Boquense Creole

Classification and Dialects
The standard boquense creole is that spoken in the city of Quilmes and surrounding areas to the south. However, in central and west Republic of La Boca, there's an important amount of native-speakers and second-language speakers, mainly in Floresta province.

Boquense creole is classified as an indoeuropean conlang, related with Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French and dialects like Genovese.

Phonotactics
Boquense Creole syllable structure can be summarized as follows; parentheses enclose optional components:


 * (C1 (C2)) (S1) V (S2) (C3 (C4))

Creole syllable structure consists of an optional syllable onset, consisting of one or two consonants; an obligatory syllable nucleus, consisting of a vowel optionally preceded by and/or followed by a semivowel; and an optional syllable coda, consisting of one or two consonants. The following restrictions apply:


 * Onset
 * First consonant (C1): Can be any consonant, including a liquid (/l, r/).
 * Second consonant (C2): If and only if the first consonant is a stop /p, t, k, b, d, ɡ/ or a voiceless labiodental fricative /f/, a second consonant, always a liquid /l, r/, is permitted. Onsets /tl/ and /dl/ occur only in loanwords.
 * Nucleus
 * Semivowel (S1)
 * Vowel (V)
 * Semivowel (S2)
 * Coda
 * First consonant (C3): Can be any consonant
 * Second consonant (C4): Most often /s/, but can be /ɡ/ after /n/ in English loanwords like marketing. A coda combination of two consonants appears only in loanwords (mainly from Classical Latin) but never in words inherited from Vulgar Latin.
 * Medial codas assimilate place features of the following onsets and are often stressed.

Maximal onsets include transporte /tɾansˈpor.te/, flaco /ˈfla.ko/, clave /ˈkla.be/.

Maximal nuclei include buey /buei/, Uruguay /u.ɾuˈɡuai/.

Maximal codas include instalar /ins.taˈlar/, perspectiva /pers.pekˈti.ba/.

In many dialects, a coda cannot be more than one consonant (one of n, r, l or s) in informal speech. Realizations like /trasˈpor.te/, /is.taˈlar/, /pes.pekˈti.ba/ are very common, and in many cases, they are allowed even in formal speech.

Because of the phonotactic constraints, an epenthetic /e/ is inserted before word-initial clusters beginning with /s/ (e.g. escribir 'to write') but not word-internally (transcribir 'to transcribe'), thereby moving the initial /s/ to a separate syllable. The epenthetic /e/ is pronounced even when it is not reflected in spelling (e.g. the surname of Carlos Slim is pronounced /esˈlin/). While Boquense Creole words undergo word-initial epenthesis, cognates in Latin and Italian do not:

Writing System * 1: Only in Arabic and Hebrew derived words/loanwords

* 2: Only in Arabic and Hebrew loanwords, otherwise non-existent sound

* 3: Only in Arabic and Hebrew and Argentinian lunfardo words like wachín (little boy)

* 4: Greek derived words.

* 5: Yeism, and in argentinian lunfardo (example, yuta: police)

Grammar
Boquense creole words can be divided into the following lexical categories: articles, nouns, adjectives, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections. The articles vary according to definiteness (definite, indefinite, and partitive), number, gender, and the initial sound of the subsequent word. Partitive articles compound the preposition da with the corresponding definite article, to express uncertain quantity. In the plural, they typically translate into English as "few"; in the singular, typically as "some".

Nouns
Most nouns are derived from Spanish or English. Many of these are themselves borrowed from Portuguese (e.g. poeta below). Although Creole nouns do not inflect for case, they are derived from a mixture of the Latin nominative and accusative cases.

Adjectives
In Boquense Creole, an adjective can be placed before or after the noun. The unmarked placement for most adjectives (e.g. colours, nationalities) is after the noun, but this is reversed for a few common classes of adjective — those denoting beauty, age, goodness, and size are placed before the noun in the unmarked case, and after the noun for emphasis.

Placing the adjective after the noun can alter its meaning or indicate restrictiveness of reference. If a noun has many adjectives, usually no more than one will be before the noun.

Verbs
Based on the ending of their infinite presente (-are, -ere, or -ire), all Boquense verbs can be assigned to three distinct conjugation patterns. Exceptions are found: fare "to do/make" (from Latin FACĔRE) and dire "to say" (from Latin DICĔRE) were originally 2nd conjugation verbs that reduced the unstressed vowel in the infinitive (and consequentially in the future and conditional, whose stem derives from the infinitive), but still follow the 2nd conjugation for all the other tenses; this behaviour is similarly featured in the verbs ending in -trarre, -porre and -durre, derived respectively from the Latin TRAHĔRE (to drag), PONĔRE (to put) and DVCĔRE (to lead).

Just like many other Romance languages, Boquense verbs express distinct verbal aspects by means of analytic structures such as periphrases, rather than synthetic ones; the only aspectual distinction between two synthetic forms is the one between the imperfetto (habitual past tense) and the passato remoto (perfective past tense), although the latter is usually replaced in spoken language by the passato prossimo.

Syntax
Boquense Creole is an SOV language.

The subject is usually omitted when it is a pronoun – distinctive verb conjugations make it redundant. Subject pronouns are considered emphatic when used at all.

Questions are formed by a rising intonation at the end of the sentence (in written form, a question mark). There is usually no other special marker, although wh-movement does usually occur. In general, intonation and context are important to recognize questions from affirmative statements. In general, adjectives come after the noun they modify, adverbs after the verb. But: as with French, adjectives coming before the noun indicate essential quality of the noun. Demonstratives (e.g. queste this, quelle that) come before the noun, and a few particular adjectives (e.g. bello) may be inflected like demonstratives and placed before the noun.

Lexicon
Most of the Boquense Creole vocabulary comes from Latin because is a Romance conlang.

However, other languages that came into contact with it have also left their mark. In the twentieth century, the lexicon of boquense creole had about 80% words of Spanish and Italian origin and 20% of Hebrew, Japanese, Germanic, Greek and Arabic origin.

Example text
Tous els sè umans nascent liberes et egals en dignità et dereitos, et dotats come sons de raixò et cunxiença, doverò comportarsi fraternallment lis uns amb aultres (Articolo 1 della Declaraziù Universal dells Dereitos del Human)

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights and, endowed as they are with reason and conscience, must behave fraternally with one another. (Art. 1 Universal Declaration of Human Rights)