ʔulili

General information
ʔulili is a language or small language family spoken by the indigenous inhabitants of the island group today known as Sumpa Hulil in the dominant dialect of Ddiktas Ddammay. Called Hikddakatddazmi ("those who do not have names" or "those who do not exist") or simply Hulilwus ("people from Hulil") by the kaddikuwus (the speakers of Ddiktas, who more often refer to themselves simply as nu, "people"), the speakers of  ʔ ulili were the only (near-)human inhabitants of the archipelago of Sumpa Ddammay prior to the arrival of Ddiktas speakers from across the western ocean, living in small, semi-permanent villages as stone-age fishers and gatherers.

The islands of Sumpa Hulil are the largest known in Sumpa Ddammay, and were swiftly claimed by Ddiktas-speaking agriculturalists after their migration across the sea, relegating the Hulilwus to peripheral lands in the rugged island interiors and a few of the smaller outlying islands. The history of interaction between the two peoples has been largely antagonistic, but over the centuries there has been some exchange of goods and ideas between the two as well.

Most significantly, the inland Hulilwus, unable to practice their traditional maritime lifestyle, long ago adopted agricultural practices and technologies, as well as metalworking techniques and other advanced crafts, from the Ddiktas-speaking invaders. These practices and tools came accompanied with a sizable body of new vocabulary, and the introduction of foreign words, phonemes, and constructions from Ddiktas has left a noticeable mark on  ʔ ulili.

ʔ ulili has had an influence on at least some of the insular varieties of Ddiktas as well, albeit a subtler one. For instance, the prestige "Ddammay" dialect first arose in Sumpa Hulil, and the distinctive deletion of word-final nasal consonants in that dialect may show the influence of  ʔ ulili words, which for the most part consist of only open syllables and therefore invariably end in a vowel.

Alphabet
ʔ ulili phonology shows a number of similarities with that of   Ddiktas, though some are likely to be coincidental. Most strikingly, both languages share an unusually small vowel quality inventory, though 'ulili recognizes vowel length as phonemic, giving it a somewhat more diverse vowel system overall. On the other hand,  ʔ ulili's aspirated and ejective plosives and affricates are quite distinctive and unfamiliar to  Ddiktas speakers.

The Latin orthography for  ʔ ulili  mostly follows the IPA standard, though /j/ is represented as "y" as in English. Aspirated consonants are indicated by the addition of a final "h" to the corresponding "plain" letter or digraph, while ejective consonants are marked with an apostrophe ('). Long vowels are indicated by doubling the corresponding letter;  ʔ ulili phonotactics do not allow vowel sequences, so a series of two vowels is always pronounced as a single long vowel sound.

Allophones in complementary distribution are always written as the "primary" allophone. / ɕ/   appears only  between front vowels (long or short /i/ or /a/)  as  an allophone of /s/ and is therefore written as "s." / t͡s/ and / t͡ɕ/ both contrast with /t/, but the former occurs only medially before front vowels and the latter occurs only initially before close vowels (long or short /i/ or /u/), so they are considered to be in complementary distribution with eachother and are both written "ts."

Phonotactics
ʔ ulili phonotactics are highly restrictive, allowing only syllables of the form "CV," though it has a series of aspirated and ejective plosives and affricates that could be viewed as glottal stops and fricatives co-articulated with other consonants.

In loan words from  Ddiktas that include syllable codas,  ʔ ulili typically inserts an additional short vowel to break up the resulting consonant cluster, though the quality of these epenthetic vowels varies somewhat unpredictably depending on the dialect and the particular word, and in some cases consonants are simply dropped, particlarly in word final position or in clusters of identical consonants. For instance, "standard"  ʔ ulili represents the  Ddiktas  place name  Sumpa Ddammay as S uumapa Lamayu (/s uːmapa lamaju/), and the word  Ddiktas itself as  Likutasa (/likuta ɕa/).

Syntax
Nouns in ʔulili are not marked for case and objects are differentiated from subjects primarily through word order, with the former always preceding the latter. Verbs, on the other hand, are quite distinctive, and their placement within a phrase is more flexible. ʔulili word order can therefore be seen as varying relatively freely between VOS, OVS,  and OSV, though in everyday speech VOS order is by far the most commonly used.

Nouns
Nominal morphology in ʔulili is relatively simple, with no grammatical marking for case. However, most nouns are required to take one of ten possible suffixes which mark them for grammatical gender or class. Assignment of noun class markers is highly idiosyncratic; some nouns alternate arbitrarily between more than one possible suffix, while others take on entirely different meanings depending on which suffix is applied, and still others take only the "null" suffix -Ø. Nevertheless, most of these "class-marking" suffixes can be grouped based on the animacy of the nouns they modify, as follows:


 * -si exclusively marks terms for human body parts and diminutive forms of nouns referring to people, which typically otherwise take an "unmarked" suffix (most often -Ø).

Aside from class markers, nouns may be marked in the plural number, though this distinction is always optional and need not agree with verbal number marking. Indeed, in phrases containing verbs bearing plural affixes like the plural agent suffix -mats'i, it is generally considered ungrammatically redundant for the corresponding noun to also be pluralized.

Plural marking in nouns is accomplished through one of two forms of reduplication. In some nouns, reduplication of the initial syllable of the noun root (or the entire root if it is monosyllabic) marks plurality, as in nenepa-si, "feet" or tsitsilamati-Ø, "rattlesnakes", while in other cases it marks different semantic distinctions, as in kxuukxuula-sa, "river, stream, running water", from kxuula-sa, "potable water". In general, when a noun takes a suffix, the suffix may be reduplicated instead, as in nepa-si-si, "feet", kxuukxuula-sa-sa, "rivers, streams," or kxuula-sa-sa "waters, sources of potable water."

Although nouns in ʔulili do not decline for case, they may take one functional suffix in place of their normal class marker: -pii. Nouns ending in -pii denote "one who is characterized by" or "one who makes," similar to the English agentive ending "-er." For instance, ʔulili-pii can mean "intelligent person", "orator", "confidence artist", or "speaker of the ʔulili language," from ʔulili, "intelligent, eloquent, or beautiful speech", while ʔalili-pii means "gossiper" or "storyteller," from ʔalili, "gossip" or "story." As with noun class markers, -pii can be reduplicated to indicate plurality, as in ʔalili-pii-pii, "gossipers" or ʔulili-pii-pii, "ʔulili speakers (used as an ethnonym)."

-pii can also be applied to geographical terms or place names, in which case it produces a term describing a person from that place. For instance kxuukxuula-pii-pii, "river people" or "people from the river(s)."

Verbs
Verbal morphology in ʔulili is highly polysynthetic, with a large inventory of potential affixes marking a wide variety of grammatical and semantic distinctions. Of these, a verb may only take one prefix, and the suffixes may be grouped into a number of categories (here labelled sequentially from A to O) based on their position in relation to the verb root and to each other.

Instrumental Prefixes
Most verb roots in ʔulili describe a relatively vague or generic action, such as k'a, "to hit", which is made more specific through the application of an instrumental prefix indicating how the action is accomplished. ʔulili regularly uses 20 instrumental prefixes, though not every root can be meaningfully paired with every prefix, and each can express a range of different meanings. Each is defined below according to the sense in which it is most frequently used.