Yoketian

The Yoketi were the first civilization of Hudar. Their written history started around the year -2000 and reached its heyday around -700. They were organized in a number of rivaling slave-owning city-states, ruled by a duke (acway, literally 'strong man'). The cities constantly fought each other.

Their religion was polytheistic and featured multiple human sacrifices (wirawča), mostly of prisoners of war. Once a year, there was a feast during which a slave was crowned duke and everything normally considered sinful was allowed. After the feast, the Yoketi sacrificed the slave to the sun god Ma'elchōr.

The Yoketi were ultimately conquered by the Nolikan emperor Amelati in the year 78.

=Language=

The Yoketi language (yokēttu) was the first written language of Hudar. Writing started with logograms but later evolved into a syllabary, which was borrowed to write Nolikan.

Etymology: Yokēt literally means 'the nurturing place'.

Phonology
Vowels: a e i o u, with contrastive length (marked with a macron)

Consonants:
 * Stops: p t k q
 * Aspirated stops: ph th kh qh
 * Affricates: c č
 * Aspirated affricates: ch čh
 * Fricatives: s š h
 * Approximants: w l y
 * Tap: r rh; the latter either a palatal flap or aspirated alveolar one given treatment in words borrowed into Nolikan

Syllable structure is CVC. Details such as stress and allophony are unknown

Morphology
Yoketi is an agglutinating language. Its vocabulary consists of basic roots which can be extended into different parts of speech, their meaning changed or modified, with various suffixes. Most of the suffixes are optional, so that there is a choice of what sort of information to convey with a given word.

Nouns
Yoketi nouns are inflected for case, number and possessor.

There are 13 cases, whith the following endings:


 * Nominative - Ø
 * Accusative -u (animated masculine nouns), -a (other nouns)
 * Dative -or
 * Locative -tin
 * Ablative -sā
 * Allative -mun
 * Instrumental -isse
 * Comitative -lla
 * Prolative -pe                                                                                                                           :Abessive -inti
 * Comparative -iš
 * Essive –aq
 * Vocative -ā

Number endings come after the case endings. The basic dual ending is -r. However, -l is used in the dative as well in words whose stems end in an /r/. The plural ending is -n.

If inflections would result in an illegal consonant cluster, an /e/ is inserted, for example arkōt means 'friend', 'friends' is arkōten and 'with friends' is arkōtellan.

Verbs
Verbs are inflected for tense, mood and person. The conjugation depends both on subject and object.

Adjectives
Adjectives and adverbs are morphologically identical and cannot be inflected.

Syntax
The basic word order is SOV, but it can vary since noun cases allow understanding even most bizarrely mangled sentences.