Walaan

Walaan is a mixture of Estorva's creativity, Mandarin, and Japanese. I felt somehow familiar when creating this language since my mother tongue is actually Mandarin, :P.

General information
Walaan is a language using syllabary. With 86 syllabograms and 1 diacritic the system covers all possible syllables in Walaan.

Writting System
The writting system of Walaan is syllabary. There is also some romanizated systems. The most common and accepted one is Barleimann. But another romanization system, Darlis-Perol, is also well known.

Here's all possible syllables in Walaan. Inside a cell, the upper one is Barleimann while the lower one is Darlis-Perol. The argument of these romanizations continues nowadays, but Barleimann is common in European and USA, while Darlis-Parol is well known and most used in Asia.

Since voiced consonants are not distinguished from voiceless ones, Barleimann tends not to use any voiced letter (such as d, g, v) to represent those unaspirated consonants. It used a letter "x" instead. Whereas unaspirated consonants are referred to by voiced letter in Darlis-Parol. For new learns, the term "txa" would be hard to read and "da" is more easy to pronounce, but he would never know that "da" isn't actually voiced in Walaan. "da" is unaspirated and sounds like the actually "d" in English, but not voiced.

The three syllabic consonants in Walaan are represented as "ng, nn, and ll" in Barleimann but "ng, n, and l" in Darlis-Parol. Though the former clearly indicates that these are syllabic (thus doubled), but the latter is more famaliar to new learners.

All the romanized Walaan below are Barleimann.

Consonants
The syllabic nasal nn becomes /ɱ/ before f, and /m/ before p. Syllabic alveolar nasal can't be followed by k and h. No nasals are allowed to be in front of any approximants and flaps.

Am I pronouncing it right?
New learners always have difficult time pronouncing "real" voiceless unaspirated consonants, and often replace them with voiced but also unaspirated consonants.

One traditional local method to examine one's pronounciation contains two parts:
 * 1) "Adadadada": say the term without any stop of the vibrating of your voice folds, then you'll have the right /d˭/. You can touch your throat to feel the vibrating of your voice folds. For some people (including me in the past) they might get /t˭/ and while saying the letter "d", their voice folds stop vibrating. During saying the whole term, one should feel his voice cords keep vibrating.
 * 2) "Ts-ts": to check whether its aspirated or not, you can put your fingers near your mouth and feel the air flow coming out. Do not try to vibrate your voice cords, just push the air out from your lung, and click your tongue like "ts-ts". Feel the strength of the air flow, distinguish the stronger one from the weaker one, then you'll have both /tʰ/ and /t˭/.

Weakened consonants
"Weakened consonants" refer to some of the unaspirated consonants after other unaspirated ones. In some cases, aspirated consonants would become unaspirated. This sometimes happens, mostly when two nouns are tied together.
 * Natxa (evilness) + Tsama (person) = Natxatsxama (bad guy)

Diphthongs and Long Vowels
Two different vowels together become diphthong. When two same vowels meet, they can be regarded as one lengthene vowel. There can't be any syllabic consonants (mm, nn, and ll) after a lengthened syllable.

Gemination
Some consonants (all of them are plosive of affricative) in Walaan can be lengthened as well. These long consonants will never appear in the head of a word, and to most people is sounds like the vowel before the long consonant is shortened. This feature is represented by a little reverse "c".

The pitch of the vowel before the long consonants is always higher than usual. The length of both vowels and consonants is distinctive in Walaan.

Syllables
Most syllables in Walaan is open (CV). Some syllables don't exist in Walaan.
 * Y: yi, yeo
 * W: wu, weo
 * H: hi, hu, heo

Pronouns
Italic words are archaic. The term betahta comes from betabeta.

The apposition form of demonstrative pronouns is used when they are put in front of other nouns. For example:
 * Chxatxafi mana. (That girl)

Nouns
Nouns of Walaan are pretty easy. There is no declension at all.

Though there are still particles that can be attached to the nouns. There are postpositions, prepositions, and circumpositions. It's believed that circumpositions and prepositions are derived from verbs and adjective. Some adpositions can form adverb by adding -pai. For example, teyapai means "only, merely", formed by replacing the postposition part with the particle pai.
 * Yayea teyapai nomuimeta. (I just want to shout.)

