Ifpañul

Ifpañul is a language that was spoken in Nueva Tierra until the 400th century AW and is was the last common ancestor to the language family it comprises, much in the same way Vulgar Latin was to the Romance Languages. It is believed that the ultimate speakers of this language may have been the people of the 'sierras' of Peru and Ecuador, where heavy contact with Quechua and Aymara left a mark on it.

Vowels
What makes a striking difference with it's ancestor, Ifpañul only has three vowels, but they have long and short counterparts:

Words distinguished by vowel length are for example khába (layer) and khabá (capable). The only place where orthographically long vowels are not represented is word finally before an 'l', such as in 'animal', the last 'a' is actually pronounced longer than the first.

Diphtongs are the combination of the three but there are a few rules. Short 'u' or 'i' before or after a long vowel is treated as a 'w' and 'y' respectively.

Consonants
Another interesting development is the contrast between aspirated and non-aspirated voiceless consonants word-initially. Generally, the orthography of Ifpañul is purely phonetic, so a table with the explanation of each graph and digraph can be seen below:

Trigraphs like 'tsh', or 'tzh' therefore must sound like /tʃ/ and /dʒ/ respectively.

= Grammar =

Pronouns
Pronouns are divided into different cases, in a simplified form of Spanish, but with some interesting developments, such as the singular forms of some pronouns ending in 't' due to an analogy between udít (polite you) and udí (polite plural you)

Nominative
These pronouns work when they are the subject of a sentence.


 * ízu is actually a demonstrative that conjugates for distance (see:Demonstratives)
 * These pronouns are female when the group in reference is exclusively female, if it is mixed, the unmarked masculine form is used.

Instrumental
The closest meaning in English can be found in the kind of pronoun used in the phrase ‘to me’. They are only conjugated in the first and second singular persons, and in the rest, the nominative form along with the preposition ‘’a’’ is used.

Prepositional
These are where English would use 'with me' as in 'She went with me', or 'with him' in a sentence such as 'She brought him with her'. The latter in Ifpañul is: 'Si le thráju khujsíu', but 'le' as dealt with later, is the accusative for 'him'.

Accusative
Used as in 'He hit me.' or 'Give us'. In contrast to Spanish, the pronouns for each gender all collapsed into a simgle form, li.

Dative
To cut it short, it is the same as the Accusative except that the pronoun li, used for the third person is replaced by si.

Reflexive
Equivalent to the notion in English of 'myself' as in 'I washed my face', except that the idea is more along the lines of 'I washed to myselfface'.


 * The nominative forms for the reflexive ‘si’ would be íl mímu, íat míma, íu, etc.; for example: phára íl = para íl mímu (for himself).

Clitics
These go attached to the imperative verb, or to verbs that are aimed at someone or something, as in to give him- tárli (See:Verbs) and and represent the dative (-ti, -mi, -si, -li, -nu, -il, -la, -lu):


 * Tá = He/she/it/you give(s).
 * Tánu = Give us.
 * Tánulu = Give it to us.

The forms -ti, -mi, -si, -li, -nu, -il, -la, -lu mean the same as those seen in previous cases.

Possesive
Show possesion. There are two distinctions, just like there is in English with 'my' and 'mine', where the first is an indefinite and the latter a definite pronoun.

Number
Through sound changes in the language, most nouns don’t inflect for number but a group still is inflected in it’s plural form in five somewhat predictable manners:

The ‘li’ form
Words ending in 'l' form their plurals adding an 'i'.

However one has to notice that adjectives ending in ‘l’ also have the same inflectional paradigm.

The 'ni' form
This one is less predictable because even though most nouns with stress on the final were inflected this way, some others did not and so one had to have these learnt. During Late Ifpañul this became a more frequent inflectional paradigm among nouns with stress on the final syllable.

A great deal of these are the ‘tion’ nouns which in Spanish were ‘ción’.

This form is used also in some adjectives:

(note how the stress was not on the last syllable, or vowel)
 * júi - young
 * júini - young (plural)

The ‘ri’ form
These are predictable as the noun in the singular form always ends in ‘r’:

The ‘t/y’ form
This inflection is more complex and stems from nouns that used to alternate between ‘d’ and ‘des’ in their singular and plural forms respectively. The vowel that comes right before the ‘t’ in the singular is stressed in the plural form.

