K'hh Tllyko

"SUPER WORK IN PROGRESS"

Classification and Dialects
An agglutinative language, consistent, with little dialectic difference across regions. K'hh Tllyko features an ergative-absolutive alignment in all case excluding the copula, which is nominative-accusative.

Phonology
K'hh Tllyko has 4 basic vowels: a y o e, phonetically /a ʏ-ɤ o ɛ-ɜ/. It is notable that due to isolated sound changes the usage of the /a/ continues to move towards /æ/, sometimes merging with the /ɛ/ on unstressed syllables. The y also shows limited flexibility depending on phonotactic position, often allophonically aligning with the consonant before it.

Germination
There is no formal germination of any kind however, consonant germination can be interpolated from a heavily stressed syllable's onset consonant ie. (In English an emphatic "Fantastic!)" could contain a germinated t in the"tas" syllable).

Diphthongs
There are no dipthongs in K'hh Tllyko.

Phonotactics
Word stems (all parts of speech), are (C)'(C),(C)V(C),(C)'. *The (') represents and ejective breath of air, which can form the coda of a syllable

For nouns, vowels are uncommon in the stem. For verbs they are more common.

Affixes can follow any of the above mentioned patters as well as (V) and (C) single sound morphemes. Although single sound morphemes tend to be suffixial in nature.

Vowel initial morphemes are rare, and vowel initial words are nearly impossible. Ejective final words are very rare, and almost always aspirated, or simply non-ejective.

Word Order
Basic word order is VOS or Verb-Agent.

Nouns
Nouns have 4 morphological declension patters in K'hh Tllyko, one for a definite-ergative noun as well as one for an indefinite-ergative noun, one for a definite-absolutive and one for an indefinite-absolutive noun. There are 4 gender variations for each. Example: cat - še

The cat (DEF.ABS)= p'šetš

Verbs
Kop`ll is very much a language of Verbs, having an extensive system of affixes. Verbs in Kop`ll conjugate for two tenses: present and past; seven aspects: perfective, perfect, habitual, continuous/progressive, gnomic, terminative, and continuative, all in both the past and present tense; and eleven moods: indicative, interrogative, imperative, volitional, causative, conditional, subjunctive, contemporative, participial, potential and necessitative; five voices: active, passive, middle, reciprocal, and valencial (indicates an animate or inanimate subject and/or topic). Verbs also agree with the person, in the form of suffixed inflectional pronouns and also regular suffixes. The infinitive form of all verbs ends in the labial-dental fricative, v, followed by an a. Most verbs are regular, though state-of-being verbs as well as a few other verbs maintain completely separate words for animate and inanimate subjects/topics.

The structure of a given verb is as follows:

"He's still able to go (to those two people) so..."

Perhaps, a more creative translation would be, "He's still managing to see both (Betsy and Jeanette) so..."

Tenses
There are no tenses in K'hh Tllyko

Negation
Negation is accomplished by using the negation infix, -'''ŋya. '''In the present negative the tense marker is omitted.

Aspects
Aspects are somewhat simple to conjugate. They are placed before the tense marker in the verb. The following are all the different present tense indicative third-person animate forms of again the word bova in all seven different aspects.

Moods
Kop`ll has eleven moods, all of which are marked morphologically, typically after the person marker. The indicative mood is unmarked, being the common mood. Conjugation of the moods will be demonstrated using bova once again in the present tense third person animate form.

Gerund
The gerund in Kop`ll is accomplished by adding the suffix -baye (not to be confused with the nominalizer baye) to any given verb in the present tense.

Additionally there are no supine or infinitive forms of verbs except in the verb rare case when a verb can be stripped of all affixes to reveal only the base and then function as a sort of gerund or infinitive in that sense, but this is very archaic and rarely seen in modern writing or speech. (ie bovall, go - bova to go) This is considered to be outdated and can be seen as offensive by some speakers of the coastal (more prominent) dialect.

The Interrogative
In Kop`ll forming interrogative phrases is relatively easy. Word order is preserved entirely and only the verb is inflected, with question words (what, where, etc..) preceding the verb.

Participle
Any verb in Kop`ll can function as a participle verb when affixed with the possessive partial and placed before the modifying phrase. Using bova, go as an example, bova+q+yai aiq(river) = bovaqyai aiq, or bova ŋ yai aiq in the inland dialect, meaning "the river that I go to" (incomplete sentence, participle phrase).