Shataranjan

Shataranjan is the successor language of Old Shataranjan.

Changes compared to Old Shataranjan
Shataranjan has lost much of its oligosynthetic properties. It is now a polysynthetic language, having many new morphemes coming from the expansion of Shataranjan culture.

Setting
Shataranjan is the main language of Shataranjans, inhabitants of the tidally-locked planet of Shataran, located around 500 light years from the Solar System.

There are two main dialects, the one spoken on the always bright side which eternally is illuminated by their star, and the other spoken in the darkness of the hemisphere facing against the star. As the two sides are constantly at war, the two dialects never became different languages, as a result of common interactions.

Phonotactics
The phonotactics are relatively simple. The most complex cluster possible is CCVCC, and a fricative cannot follow its equivalent affricate. Short vowels tend to appear more commontly before affricates.

Transliteration
There are two systems of transliteration of Shataranjan into Human languages, one Latin-based and the other Cyrillic-based.

Latin
All affricates are created by combining the plosive and the fricative glyphs or digraphs.  take the place of ʈ an ɖ respectively, while  takes place of both ɟ and ɢ.

/ɲ/ and /ç/ are both written as  and  before a vowel, and  and  at the end of a word or before a consonant. A long vowel is marked by duplication (e.g. /a/ = ; /aː/ = ).

Cyrillic
Affricates act the same as in the Latin transliteration, with the notable exception of gj = гь. The cyrillic transliteration allows for the use of ю, я and sometimes ё after palatal consonants instead of ь+V, although the use of ё is sometimes discouraged.

Grammar
Shataranjan is a language with a high degree of inflection and agglutinative-polysynthetic morphology. It is an ergative language, meaning that it does not distinguish between the subject of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive verb. It has a Verb-Subject-Object syntax.

Verbs
Verbs are the morphemes that start any sentence, since VSO is the syntactic order. Verbs only have 3 tenses - past, present and future, and additionally conjugate by number and person. It is important to note that the past and future tense suffixes - u(u)n and i(i)v - change vowel length based on plurality - if the number of the verb is singular and the final vowel is short, the suffix will have a long vowel, but in the opposite case, the vowel will shorten.

The verb be - dzelh - will be used as an example for conjugation. To create the imperfective aspect, one adds -oopf at the end of a verb before the agent.

Nouns
Nouns are inflected according to case and number. Shataranjan has four cases: Ergative, Absolutive, Dative and Genitive. The plural form of a noun is formed by gemating the final vowel of the root word. There is a total of three declesions for each ending of a noun.

1st declesion
The first declesion applies to nouns ending in a consonant, commonly a fricative or a nasal. While the ergative is formed by simply the root word, to form the absolutive one adds -o at the end of the word, with another suffix being added to form the dative form (-ji) and the genitive form (-tse). The plural form is formed by geminating the vowel preceeding the final consonant in the ergative form, instead of the -o.

2nd declesion
The second declesion applies to nouns ending in -a or -e. As with the first declesion, the absolutive form has an -o at its end, however it replaces the -a or -e ending and is the vowel duplicated to form the plural of the word. Dative and genitive work exactly the same as in the first declesion.

3rd declesion
The third declesion applies to nouns ending in -i. Unlike the first two declesions, the absolutive is formed by replacing the final -i with -u, but as in the second declesion, -u is geminated to form a plural. As with the previous two declesions, dative and genitive cases are formed by adding -ji and -tse at the end of the absolutive form of the word, respectively.

Adjectives
Adjectives decline by case and number as well, following the same declesion pattern as nouns with the same ending, instead of according to nouns they refer to. They have a comparative and superlative form. The comparative form is formed by adding the prefix pfo- (if the adjective starts with a consonant) or pf- (if it starts with a vowel) to mean "more", while "less" is formed with the prefixes qqha- or qqh-, depending on the starting letter of the adjective. The superlative form is formed by adding the prefix etlha- or etlh-, again depending on whether the adjective starts with a vowel or not.

Example sentence
dzelhevlom-ketsharoshaatu

джэлъэвлом-кэтшарошаату

be.PRS.SG.3-3SG.ERG weapon.SING.ABS-black.SING.ABS

lit. "It is a black weapon".