Thiskish

Thiskish is a language isolate in the Indo-European Group. It is influenced by Germanic languages and mainly uses the Latin Alphabet but also has some cyrillic-derived letters.

Setting
The language formed from a mixture of Indo-European languages and soon became unique as well as the sole language in the Thisk branch of languages. Sometime in the second millennium influence from English began and Thiskish became more similar to English over time. It is spoken around the coastline of the North Sea.

Phonology
Thiskish is about as phonetic as Spanish. It includes twenty-seven letters, thirty-seven sounds, four digraphs and three diphthongs.

Alphabet
The Thiskish alphabet is simple and has a letter or digraph for all of its sounds, and it uses the Latin alphabet mixed with a hint of Cyrillic alphabet. There are twenty-seven letters: A, B, C, D, E, F, Г, И, H, I, J, K, L, Ł, M, П, O, P, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z. Except for A, C, E, U, W, and X, each letter has one sound. In all instances, each sound has one letter.

Orthography Chart
This is a chart of all the sounds found in Thiskish and what letter or digraph represents them, in parentheses. If two appear in one slot, in consonants the bottom is voiced and top is unvoiced while in vowels the top is unrounded and the bottom in rounded.

Phonotactics
Consonant clusters are relatively uncommon in Thiskish. By far the most common types of cluster are either a plosive followed by a fricative, a fricative followed by a plosive (both letters are usually both voiced or both unvoiced), or a nasal followed by a fricative. Rarer clusters include approximant consonants (j, r) or lateral approximant (l) consonants followed or preceded by a fricative (s, z, f, v, w, x) or a co-articulated approximant consonant (ł) preceded by a fricative or a plosive.

Typology
Thiskish is a Subject Object Verb (SOV) language, an average sentence would be along the lines of "Sam oranges ate" (Sam orunw ce). Thiskish is also a Place Manner Time language, so another sentence would be "I went to the store by car yesterday". Adjectives and Adverbs almost always are placed in front of the word they modify.

Articles
Thiskish contains many different articles, each for a different purpose. The most common is the neutral definite article, La (I ate the cheese). In addition, there are feminine definite (We played with the [female] cat) and masculine definite articles (I walked the [male] dog), Da and Ta respectively. The indefinite article Ka (I saw a bird) is used as a noun marker for all nouns. The partitive article Bi (Do you want some water?), the negative article Pi (No man is an island), and a final article referring to all of a noun, known as Гo, are also present in the language.

Declension
Thiskish is declined by Case, Number, Tense and Gender (although the gender is not specifically assigned to nouns). These are all served by suffixes.

Case
Thiskish includes four cases, the nominative case, the accusative case, the dative case, and the genitive case. The nominative case is written as the root word. The accusative is marked by the suffix -n (if last letter is an illegal consonant cluster, -an), the dative by the suffix -m (if last letter is an illegal consonant cluster, -am), and the genitive by the suffix -f (if last letter is an illegal consonant cluster, -yf). Irregular case declension is extremely rare.

Fypif (English: Fish)

Number
Thiskish has three grammatical numbers for its nouns, the singular (1), dual (2) and plural (more than 2). These can be identified by no suffix for singular, a suffix of -w (if the last letter is an illegal consonant cluster, -ew) for dual, and a suffix of -s (if the last letter is an illegal consonant cluster, -es) for plural. Sometimes there are irregular nouns, almost always caused by an illegal consonant cluster (see phonotactics).

Gender
In Thiskish, words are not assigned genders, but there is three genders dependent on the in-life sex of the noun, Masculine, Neuter and Feminine. To create the genders, one simply uses an article or an affix (usually the latter) to tell the reader the gender of the noun. All nouns that can be both male and female are masculine or feminine depending on the sex of that noun in Thiskish.

Kames (English: Dog)

Tense
There are four tenses in Thiskish, these are the future tense, present tense, past tense. They are all used arbitrarily to tell a reader when the verb was done. The difference between recent tense and past tense is that in past tense, the verb has been done after it has triggered another major event. Future tense is triggered by the suffix -ca (or if the last letter is an illegal consonant cluster, -aca). Past tense is triggered by the suffix -ba (or if the last letter is an illegal consonant cluster, -aba)

Efax (English: Run)

Pronouns
Pronouns are basic and straightforward in Thiskish. There are conjugations for first person, second person, and a masculine, feminine and neuter for third person. In addition, each of the five types of pronoun gets a singular, dual and plural form, making fifteen pronouns total, each for a different purpose.

Participles
To create a participle out of a verb, one must add the suffix -a, since all adjectives end with -a. Therefore, the verb is an adjective and describes that a noun verbed or was verbed on or is being verbed or verbing. To change the tense, one simply uses the tense rules in Thiskish.

Dictionary
See Thiskish/Dictionary for a list of words in Thiskish.