Relatively few nouns and no adjectives inflect this way.

The ‘z’ form
This form is unpredictable and affects only a few nouns. It works regularly by adding a ‘z’ at the end of the plural form:

This only affects a few adjectives, which are seen in the Adjectives section.

Gender
Due to levelling, the vast majority of nouns that end with ‘a’ as a vowel are analyzed as feminine and go with the feminine article. The rest are all masculine. Only a few nouns are exceptions to the rule.

(to come)

Articles
These inflect for number and gender much in the same way the articles would do in German, with the exception that they do not change for case, as in Spanish, as in the plural they merge:

Contractions
Some articles are shortened in a few cases, such as ‘til’ comes from ‘ti il’ (of the). A table with the common ones:

Determiners
There are 3 kinds of demonstrative, whose use depends on the distance between the speaker and the described thing/person. The demonstrative equates to the English terms "this" and "that", although the word used must agree for number and gender.

Neuter demonstratives have the meaning of "this (or that) thing, concept or idea": Ízu idá ogí (That is okay). Sometimes, neuter demonstratives can convey a pejorative connotation: Khída ízu ti aí (Take that out of there).

Other determiners

 * Indefinite quantity: phúgu (little), múshu (a lot), sufizhíni (enough)...


 * Cardinals: u (one/a, an), tu (two), thrí (three)...


 * Ordinals: phrimíru (first), siújdu (second), thirsíru (third)...


 * Cardinal and ordinal numbers are adjectives of amount (like mucho and poco) and precede nouns (tu animali = two animals, phrimíra phirsúna = first person).


 * Interrogatives: khí (what/who), kuájdu (when), khúmu (how), tújdi (where), phurkí (why), khual (which).

The cardinal number ú is declined according to gender as úna (feminine) and únu (masculine plural) and the interrogatives khual (which) and khi (when reffering to 'who' instead of 'what') are declined as khuali (for plural) and khíni (plural) respectively. The rest are indeclinable.

Adjectives
The preferred place for adjectives is after the noun they modify, but a few exceptions have different meaning when coming after it.

Inflection
Most adjectives do not inflect according to the number of the noun (but some do just like the examples of declension shown in the Nouns section), but most do inflect for the word's gender, which is either feminine or masculine.

For example, 'tzhíjti' (tooth/teeth), which is masculine, and 'khwírda' (string(s)) which is feminine, cause adjectives to inflect differently:


 * Il úmbri píu (the beautiful man)
 * La mugil pía (the beautiful woman)

Adjectives that end in 'u' in their masculine form turn it into 'a' before feminine nouns. Other adjectives, such as 'priájti' (smart, brilliant), do not conjugate and the final vowel remains the same.

Comparatives and Superlatives
The particle 'ma' before an adjective turns it into a comparative, such as in 'ma lijtu' (smoother). Even though a superlative as in English 'best', compared to 'better' does not exist in Ifpañul, the including of the article before the adjective conveys this meaning, such as in il ma líjtu (the smoothest). The trick is determining how definite or specific is the object being spoken of.

Suffixes added on the end of adjectives (replacing the last vowel or consonant) give the adjective different grades of meaning, such as:


 * azu/a - very. Example: pwínu (good) - pwínazu/a (very good)
 * ízimu/a - very. Ex: múzhu (a lot) - muzhízimu (more than a lot)
 * idu/a - diminutive. Ex: phúgu (a bit, few) - phugídu (a very small amount)

Only a few adjectives have more synthetic ways of changing, such as pwínu and migúr, which mean 'good' and 'better' respectively. Other examples are málu and phiúr (bad and worse). Coincidentally these are most of the time the same English conjugates 'funilly'.

Verbs
Much of the complex verbal inflection was retained in Ifpañul, in comparison to sister languages such as Esupanyá which underwent a great deal of simplification, but some general simplifications occurred, such as final 's' in second person dissapearing making the verb conjugates as for third person. Other important changes include an abundance of constructions using the gerund to indicate perfectiveness.

An example of a verb conjugated is the following:

thinir (to have)