Casuma

Casuma is a Germanic language spoken in western Europe. It is the official language in the Casum Republic, and a minority language in surrounding areas in England, France and Spain.

General information
Casuma is a fusional nominative-accusative SVO language. It is spoken by approximately 90 million people in Casum and approximately 1 million in surrounding areas. It is an isolate within the Germanic language family. Notable features the retention of Proto-Germanic nasal vowels and the extremely conservative Germanic vocabulary. There are many loans in Casuma from Basque and the Celtic languages. Morphologically, Casuma has four noun cases and two grammatical numbers (three in the pronouns). In addition, verbs conjugate for person and number, three tenses, three moods, and two voices. The three grammatical genders were only preserved in the pronouns.

Consonants

 * (d͡ʒ) only appears in loan words
 * /l/, /m/, /n/, and /r/ can appear syllabically.
 * /ɾ/ is an allophone of /r/ word-finally after a vowel for many speakers and is not a seperate phoneme.

Diphthongs
In addition, /j/ and /w/ can form a diphthong before any vowel or a triphthong before a dipthong.

Nasal vowels
There are also two nasal dipthongs /ɑ̃ĩ/ and /ɑ̃ũ/, spelled ąi/aį and ąu/aų respectively.

Alphabet
The Casuma alphabet has 31 letters
 * Loan words are often transcribed phonetically to avoid pronounciation errors. For example, center is spelled sentr, and jelly would be spelled dzheli.
 * The letters Kk, Qq, Vv, and Xx can appear in loan words. Kk is pronounced /k/, Qq is pronounced /k/, Vv can be pronounced either /f/ or /v/, and Xx is pronounced /ks/.

Determiners
Articles and determiners decline for case along with the noun.

The definite article
The definite article can be used with singular and plural forms of nouns.

The indefinite article
The indefinite article is the number 1. Similar to other Germanic languages, it cannot be used with plural forms of nouns.

Nouns
Nouns in Casuma decline for four cases. Nouns follow five different declension patterns depending on the ending of a noun: a noun can decline differently if it ends in a nasal consonant, a consonant other than a nasal, a front or near-front vowel, a central or back vowel, and a nasal vowel.
 * the Nominative case is the unmodified form of a noun and denotes the subject.
 * the Accusative case marks the direct object
 * the Dative case marks the indirect object
 * the Genetive case shows posession

Front and near-front vowel endings
The only truncation in this type of declension occurs in the accusative singular.

Nasal vowel endings
In the nominative plural, the accusative, and the genetive singular, the nasal vowel will be replaced by it's non-nasal counterpart and then the bolded case ending will be added on. In the genetive plural -es will be infixed between the final consonant and the nasal vowel. In the dative case, the truncations will be the same no matter which nasal vowel the noun ends in.

Adjectives
Adjectives in Casuma preceed the noun they modify and agree with it's case. There are two irregular adjectives (much) and (good). All other adjectives are regular and follow the same declension pattern depending on whether they end in a consonant, vowel, or nasal vowel.

Nasal vowels retain their unnasalized variant in all declensions but the nominative-accusative comparative.

Verbs
The Casuma verb is fairly simple compared to other germanic languages. 11 strong verbs survive from Proto-Germanic and there are only 2 irregular verbs. Verbs conjugate for 3 moods (indicative, subjunctive, and imperative) and three tenses. The present and past tense are indicated by inflection of the verb, and the future tense is indicated by an auxillary verb. Dual-number pronouns take the plural conjugation.

To Be
The verb "to be" is completely irregular, as in many Indo-European languages.

Strong verbs
There are few strong verbs surviving in Casuma, and they take a different conjugation than weak verbs. These are zäwan (to see), helpan (to help), näman (to take), ghäban (to give), ätan (to eat), shäcan (to happen), näwsan (to use), and.

Participles
Participles are not formed differently if the verb is strong or weak. There are only 2 participles in Casuma: present and past.