin, and Hindustani, with some grammatical influences from non-Indo-European languages such as Georgian, Basque, Finnish, and Classical Nahuatl, and some phonological influences from conlangs made by Big Lang YouTubers such as Nekāchti and Arodjun, the latter of which influenced the number system as well.

Delta Dialect
This dialect is the standard dialect of Yaksōn, and happens to be the dialect used in this article.

Fjord Dialect
This dialect is spoken by Yaksōnian speakers in the Tioroskan fjords, which has spread there due to numerous empires conquering them and forcing the people to assimilate. This dialect is notable for a small vowel shift that occured over the past 200 years which slightly heightened long vowels and is currently starting to break them into diphthongs. This sound change is very common in the southern areas and is starting to spread into Yaksōn proper, but in the delta areas, it is believed that this sound change will destroy the language as a whole, and therefore efforts from the government are being done to "correct" the pronounciation of many dialect groups back in line with the standard delta dialect. The fjord dialect is also characterized by unstressed short vowel loss, which makes voiced obstruents phonemic in this dialect.

Western Dialect
This dialect is very common in the western areas, and it is charactarized by vowel reduction and universal heightening of short vowels, which further causes the long vowels to break into diphthongs. Even though it shares numerous sound changes with the fjord dialect, it is nevertheless considered "substandard but normal" due to having nearly the same grammar as the standard, except for a negative construction consisting of a subject, <ēt> (a contraction of <ēre> and the copula), and a verb, rather than the standard construction consisting of a subject, <ēre>, and a verb. In the west, the former tends to be used in the speech of the slum-dwelling uneducated, while the standard construction tends to be used in the speech of the highly educated.

Consonants

 * (*) /ŋ/ only occurs before /k/ or /q͡ʟ/. However, it is phonemic, as the clusters /nk/ and /nq͡ʟ/ exist as well.
 * (**) It has been argued that the sound /q͡ʟ/ was brought over as influence from the neighboring Qlerevi languages. However, this was proven to be false, as the sound is very rare outside of northwestern Prorinvian languages, either Macro-Yaksōnian or Qlerevi, and is very rare in other Qlerevi languages outside of borrowings from Yaksōnian and other Macro-Yaksōnian languages.
 * Non-geminated obstruents other than /q͡ʟ/ become voiced between vowels.
 * Consonant gemination is phonemic, and is used to distinguish between words like <ātte> "night (Alligatoris sapiens ' equivelant to a day)" and <āte> "thief, bandit" (a loanword from Meyansian that originally meant "a nuisance, an annoyance") in singular forms. The only way to distinguish between these forms when they are not distinguished is by context.
 * When writing geminated /q͡ʟ/ in the romanization, is used.

Vowels

 * (*)The short and long variants of /u/ only occur in loanwords.
 * Short vowels become non-syllabic when next to another vowel. Long vowels become short in this environment.

Stress
Stress falls on the first syllable only if it contains a long vowel. If there isn't a long vowel in the first syllable, stress goes to the first long vowel in the word. Otherwise, if there are no long vowels in the word, stress defaults to the first syllable for two-syllable words and three-syllable words, and the antipenultimate in all other words.

Phonotactics
Yaksōnian's general syllable structure is (O)(S)V(C), where O represents any obstruent, S represents any sonorant, V represents any vowel, and C represents any consonant. No word is allowed to begin or end with a cluster. A general cluster contains of an optional sonorant, sibilant, or /k/ or /p/, followed by an optional obstruent (/q͡ʟ/ is not allowed to be in a cluster which ends in /r/, and two non-affricate sibilant sounds are not allowed to be next to each other), followed by /r/.

Writing System
Yaksōnian is written with an abugida, descended from the ancestor to the Meyānisian alphabet. Prior to the Meyānisian invasion, the vast majority of Yaksōnians were illiterate, and the only ones who can afford the lengthy education necessary to learn it were the higher classes. Back then, the language was written with a logography which was written right-to-left, using logographs to transcribe entire words as well as grammatical modifiers and inflections. When the Meyānisians conquered the collapsing Venēmian empire, they enforced their writing system on the nobility, and therefore the old logography declined and a new script took over.

When the Meyānisians left in 156 AC after the Yaksōnians took advantage of human technology to kick them out and regain their independence, the nobles realized that the alphabet was unable to transcribe all of the sounds of the Yaksōnian language. At the time, the Meyānisian language had a much simpler phonology compared to today, featuring an almost-symmetrical consonant inventory with no phonemic voiced obstruents, no fricatives other than /s/ and /x/, a uvular stop (which was lost shortly after this script was invented), and a three-vowel system with no length distinction. Therefore, the nobles borrowed the characters for /m/, /n/, /ŋ/, /p/, /t/, /k/, /q/, /s/, /x/, /w/, /l/, /r/, /j/, /a/, /i/, and /u/ into the new writing system, while the remaining characters were borrowed from logographs tsēkriān "to run" for /t͡s/, cīntrāve "sixteen" for /t͡ɕ/, śiņqlō "magic, sorcery" for /ɕ/, fōriō "enemy" for /f/, ēsēn "west" for /ɛ, eː/, and orontra "brother" for /ɔ, oː/. The scribes then invented a diacritic to transcribe long vowels and geminated consonants. The script achieved widespread popularity, and when the Meyānisian empire collapsed after waging a war with a coalition of Prorinian states in 324 AC, Meyāni fell into a dark age for centuries, and the Yaksōnians entered into a golden age, becoming the most literate people found anywhere in Levarianqueva.

