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| I'tslmaw I'tslmaw | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Type | |||
| Synthetic-Agglutinative | |||
| Alignment | |||
| Nominative-Accusative | |||
| Head direction | |||
| Undecided | |||
| Tonal | |||
| No | |||
| Declensions | |||
| Yes | |||
| Conjugations | |||
| No | |||
| Genders | |||
| No | |||
| Nouns decline according to... | |||
| Case | Number | ||
| Definiteness | Gender | ||
| Verbs conjugate according to... | |||
| Voice | Mood | ||
| Person | Number | ||
| Tense | Aspect | ||
I'tslmaw [i:t͡sɬma] is an analytic/aggultinative language. It has a close class of verbs but an open class of cases with heavy use of declension to derive meaning.
General information
Word order is SOV in non-future sentences and SVO in future sentences, with no morphological tense. There are two verbs, "i'ts" and "tlih", which roughly mean 'produce' and 'consume' respectively. Nouns decline for case.
Phonology
Consonants
| Bilabial | Dental | Alveolar | Velar | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | m | n /n̪/ | nn /ŋ/ | |
| Stop | p, b | d /d̪/ | t | k, g |
| Affricate | pf /p͡ɸ/, bv /b͡β/ | tth /t̪͡θ/, ddh /d̪͡ð/ | ts /t͡s/, dz /d͡z/ | kx |
| Fricative | f /ɸ/, v /β/ | th /θ/, dh /ð/ | s z | x |
| Trill | bb /ʙ/ | |||
| Lateral | l /ɬ/, ll /ɮ/ |
/ʙ/ is excedingly rare.
Vowels
| Front | Back | |
|---|---|---|
| Close | i y | u |
| Near-close | ih /ɪ/ | |
| Mid | e /ɛ/ | o |
| Near-open | a /æ/ | |
| Open | aw /a/ |
Vowel length is contrastive. All front vowels except for /ɛ/ can be long.
Grammar
Verbs
There are only two proper verbs, "i'ts" which means consume and "tlih" which means produce. The use of noun declension heavily influences the meaning of the verb. For example, "life-self-acc produce" means "I live" but "life-self-acc consume" means "I kill myself". "mouth-self-inst obj-acc consume" means eat but "mouth-self-inst obj-acc consume" means vomit.
Nouns
Noun decline for case and additionaly can take a pronoun between the base and the case marker to indicate possesion.
Pronouns
I'tslmaw is a pro-drop language