User:Elector Dark/Kti/2

General
The Ktarh language (Kti: "ktehanarā", /ktɛxanaˈra:/) is one of the major languages on Oktarhazǣm. It is the most widely spoken Dnaric language, with several billion speakers. It is made up of several dialect clusters and one standard variety; the dialects are decreasing in usage due to official government policy. In actuality, Kti is defined as any speech form descending from proto-Ktarh; this definition doesn't include mutual intelligibility amongst the dialects, as the dialects from two distant points can differ quite a lot.

The Ktarh language (most often plainly called "Kti", sometimes called "ktehanarā") can be abbreviated to "" in situations requiring the usage of its formal name (as shown in the tooltip).

Dialectically, Kti is divided into the following clusters and dialects:
 * - Dialects of Tanu
 * - Upper Tanarh
 * - Lower Tanarh
 * - Peninsular Tanarh
 * - Acrolectic peninsular (lingua franca)
 * - Basilectic peninsular
 * - Peripheric Ktarh
 * → Insular dialects
 * - Eastern dialects
 * → Coastal eastern
 * - Inland eastern
 * - Southern dialects

The acrolectic peninsular Tanarh dialect is usually taken as the closest form to standard Kti. This article describes the acrolectic peninsular Tanarh variety. All forms should be taken as standard unless specifically noted not to be so.

Vowels
Kti has six vowel qualities spread relatively evenly across the vowel space: it has two front, two central and two back vowel qualities. It does not contrast rounded and unrounded vowels, though most of its vowels have an innate roundedness feature.

Ktarh monophthongs distinguish three degrees of length; they can either be short, long or overlong. Short vowels are unmarked, long vowels take a macron (such as <ǣ>) and overlong vowels take a circumflex (such as <æ̂>). Some overlong vowels may also end up being written as, for example, ; such phonetically overlong vowels are in fact underlying sequences of a long and short vowel that have undergone coalescence.

Kti has five diphthongs that metrically count as a single long vowel.

There are also three triphthongs that metrically count as an overlong vowel.

Consonants
Kti has 12 cardinal consonants, ordered ŠSŽZKTDHMNRX. They are distributed unevenly along five points of articulation, labial, alveolar, postalveolar, velar and glottal.

* These are allophonic variations of an underlying phoneme.

Allophony
The allophonic variations of consonants are far smaller than in vowels. The only consonants that have a variable pronounciation are /k/ and /x/.

Allophony of /k/
The realisation of /k/ as [k ~ kj] is an enviromental feature. [k] and [kj] are in complementary distribution before vowels.

/k/ is realised as [k] before /a/, /u/, /ɔ/ and /ɞ/ and consonants, while [kj] is seen only sometimes before /i/ and /ɛ/. In initial positions, [k] is always pronounced as such, and an analysis of [kj] as an allophone can be considered correct as [k] seems to be the underlying element and therefore the priviledged value.

Allophony of /x/
The realisation of /x/ is far more simple, as [h] is a simple allophonic equivalent of [x] as it occurs only in initial positions. Unlike [k] and [kj] which share one grapheme, [x] and [h] are differentiated in the orthography. Sometimes, when [x] is put instead of [h], it can be assumed that the previous word is linked with the current one via compounding, phrasing or some sort of derivation, therefore giving rise to certain minimal pairs that don't chage the meaning of one word but of a phrase; this phenomenon occurs only in very fast speech. The view that [h] is an allophone of /x/ is still held, though.

Dialectical Variation
The primary variations in Ktarh acrolects stem from two things:
 * 1) The different outcomes of the sound change which came around in the acrolect as "l > r > ʂ; ʂ > ʃ"
 * 2) The different outcomes of the sound change which came around in the acrolect as "{ m d } > $$\varnothing$$ / 'ɛ_aC#"

The first sound change might have happened differently, with results such as a contrast of /r ʂ ʃ/, /l r ʂ/, /l r ʃ/ and even a total levelling of /ʃ~ʂ/ - the acrolect preserves a contrast of /r ʃ/, with /r/ stemming from earlier /l/ and /ʃ/ stemming from both an earlier /r/ and /ʂ/.

The second sound change, much more limited in scope but far more influental in verbs than the first, was either applied or not. It has resulted in pairs of words such as "akemash" and "akēsh" (stemming from "akeash", often heard instead of the second word's prescribed pronunciation)

Phonotacics
Phonotactics of Kti is divided into syllable rules and combinatorics.

Syllables
Ktarh syllables have the following general structure:

Vowels in Kti almost always border a consonant. Vowels of equal weight can share control over a single consonant between them, thus having it belong to two syllables at once. Several archaic nouns, such as <ī> (sky, m.i.), may have no consonant; these always have a long vowel; they always have an oblique stem that corresponds to the core stem as V̄ :: V̌C.

Syllables sometimes tend to "hoard" consonants taken from previous syllables, thus sometimes reaching three initials. These consonants, while theoretically part of the first syllable, phonetically become part of the second. It should be noted that a post-vocalic glottal stop resets syllable rules, thus always starting a new syllable after it.

The only allowed final cluster in Kti is /rx/ - it only occurs word-finally as it cannot be followed by a consonant. It stems from a syllable with an earlier, deleted vowel.

