PhonologyEdit

VowelsEdit

Vattic distinguishes between long and short vowels, and as such has a symmetrical system of 6 short vowels and 6 long. The phonetic quality of these vowel pairs does not differ, just the duration.

There are no diphthongs in Vattic, and vowels do not come into contact with each other. If a situation arises where two vowels would need to be placed next to each other (such as in compound words or the addition of a suffix), an auxilliary 'n' is placed in between them. This is highlighted in the following: "dégge" ('heel') + "órogő" ('high') = "déggenórogőt" ('high heels (shoes)').

ConsonantsEdit

• /m/ and /n/ become [ɱ] before /f/ and /v/ as in kunfel [kuɱfɛl] "horse".
• /n/ becomes [ŋ] before /k/, /g/ and /x/, as in sanqábok [saŋxaːbɔk] "to sit"

GeminationEdit

All fricatives and affricates can be geminated (i.e. pronounced longer than ususal). This is indicated by the doubling of the consonant letter: ssém [sːɛːm]. Gemination can occur at the beginning, middle and end of a word. In words where a stop consonant is doubled, it does not have any effect on pronunciation.

OrthographyEdit

The Vattic Orthography follows a predominantly phonemic principle, with each letter representing one phoneme. However, some phonemes may be represented by more than one letter and can sometimes cause confusion.

AlphabetEdit

The alphabet consists of 38 letters. These are all the letters of the standard latin alphabet except 'w' and 'x', plus numerous letters modified with a diacritic mark.

CollationEdit

In Vattic, the letters with diacritics like 'á' and 'ö' are treated as letters in their own right, representing distinct sounds from their non-diacritic counterparts. Therefore, in alphabetical ordering they are placed after their parent letter. So for example ozzýn comes before óban.

The Letters I and YEdit

The letters 'i' and 'y' both represent the phoneme /i/ (with their long counterparts 'í' and 'ý' both representing /iː/). There is no specific rule which governs when 'i' should be used over 'y' and vice versa, so it a simple matter of memory, but 'y' sees a much more marginal use than 'i' so a guess at 'i' would be sufficient. The reason for having both letter representing the same phoneme derives from Early Vattic, where 'y' represented the phoneme /y/. After /y/ lost its roundedness and became /i/, the orthography was not changed.

The Letter ŪEdit

Ū represents the long vowel /uː/, the same sound as 'ú' and the long counterpart of 'u'. It derives from the collapse of the sequence /uhu/ in Early Vattic, which later voiced to become [uɦu], and then the [ɦ] was lost altogether, resulting in [uː], which was notified by this letter.

CapitalisationEdit

As in most languages, the first letter of a sentence is capitalised. However, in proper nouns the capitalisation is much more sporadic.

• In names of people, the fist letter is always capitalised, as in almost every other language.
• In names of places, the first letter is always capitalised, for example tanatum Londynpéj "I went to London". This is also the case in road names.
• In the names of months and days which are always capitalised in English, the first letter is never capitalised. For example Londynpéj tanatum ūnavességgón "I went to London on Tuesday".
• Language names and demonyms are never capitalised, for example anlasta vessaluz "she speaks English".

Basic GrammarEdit

NounsEdit

Vattic nouns follow a rich system of inflection, with numerous noun cases, and different endings indicating things like number and possession.

CaseEdit

There are numerous noun cases in Vattic. The following table shows a detailed list of the cases found in Vattic, using the noun boźojóvon "the egg".

ArticlesEdit

Unlike in English and most other Western languages, noun articles are placed after the noun as a clitic. For indefinate nouns, the suffix -jezk is used, for definate nouns, the suffix -von is used.

See the following:

• Oneggárvon makkonan nosodjezk. - "The man built a house."
• Anan velicjezkett fa nasadant. - "There were some limes over there."

Article suffixes are placed directly after the noun, before any other suffix (possessive, number, case etc) has been added.

NumberEdit

There are two numbers in Vattic - the singular and plural. The plural is marked by the ending -(e)tt. For example: nosod "house" becomes nosodett "houses".

PossessionEdit

The possessor of a noun is indicated in the noun in itself by the way of a suffix.

DemonstrativesEdit

• ves - this
• vost - that
• vesett - these
• vostett - those
• zévér - other
• pemitt - many

Vesett nosodett lensí san. - "These houses are nice."

VerbsEdit

TensesEdit

Vattic verbs are quite restricted in regards to tenses. There are five tenses, as seen in the table below, using the verb fagand "to do" as an example.

ParticipantsEdit

The participant of a verb is notified in the noun. They take the same forms as the possessive suffixes of nouns. So for example in the sentence: tanatum nosodumpéj "I went to my house", "I went" (tanatum) and "My house" (nosodum) both take the same suffix.

MoodEdit

There are several different moods used in Vattic which indicate various intensities of different verbs. Each mood is added to the verb in the form of a prefix, which is placed directly before the main verb root.

VoiceEdit

Vattic distinguishes between the active and passive voice in its verbs. The active voice goes unmarked, whereas the passive voice is marked by the addition of an "e" followed by a hypen before the verb. For example the sentence "The man built the houses" is written Oneggárvon makkonan nosodvonettekk, however the sentence "The houses were built by the man" is written Nosodvonett e-makkonan i-oneggárvon. The 'i' with hypen before oneggárvon represents the English word "by".

Word OrderEdit

Vattic follows an SVO word order, the same as in English. However some flexibility is permitted, provided the accusative and nominative nouns are marked.

AdjectivesEdit

There are three forms of each adjective: the basic, comparative and superlative.

InterrogativesEdit

Interrogative words go to the beginning of the word, as in English.

• qa - what?
• qér - who?
• qopa - why?
• qubśí - when?
• medod - how?
• qancin - how much? (cost)

PronounsEdit

Personal PronounsEdit

Interrogative PronounsEdit

Interrogative pronouns follow the same route as the interrogative questioning words. The only difference is that the dummy word "dá" is added to the beginning.

So for example, one may ask Qopa fagandanakud veś? "Why have you done this?", and an answer may be Nal veś dá qopa... "This is why...".

Dummy PronounsEdit

Several dummy pronouns exist in Vattic. A dummy pronoun is like in English "It is raining again", where the "it" does not replace any particular noun, but is need in order to make grammatical sense.

Zke

The word "zke" is used as in the above example "It is raining again", where Zke represents "it is". It is declined according to the regular verb tense endings to become zkan "it was", zkún "it will be" etc. So someone could say Zke errenssútárenek "It is raining again" or Zkún errenssútárún "It will rain again".

A

The lexical word "a" is similar to the "there" in "there will be". It can be declined as a verb to become a (there is/are), anan (there was/were), anún (there will be) etc. So for example someone could say "There is no point in doing that" as A név radanc fagandum vostór.

NumbersEdit

When the number is used to indicate a quantity of a noun, it is written after the noun itself. So for example: An rúgárett zeggńez means "There were twenty cars".

VocabularyEdit

DictionaryEdit

See: Vattic Dictionary

Example TextEdit

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