User:Elector Dark/Speedlang

General information
The Negma language (known natively as []) is the common language of the Negic people, the immediate descendants of the first colonists from the generation ship []. The language itself is a descendant of whatever koiné the first generations aboard the ship came together to use, and bears no visibly recognisable, related features to languages of the Earth — seeing as it has been in isolated evolution for 9400 years (the time taken for the ship to come to Gliese 581g from Earth).

Negma is written in a latin alphabet orthography, redeveloped a multitude of times over the span of the ship's journey. It is very deeply historical and isn't a good direct guide for reading Negma.

Phonology

 * /p b t d ʈ ɖ k g q ʔ/
 * /f θ s ʂ x/
 * /m n ŋ ɴ/
 * /ʋ w r l ɭ j ɰ/
 * /ts dz ʈʂ ɖʐ tɕ dʑ/


 * /i ɪ ʊ u/
 * /e ə o/
 * /a ɒ/
 * /i: u: e: ə: o: a: ɒ:/

The language has two tonal processes operational: one is from pitch accent, where a single stressed syllable may take on a pitch accent feature; these features apply to the whole vowel, even if it is long or naturally tonic. Such accented vowels are generally peak-accented, though some (mostly in certain morphological forms, stemming from accent retraction) may be dipping or bottom. Peaking accent is indicated with an acute, and dipping accent with a grave diacritic.

Vowels may also have "natural" tone, which is accent-independent. The natural tone of a syllable is lexical and inherited from older forms of the language. It is only somewhat predictable from the written form of the word. This natural tone may be high, medium or low. It interacts with the accent.

Accented vowels are called tonic (peaking and dipping respectively), whereas natural-toned vowels may be called high, middle (or natural), and low. These designations may be combined, and thus a vowel or syllable may be called peaking low or dipping middle based on the phonemic composition of its features. For the purposes of describing the accentology and tonology of the language, the term "vowel" is equated with the term "syllable" and both may be used interchangeably: a syllable's consonantal component, or suprasegmentals, may not carry tone separate from the nucleus.

The phonetics of pitch are complex:


 * High pitch, high tone:
 * ghán /kán5/ [kan5]
 * ghára /ká:r5/ [ka:r5]
 * gháres /ká5rəs/ [ka5rəs3]
 * High pitch, low tone:
 * gán /kán1/ [kan13]
 * gára /ká:r1 [ka:r15]
 * gáres /ká1rəs/ [ka1rəs5]
 * Low pitch, high tone
 * ghàra /kà:r5/ [ka:r51]
 * ghàres /kà5rəs/ [ka51rəs3]
 * Low pitch, low tone
 * gàra /kà:r1/ [ka:r1]
 * gàres /kà1rəs/ [ka1rəs1]

As low pitch may occur only on old polysyllables, in modern Negma it may occur only in polysyllables or on long vowels: it doesn't occur in short monosyllables, except irregularly. Tonically unmarked syllables generally take the middle pitch level, and may acquire a contour when a contour tone splits to become two level tones, where the initial pitch becomes the level of the original syllable, and the final pitch, or an intermediate value, becomes the level of the unmarked syllable.

Constituent Order
Negma is a language with somewhat free word order, though a verb-final configuration is generally preferred. Modifiers generally precede their heads, and general dependents precede the constituents that govern them. Some dependency structures are head-initial or ambicapital, though, such as relative clauses (introduced by a particle head that governs the verb, which is otherwise clause-final).

On the surface, this macrostructure manifests itself as a common SOV structure.

Nominals
Negma, as a fairly inflected language, has extensive nominal morphology. Under nominals, it groups nouns, adjectives and pronouns together: these three groups have similarities in how they work, but also possess notable structural similarities.

Negma nominal inflect to reflect the category of case. The nouns and pronouns also reflect number, which adjectives do not. The pronouns also reflect deictic person and location, and nouns inflect further for definiteness. There is some overlap between the categories of adjective and noun (some adjectives are in fact zero-derived nouns), as well as pronoun and noun — as Negma lacks a formal third person category, it has a semi-open class of third person pronouns, which are drawn directly from nouns and generally inflect as such (with special remarks).