Nouns
Nouns decline for two genders (animate, inanimate), seven cases (nominative, accusative, ergative, genitive, dative, prepositional, and adessive), three numbers (singular, dual, and plural), and definateness. Nouns have five declensions, three animate and two inanimate. The language used to have more cases, but were eroded over time via sound changes. Older versions of the language used to have 13 to 25 cases depending on the dialect, but it was reduced to 7 cases by the time of the Venēmian Empire (493 BC to 1 AC). No further case loss has occured due to the strong prescriptivism enforced by the conservative nobility.

Cases and their Functions
The dative, prepositional, and adessive cases have the same suffixes as the nominative, ergative, and genitive cases respectively, only with umlauting of the preceding vowel.
 * Nominative - The subject of a verb in non-perfect tenses.
 * Accusative - The direct object of a transitive verb, and the subject of an intransitive verb in the past tense.
 * Ergative - The subject of a transitive verb in thepast tense, and describes motion towards the noun when the verb is in imperfect tenses. Also used as a vocative case, as the vocative case merged with the ergative case early in the language's history.
 * Genitive - The possessor in a possessive phrase if in English you can replace the word "of" with "for" and the phrase a similar meaning, and describes motion away from the noun.
 * Dative - The main indirect object of a bitransitive verb. All other indirect objects receive the ergative case.
 * Prepositional - Describes motion towards the noun when the verb is in perfect tenses. Also used as a general prepositional case.
 * Adessive - Describes motion in, on, or at the noun. It is also used to mark the possessor in a possessive phrase if in English you can replace the word "of" with "for" and the phrase a totally different meaning: e.g. "the war of the king of France" would be "war-NOM.DEF.SG France-GEN.DEF.SG king-ADE.DEF.SG" in Yaksōnian gloss, with "the king" taking the adessive case instead ofthe genitive case.

Animate short -e stems

 * (*) Remove gemination from and palatalize the preceding consonant.
 * (**) Keep gemination, palatalize the preceding consonant, and assimilate the last vowel of the stem towards /i/.
 * (***) Turn preceding vowel into a short vowel (if it is long) and palatalize the preceding consonant.
 * (****) Remove gemination from the preceding consonant.
 * (*****) Remove gemination from preceding consonant
 * (******) The /t/ is metathesized with /k/ because an illegal cluster /tk/ was formed.

Animate long -o stems
This stem is the most common noun stem, and the -e stems are slowly falling out of use in a campaign sponsored by the government.


 * (*) After /i:/, sequences of a consonant plus short /i/ are palatalized.

Inanimate -r stems
WIP

Animate -a stems
WIP

Inanimate -n stems
WIP

Tenses
Yaksōnian had two tenses: past and non-past. To encode future-in-the-past and future tenses, an auxillary verb  is used, which also agrees in person and voice with the main verb.

Moods
Yaksōnian distinguishes between only three moods: imperative, deontic, and default. There are also three types of imperative: an encouraging imperative, which encourages the recipient to do the action, a suggesting imperative, which suggests the recipient do the action, and a magical imperative, which magically forces the recipient to do the action (yes, magic naturally exists within the planet Levarianqueva).

Voices
Yaksōnian has four voices: active, passive (promotes an accusative argument into a nominative argument, and demotes a nominative argument into an accusative argument), antipassive (promotes an ergative argument into an absolutive (accusative) argument and demotes an absolutive argument into the prepositional case or drops it entirely), and antipassive-passive (promotes an accusative argument into a nominative argument, and demotes a nominative argument into the prepositional case or drops it entirely). The latter was once considered dialectal, but is now considered standard usage.

Declensions
Most verbs are in a single declension, because of efforts by the prescriptivists to eliminate potential "dialectal" forms. The infinitive for all verbs end with <-an> in the first person singular subject form. However, there are a few exceptions, including the copula , the auxillary , and a few verbs relating to movement.

Numbers
Yaksōnian uses a mixed base vigesimal-dozenal system. Dozenal was borrowed from Qlerevi languages, while vigesimal systems being very common in Macro-Yaksōnian tongues, living and extinct, with some Prorinian Qlerevi languages incorporating base 20 systems partially or fully. There has been some movements to adopt a pure vigesimal system to distance the language away from the Meyānisian language, which has a pure dozenal system, but this has proven unpopular with prescriptivists in the government who want to maintain most of the features of the ancient Venēmian language, the direct ancestor to modern Yaksōnian.

Syntax
The default word order in Yaksōnian is SVO in transitive and intransitive sentences and SOV in ditransitive sentences, with a strict V2 order in intransitive and transitive sentences and a verb-final order in ditransitive sentences. However, the word order is free, and the subject, direct object, and indirect object may be shuffled around to convey focus.

Pivot arguments
Due to its split-ergativity, Yaksōnian has both a passive voice and an antipassive voice. The passive voice is ungrammatical in past constructions, and this is true with the antipassive voice and non-past constructions. However, things get complex when talking about pivot arguments in this language. Pivot arguments behave ergatively when in past tenses, and behave nominatively when in non-past tenses. This creates a sense of freedom when the speaker encounters sentences with a sentence like "You eat food and I infiltrated you." The speaker has the option to treat the entire phrase nominatively, or to treat the entire phrase ergatively, creating quadruplets which translate to the exact same meaning in a fully nominative-accusative language or a fully ergative-absolutive language. This also makes voice shifting a grammatical requirement in these types of sentences, unlike in standard written English.

Example text
The following text is a letter sent between two