Ëkopion

Ëkopion (/ǂǂʷǀː/, cq:T) is a North Chelydian language spoken by Arthrowheels on the planet Chelys.

Phonology and Romanization
Ëkopion is a language that is entirely comprised of click consonants. It lacks vowels as such, however it has a distinction between "strong" and "relaxed" clicks, where a strong click can only occur once per word, similar to a stressed syllable in a stress-based language. In the romanization, strong clicks are indicated with a capital letter. Ëkopion also has geminated clicks, that is, clicks articulated only following a short pause. When a click is geminated, a <:> will appear in the romanization before said click.

Grammar
Ëkopion has a strict SVO word order and is predominantly head-initial.

Reduplication
Ëkopion makes abundant use of reduplication in its morphology. There are strict rules on how a given root reduplicates. Roots that are only one click long often make use of suppletion in instances where they should reduplicate grammatically.

Initial reduplication
Initial reduplication is applied to a verb to put it into a perfective aspect. When applied to a noun (whether a modifier or not) it indicates that a given noun is collective.

Final reduplication
Final reduplication can be applied to almost any participant of a phrase to indicate that it is a modifier to the preceeding word (except for adverbs, which are put at the beginning of a clause and applied to verbs).

Rules for applying reduplication
The "root" is strictly the part of the word that is either initial or final.

Syntax
Ëkopion has a fixed word order. A word's part of speech is largely determined by its position in the phrase.

The following sentence would be translated as "The unfriendly animal showed the old person [its] upper teeth".


 * * means that the word in this position must undergo final reduplication.
 * † means that the verb in this position takes the affix -pl (or -:pl if the final root click is stressed) to indicate its role relative to the auxiliary verb.

Auxiliary verbs
There are multiple auxiliary verbs in Ëkopion. Auxiliary verbs can overlap, and two or more auxiliary verbs can be used.

Script
The script used for Ëkopion has 5 main glyphs (one for each click), a glyph indicating gemination of the following click, and a diacritic to indicate stress. Due to the absence of vowels in the language, the script can be simultaneously classified as an abjad, an alphabet, an abugida and a syllabary. The script is written right-to-left, top to bottom.



Vocabulary
Ëkopion has a fairly limited amount of roots and uses modifiers to give any word a new shade of meaning. In following reiterations, the modifiers can be left out, and sometimes the interpretation becomes up to context if any ambiguity arises.

See Ëkopion/Vocabulary.

Transcription of foreign words
Transcribing any word from a pulmonic language (with consonants and vowels) into Ëkopion is a huge challenge, as the limited phonological inventory may leave many ambiguities. Whenever possible, Ëkopion calques a foreign word instead. If it's impossible to calque something, the following system is used:

Stress
If the language from which the word originates has one syllable that is more prominent than the others, Ëkopion transcribes that syllable with a stressed click.