All Negma nominals inflect to reflect seven cases:


 * Nominative
 * Accusative (Oblique)
 * Vocative
 * Genitive-Comitative
 * Lative (Oblique)
 * Locative
 * Temporal

Pronouns generally merge the temporal and locative cases into one, whereas adjectives reflect only a nominative (direct) and a general oblique which may interchangeably take the form of either the accusative or the lative. Nouns generally distinguish all the cases straightforwardly; a peculiarity exists in that oblique prepositions may take either the lative or accusative seemingly interchangeably.

Nouns
Negma noun morphology is primarily suffixing, and secondarily prefixing. Both prefixes and suffixes may be either derivational or inflectional. The nouns generally fall into three large classes:


 * Countable nouns
 * Uncountable nouns
 * Conceptual nouns

They differ in number formation: countable nouns may be inflected for the singular (default), plural and collective (which may act as a mass or greater plural), and uncountable nouns may be collective (default) and monadic. Conceptual nouns have the shape of uncountable monadic nouns, but have no corresponding collective noun. Generally, number formation is fairly volatile. A countable noun has eight possible ways of forming a plural:


 * Simple prefixation: béisi → ibbéisi (pillow)
 * Simple circumfixation: líe → illièske (tongue)
 * Simple reduplication: tùine → tutúine (fish)
 * Reduplication w/ suffixation: stàire → sastáireske (child)
 * Reduplication w/ stem change: ghùyet → ughúyed (lightbulb)
 * Reduplication w/ ablaut: zóre → zòzere (brother)
 * Suppletion/irregular: myíga → iyyínge (woman, wife)
 * Zero-derivation: négən → négən (child)

Furthermore, a countable noun has three further ways of forming a collective:


 * Reduplicated plural: illièske → lillièske (tongue)
 * Fortification of plural: iyyínge → issínge/issínke (woman, wife)
 * Suffixed reduplicate: zóre → zozóreᴋ (brother)

As such, the plural and collective of each noun needs to be cited along with its singular, as it is often unpredictable. Many nouns allow multiple plurals with varying degrees of grammaticality. The shape of a countable singular is otherwise unrestricted.

The collective of uncountable nouns can have one of three general shapes:


 * (a) Kappa-terminated: íyiᴋ (air)
 * (b) Reduplicated: tèteis (water)
 * (c) Suffixed w/ kappa: séneskeᴋ (speech)

The monadic of uncountable nouns is formed regularly from their collectives:


 * (a/b) Reduplicated w/ kappa: íyiᴋ → iyyíyiᴋ (air > breath)
 * (c) Reduplicated, suffixless w/ kappa: séneskeᴋ → seséneᴋ (speech > word)

Many such monadic uncountables may then be repurposed as singular countables: they then form their plurals through fortification:


 * iyyíyiᴋ → issíyiᴋ (breath)

For comparison, conceptuals have a simple shape resembling a kappa-suffixed reduplicate without a corresponding collective:


 * nenéireᴋ ← *nèireskeᴋ?? (transparency (of an item))

Interrogatives
Negma handles interrogative structures fairly uniformly: most formal questions are marked by a verb clitic pre-attached to the verb, and wh-questions employ an in-situ replacement strategy.

Morphosyntactic Alignment
Negma is a typical split-ergative language. Its ergativity triggers are transitive delimitative aspect verbs in the present and past tenses, and transitive preterite verbs. Such contexts are syntactically ergative, as well as morphologically: the verbs then agree with the P-argument, which also acts as the syntactic pivot. The P-argument is then marked with the S-argument marker, and the A-argument is introduced through an oblique case. Such a reorganisation derives from the repurposing and reanalysis of the passive.

The intransitive present and past delimitatives, and intransitive preterites, are fully accusative, and are formed through periphrasis. The passive, too, is now formed periphrastically.