Qalaq

Setting
Qalaq is a language spoken by a nomadic tribe in northern Africa, Qalaqrang, originally from the shores of the Nile, but, through a series of migrations, most motivated by the Islamic conquest of northern Africa, now living on largely the same territory as the Tuareg. Despite formally converting to Islam, the tribes still retain an ancient pantheon and a great number of traditional stories and legends.

Phonemes and Transcription
The forms in the parentheses are approximate phoneme pronunciation using IPA symbols, while the symbol on the left represent how these sounds are transcribed. NOTE: NOTE:
 * While schwa is not within Qalaq vowel inventory, many speakers reduce unaccented vowels to schwa when they are not needed to distinguish words or grammatical forms. This is particularly common in conjuctions and postpositions.
 * The phonetic realisation of mid-vowels in Qalaq is not strictly defined. The e, while it is ideally an open ɛ, can be articulated by various speakers in various contexts as a closed e, or a more open æ. o shows similar variation.
 * There are no true diphthongs in Qalaq, albeit any combination with the two semiwovels can be interpreted as a diphthong. All combinations are allowed.
 * (h) is an allophone of (x) world initially. Both are transcribed as kh.
 * All aspirated consonants are aspirated very forcefully and audibly. Some constriction of the throat is also present when they are articulated, similar to Arabic empathic consonants.
 * s, z, n, l, c, cc and dz are slightly palatalized before e and i.

Phonotactics
Essentially, a syllable in Qalaq can be defined as: (C)(C)V(C)(C). Generally, any combination conforming to this definition is allowed. However, there are additional rules forbidding some few combinations.
 * rs syllable initially is not allowed.
 * th and dh may only appear adjacent to a vowel or an approximant.
 * A word cannot end on an aspirated stop. If it would due to flexion, the stop is deaspirated.

Sandhi
There is also a small degree of sandhi, the rules of which are as follows:
 * While all consonants may be geminated, geminated forms may only appear in intervocalic positions. In consonant clusters, they are reduced to single length consonants.
 * s is palatalized into sh when preceding an r, m, p, k. The equivalent rule applies to z preceding r, m, b, g. Both are also palatalized after r syllable finally and reduced to kh and gh respectively syllable finally after an l.
 * A stop followed by a non-sibilant fricative with the same place of articulation merges into the fricative. e.g. kak+khang>kakhang, awt+tharg>awtharg
 * A nasal followed by a stop adjusts its place of articulation according to the stop. A nasal followed by a nasal remains unchanged, but a schwa is inserted between them to aid articulation if needed. A nasal followed by a stop with the same place of articulation absorbs the stop and, in an intervocalic position, becomes geminate. e.g. am+ter>anter, am+nar>amnar, am+baghzha>ammaghzha

Stress
Qalaq has dinamic stress that can be placed on any syllable in a word and is often used to distinguish forms of a word or different words. A single word may hold only one stress, but additional stress may be added to the first syllable in words longer than five syllables to aid articulation. An accent on the final syllable is most common in nouns and adjectives, as many case endings pull the accent onto themselves. Stress elongates the stressed vowel slightly, but does not change vowel quality. The stressed syllable is here written by adding an accent onto the vowel as in é.

Verb Morphology
Qalaq verbs change in accordance with grammatical person, aspect, mood, tense, voice, number and, to a degree, gender. Tenses are henceforth named simply according to these categories, i.e. Tense Mood Voice Aspect.

Most verb flexion consists of adding affixes, mostly vowel only infixes, into a verb root, consisting of two to four consonants. Verbs are accordingly separated into three categories: 2, 3 and 4, according to the number of consonants and their flexion differs somewhat, though it is very similar. 3-roots are the most common and make up over 60% of all verb roots in Qalaq, but a few often used verbs (most modal verbs) belong to the 2 and 4 categories.

Present Indicative Active Imperfective
Roughly the equivalent of English present continuous, the PIAI states an action occuring in the present, which is likely to continue in the near future and is not a general fact or state of affairs. It is often used as a substitute for the future tense, as it has somewhat easier flexion and shorter forms.

In PIAI, gender is only seen in third person singular and plural, where m stands for masculine, f for feminine and n for neutral. The verb does not consistently agree with the subject when it comes to gender, as the neutral form can be used for any gender, both physical and grammatical, and the masculine and feminine forms are mostly used when being excessively polite or suggesting that the gender of the subject is important.

For 3-roots, the flexion goes as follows, illustrated with the root s-m-kk, meaning to walk.

Noun Morphology
Qalaq nouns and adjectives change in accordance with grammatical number, gender and case.