Stress
Prosodic stress is very syllable-dependent and there are relatively complex rules that are governed by syllable position and structure.

Stress is pretty regular in that it is generally found on the penultimate syllable by default, but can move as a result of syllabic weighting phenomena on the last three syllables. If the word is monosyllabilic, the stress is on the sole syllable. A syllable is counted as "light" if it has a short vowel, and "heavy" if it has a long vowel, diphthong or triphthong.

Stress in Kti follows these rules:
 * 1) Primary stress is always on one of the last three syllables.
 * 2) If all three ultimate syllables are either fully heavy or fully light, stress falls on the penultimate.
 * 3) If one of the three ultimate syllables is heavy and the rest light, stress falls on the heavy syllable.
 * 4) If two of the three ultimate syllables is heavy and one is light, stress falls on the first of the heavy syllables.
 * 5) Secondary stress always falls on the syllable that has a gap of one syllable between itself and the stressed syllable.
 * 6) By this, if the primarily stressed syllable is antepenultimate, the secondarily stressed syllable is always the ultimate.
 * 7) Secondary stress cannot fall on on the initial syllable except if it is heavy.
 * 8) Tertiary stressings occur in relation to secondary stress in the same conditions as secondary stress does to primary.
 * 9) Tertiary stress has a gap between itself and secondary stress of one syllable - if the secondarily stressed syllable is ultimate, tertiary stress falls on the syllable two behind primary stress.
 * 10) Tertiary stress, unlike secondary, can fall on the initial syllable regardless of its weight.

General Properties
Ktarh nouns are marked for the following categories:
 * Number
 * Animacy & Gender
 * Case

Number
In Kti, nouns can be marked for three numbers:
 * 1) Singular, glossed <>
 * 2) Dual, glossed <>
 * 3) Plural, glossed <>

The singular marks for one instance of the noun. This usage can also be used for marking collectives, associative groups or clusters of nouns; this isn't unusual usage. Some nouns can only take the singular marking; these nouns are called. These nouns are usually material nouns, religious terms and astronomical nomenclature.

The dual marks for two instances of the noun. Some nouns can only take the dual marking; these are called. These nouns are usually body part nouns and some astronomical nomenclature.

The plural marks for any quantity that exceeds two. Some nouns take only the plural marking; these are called.

These one-number nouns behave as normal nouns in that they still have the properties of case, gender and animacy, and still undergo declension. If such a noun needs to be marked for number other than their inherent, either a synonym or a partitive or descriptive phrase would be used instead.

Some nouns lack a certain number — these would, for the singular, dual and plural, respectively be sine singulari, sine duali and sine plurali.

Some nouns experience shifts in semantics between numbers — the semantics of one of their numerical categories will not align with others — and as such are termed heteronyms. Heteronymous nouns usually divide their semantic space such that one number would get a different, heteronymous meaning to its semantics, while the remaining two would have the noun's default meaning; such nouns are called bivalent. A smaller amount of nouns has heteronymous semantic meanings for all three of their numbers; these nouns are called trivalent.

Animacy & Gender
Kti features a fairly complex animacy system linked with its class-based noun gender. Both the categories of animacy and gender are innate to the noun and are treated as lexical noun classes; no morphological element of a noun can be used to determine its gender or animacy, though some tendencies do exist.

In Kti, nouns may belong to one of three gender classes:
 * 1) Masculine, glossed <>
 * 2) Feminine, glossed <>
 * 3) Mechanoid, glossed <>

They also carry a more complex category of animacy: whereas masculines and feminines may belong to one of four categories — thus being part of a wide animacy spectrum — whereas mechanoid nouns may belong to one of two — thus forming a narrow or binary animacy spectrum. Animacy categories are ranked according to an animacy hierarchy which is heavily involved with the language's morphosyntactic processes. The hierarchy is:

According to this hierarchy, dead feminine nouns can be used as if both below and equivalent to masculines of a low animacy and mechanoid animates, though they are always below feminines of a low animacy.

As animacy is fairly lexical in nature, some words may have multiple animacy tiers — often changing their semantics between different animacies. Animacy assignment is usually straightforward and based on the properties and meanings of the noun.

A noun's animacy, though not gender, has an impact on the noun's declension paradigm.

Case
Ktarh nouns inflect for one of twenty nine cases. The category of case reflects grammatical and syntactic relations between parts of speech and their grammatical function. According to the way their inflectional markers are formed, they can either be core or oblique — core cases are marked by a single morpheme added onto the core stem, whereas oblique cases are marked by a suffix added to a usually already extended oblique stem. The twenty nine cases are:

The case marked in blue — abessive — is only used in forming adverbs of manner or reason from nouns.

The cases marked in green — revertive, adventive and partitive — are technically not cases in and of themselves and are instead only used when stacked onto an already-inflected noun. This phenomenon is known as case stacking; it operates by taking an already inflected noun and inflecting it further as if it were bare. The once-inflected noun is called the theme and the twice-inflected one is called the anatheme. The suffixes that form them are respectively called thematic and anathematic. As such, these anathematic suffixes act as semi-derivational morphemes.