Quhtanese

General information
Quhtanese (natively rhe Lus Qhùtá /ʁæ̀ ɺɤ̀ʃ qʰɤ̂tʰɑ̌/; literally: “the speech (of) officials”) is a dialect continuum spoken across most of western, southcentral, and coastal Quhtan (rhe Sâiyu Cûis or Cûis). Because most Quhtanese dialects are found in the west, the group is also referred to as rhe lus qìe or "the western dialect(s)". When the Quhtanese continuum is taken as one language, as is often done in academic literature, it has the secondmost native speakers (nearly a billion) of the languages on Aetho.

Consonants

 * A glottal stop appears epenthetically between two vowels in the standard variety. It is phonemic is some dialects.
 * The approximants tend to be fricativized when spoken emphatically.

Vowels

 * Allowable diphthongs are: /iæ/, /iɤ/, /iɑ/, /ɤi/, /æɤ/, /ɑɤ/, and /ɑi/. All are falling.

Phonotactics
(C)V(/n/, /ŋ/, /k/, /s/, /ʃ/, /χ/, /ɻ/)
 * Minimal syllable: e /æ̀/
 * Maximal syllable: tlùin /tɬʰɤ̂i̯n/
 * /ŋ/ is not allowed syllable-initially.

Native Scripts
The native script of Quhtanese and, by conquest, surrounding languages is called rhe yùganh zàu, lit. "the common notation". It is a cursive abugida script where vowels are represented with diacritics and tones are represented with silent consonants.

Parts of Speech

 * nouns and pronouns: tlex "stone"
 * verbs, prepositions, coverbs, and adjectives: dêg "help"
 * copulae: ai "is"
 * adjectival nouns: qìe "west"
 * articles, determiners, enclitics (inc. interrogative): rhi "the (person)"
 * numbers: di "one"
 * particles: tlèx "very"
 * conjunctions: u "and"
 * interjections: Hìr "hello, pay attention"
 * ideophones: rîus "glass breaking"

Gender and Articles
Grammatical Gender is only expressed in articles and pronouns. Some derivational affixes can change the gender of a word.
 * The definite articles lose their initial consonant if the previous syllable ends in a consonant. ex. Dêg in i nàu nûx. "They help the old man."

Copula
There are several copulae in Quhtanese, the main one being ai.

Tense/aspect particles
The tense/aspect particles are placed immediately after the verb. There is also a perfect/anterior particle ê, which is placed immediately before the verb.

Sentence word order
Verb-Subject-Object

Cùs su nàu tún nûx àr díu dá èn tu.

[k̟ʰɤ̂ʃ ʃɤ̀ nɑ̂ɤ̯ tʰɤ̌n nɤ᷈χ ɑ̂ɻ tǐɤ̯ tɑ̌ æ̂n tʰɤ̀]

eat past.perf man zero year def.n cream sweet gen 1

"Some kid ate my ice cream."

Nouns can be moved before the verb for emphasis.

Noun phrases
Preposition-Article-Noun-Adjectival noun

Numbers
Because Aethos have only four fingers per hand, they count in base 8. Larger numbers are constructed by listing the number of 10,0008s, then 1008s, then 108s
 * The spaces between parts are optional.
 * 101326
 * xâháis xârúnàuz zàxâzàlu
 * 8-myriad 8-3-hundred 2-8-6