Qalaq has nine cases: Nominative, Accusative, Dative, Genitive, Ablative, Allative, Perlative, Comitative, Causative. They communicate roughly the following noun functions in a sentence. A noun in N tends to be the subject of a transitive or intransitive verb, while a noun in A tends to be a direct object of a transitive verb. D represents an indirect object and is used for little else. G indicated possession or source, but not reason or cause. Ab represents the beginning point of movement, a concept off of which other concepts, usually the subject, break off, or the cause or justification for an action. Al represents the goal of movement, a result of accumulation of other concepts, or the result of an action, expected or observed. P is used to indicate movement through or by, but also, metaphorically, for an instrument or condition needed to fulfill and action. Co is used to indicate the company in which an action is done, but also, rarely, to describe thoughts more precisely. As I am not sure whether this is clear, an example would be, should one describe a feeling of envy with a touch of anger, one would express it with the NP: envy-N anger-Co. Finally, Ca represents the direct cause of an action or event. Ca and Ab merged into Ab and Al and D into D in the modern spoken Qalaq varieties, but they are still included here, as they are present in some traditional texts.

There are four grammatical genders: masculine human, shown as m, feminine human, shown as f, concrete nonhuman, shown as c and abstract nonhuman, shown as a. The name of the genders is fairly informative as to what nouns they usually apply to, albeit there are some counter-intuitive exceptions, particularly when it comes to domesticated animals and certain concrete concepts viewed as abstract. Adjectives agree with the noun in case, gender and number and their flexion includes paradigms for all these forms. Each gender has only one declension and all nouns of the same gender are inflected the same way. There are, however, small groups of irregular nouns in all four genders that have unpredictable paradigms, as well as several nouns with flexion according to one gender, but that request agreement according to another. These exceptions are covered later, beneath regular flexion.

Nouns and adjectives are also inflected for number. Qalaq has three grammatical numbers: singular (sg), plural (pl) and absolute plural (ap). Their meaning can be illustrated as man-men-all men. In quick speech, nouns are, when number is not important for understanding the sentence, always presented in their singular form. While, ideally, the verb and subject agree in number, it is often expressed through the verb only, whereas the subject noun is usually in singular unless one wants to emphasize that one is refering to more than one or all. Nouns in ap take verbs in pl, but, as was explained, this is not strictly adhered to in speech.

Most noun roots are in the form of any number of syllables followed by an incomplete syllable to allow for vowel infixes, a common feature of declensions in Qalaq. The stress is on the affixes in all regular nouns, so the root is always unstressed and inflected forms have the stress on the ultimate or penultimate syllable. Irregular nouns are not as predictable and may have stress on any syllable in any form.

There is a small number of nouns which are non-gendered, in that they can agree with an adjective in any gender, regardless of their own paradigm. They are covered in the irregular section.

Regular Declension
Regular m declension goes as follows, as illustrated by the noun kawt-l meaning husband.

NOTE:


 * There is an additional form for all words creating by an -a- infix that is only used in compounds, but, as compunding is not productive in modern Qalaq, it is not included in the paradigms. It is, however, noticeable in many remaining word roots that were originally compounds. In classical Qalaq, compunding was also rarely used and it is possible that already at that point it had no longer been a productive feature of the language..

Classical vs. Modern
There are several differences between Classical Qalaq, the language in which most Qalaq folktales are recited in, and Modern Qalaq, the language used in everyday communication. The language described here is closer to Classical than to Modern Qalaq. Some developments in Modern Qalaq include the almost complete dissapearance of number from both verb and noun paradigms, with a few plural and absolute plural forms remaining in fixed expressions, the simplification of the case system to varying degrees depending on the tribe, the greatest number of cases being 7 (Nominative, Accusative, Dative, Genitive, Ablative, Perlative, Comtiative) and the smallest 3 (Nominative, Oblique, Genitive), expansion of the vowel system and, in many cases, merging of the aspirated and unaspirated voiceless consonants.

Due to very little semantic drift and largely unchanged syntax, most Modern Qalaq dialects are mutually intelligeable, but are far from similar and very different to the Classical variety, though most tribes still understand spoken Classical due to oral tradition. However, in order to preserve folktales despite the changing grammar and phonology of Qalaq, many features of Classical Qalaq are thought to be exagerated in order to compensate for lack of certain qualities in Modern varities, especially when it comes to pronounciation. Aspirated consonants, for example, are thought to have been substantially more subtly aspirated then they are today when folktales are recited, as Modern Qalaq speakers, who are unable to hear the difference between these two types of consonants, but are aware that it exists, over-aspirate the consonants to make the difference audible to other Modern Qalaq speakers. Furthermore, the e and o sounds are thought to have been substantially less varied in pronounciation, but Modern Qalaq speakers often transpose their greater vowel inventory onto classical words. Other than these few differences, linguistic analysis suggests that Classical Qalaq as it is spoken today is not far from the proto-Qalaq spoken by first Qalaq nomads who arrived in the north of Africa.

Words
The following are links to pages where word roots are listed.

Verbs

 * Qalaq\Verb Roots