Verbs
There are currently 3 types of verbs: a-verbs ,and eya-verbs, and some irregular verbs. As for modern Walaan, a-verb comprises of verbs with some certain type of ending. Most verbs ends in -tsa. Some transitive verbs end in -ta, -ka, and -tsa, whereas their intransitive version end in -txa, -kxa, -tsxa.
 * -(u)a, -ta, -txa, -sa, -na, -sha, -ka, -kxa, -pa, -tsa, -tsxa

Kxonnpxotuafeli and Sasepxotuafeli
The term "kxonnpxotuafeli" means "the form that attaches to object", whereas "sasepxotuafeli" stands for "the form that attaches to action". This is due to the usage of the defferent verb forms.
 * Infinite: modifies the noun following, acting like a noun.
 * Realis I: takes nouns around it as its argument.
 * Realis II: can only precede verbs, acting like a noun. Sometimes can be regarded as gerunds or verbal nouns. It can also combine other verbs to form a verb phrase.
 * Irrealis: can only precede auxiliary verbs or adjectives.

Archaic Past Tense
To be honest, the past tense form mentioned above is becoming archaic. The perfect aspect and its particle tseo is taking over and becoming more common and common.

It's reported that tseo might originated from the adjective tsito.

Negation
The verb eonn can be regarded as negative to. It can also follow other verbs to express negation. Here's some comparison:

Kxoyasha natxa
"Kxoyasha natxa" literally means "hurrying sound" and is a mechanism like Onbin (音便) of Japanese. Some sounds are dropped and a vowel or gemination replaces. Such things happen when a verb (or an auxiliary reflecting like verbs) is followed by auxiliaries with aspirated opening. Such as -peta and -tse.
 * Yayesa pxohteohtsite. (I have been hit.)

Adjective
Adjectives of Walaan does conjugate. They can be regarded as a stem with a verb (or copula) to following. Adjectives are put in front of modified noun. The adjectives are glue together witht eh nouns. When there are plural adjectives modifying the same noun, the particle ye will be added to each of them.
 * Lato mienn. (red flower.)
 * Latoyefasoye mienn. (red and tiny flower.)

Adjectives can also be put behind the noun and act like verbs. In this case, a sentence is formed. Adjectives themselves can be treated as verbs that conjugates like the one to. The stems of these adjectives are meaningless without the verb to (and other particles).
 * Mienn late. (Flower is red.)
 * Chxato mienn latu. (This flower was once red.)

Other Particles
Particles and auxiliary verbs are surely important to Walaan. There are some other particles that haven't yet been mentioned.

Grammatical Object
The so-called "grammatical object" refers to those nouns with the same meaning with others but functioning differently. The words that are used alone are called common object, whereas those which can't stand alone are refered as grammatical object. Most grammatical objects consists of only one syllable and may sound strange to most Walaans when using alone. Grammatical objects can be seen in pronouns and appositions. Here's some comparison:

Syntax
Under normal circumsatnces the syntax of Walaan is SVO. When topic-marker is introduced, the topic (T) would be at the front of a sentence like TVO or TSV. Only objects are put behind the verb. When the particle "tseo" is introduced, the subject (with -tseo) must be in front of the verb.
 * Pxonayayese nato sonnpxayo fetetsaye chxata mana. (It was us who found this girl in that forest.)(私達はその森でこの少女を見付けた. )("we" as topic)
 * Chxata manase pxonayayeta nato sonnpayo fetetsaye. (This girl is found by us in that forest.)(この少女は私達がその森で見付けた. )("this girl" as topic)
 * Nato sonnpxayose pxonayayeta fetetsaye chxata mana. (In that forest we found this girl.)(その森では私達がこの少女を見つけた. )("that forest" as topic)
 * Pxonayayesa nato sonnpxayo chxata manatseo fetetsxaye.

Vocabulary
Walaan/Lexicon

Example text
Put your cursor on the sentence to see the meaning of it.

Nato manase tumeta yayefi elisi mai?

Txatsxa txatsxaieonn kxonn.

Nato nachato manafi fokxa txonone hewalapai.

Kxaleto pxonatsamawa! Yotsxopewi pxonafetatseo chetete?

Yetsipetatsu selemana.

Yayefiye poleonntoye txeofapxaseofiye shahafi folenia.

Olltxito wangkane tsewefi lomoyo shape. Neolata lafarenntse. Yotsxoatatawi...

Shelito hawatachine lekuyemmnetseo kxane. Totsa lafarenntse. Yotsxotsiyannwi...

Sawane kxetsxatsxa selepennsi, kxonntsa tonokxafi kanonn.

Chachapai hanotsa likolisi, watxaieonn elisionn.

Egyptian Book of the Dead
Yayese to maniaye txaaniaye tsxuniaye,

yenn yayese hatse txo pxaapehteo yeleiteota.

Yayese to seomuaye txalaama fi tsahatoye neotoye pua,

yenn yotsxo heeofi onnta wi txaetse siolefi pxonahasa,

yenn heeose to atatafi otsasoiye txuaye.

Tsotsa tsu! Yotsxo fashe welltefi yolannwi fi siolefefi saeo wi.

Tsetase to yaye yenn yayese to tseta.