Sïy Leqhek sa Dümlyaghzh - the ugly cousin of Tamaissa-lêk

[Irtaviš Ačankif]

As Tamaissa-lêk was supposed to represent an advanced culture, Sïy Leqhek sa Dümlyaghzh represents the common vernacular language of the brutal world of the abandoned Timlyâksa space colony founded by the Tamaissans in 2140 but abandoned eventually when the Timyâksa-Earth backbone link, a meager 2.3 MiB/s, failed during the dangerously close supernova SN2184B due to Kuiper Belt microwave relay stations mass-failing. Enormous budget issues, the huge distance of the Oort Cloud, and general societal chaos resulting from the mass death of certain models of sentient robots meant that Tamaissa could not afford to repair the relays, and it formally cancelled its Oort Cloud mining program.

Timlyâksa then went into isolation with Earth, being more than 3 light months away from the solar system. Tamaissan authority quickly crumbled and society fell into chaos. Eventually in the year 2208 a military dictatorship emerged ruled by the construction robot controllers, who could mobilize deadly firepower using construction machines. All forms of communications and motorized transportation technology was strictly banned and reserved for the extremely few military elite. Most of society fell to 19th century technological levels.

Language change happened rapidly as lack of education removed the stabilizing influence of the central control program's prescriptions, and influences from previous natural languages, particularly Indo-European languages, began to creep into syntax and pronunciation.

The major vowel 23rd century vowel shift in Tamaissan, eliminating all back vowels, did not appear in Dümlyaghzic; rather, somewhat haphazard vowel reduction happened, multiplying the number of vowels drastically. Consonants are generally more conservative to Proto-Tamaissan as conceived by the central control program, but again, rather irregular sound changes (though more regular than the vowels) happened. This was not helped by the coining of large amounts of new vocabulary, most of which shunned Tamaissan phonotactics and encouraged the further corruption of etymologically Tamaissan words.

Verbal particles only contains some shadows of the Tamaissan verb system, and the case system is completely lost. Dümlyaghzhic is an analytic language exceeding the analyticness of English approaching that of Chinese, expressing the vast majority of ideas using particles, the positions of which are not easily predicted and must be memorized.

Phonology & phonotactics

Listing all the consonants would be quite cumbersome. It suffices to say that there are bilabial, dental, velar, and glottal voiced/voiceless stops, voiced/voiceless affricates, and voiced/voiceless fricatives, in addition to l, a lateral fricative lh, a "French R" r, and w and y. There are three sets of sibilants: alveolar (s, z), postalveolar (sh, zh), and palato-alveolar (shh, zhh). All three types also come with t/d added as affricates.

The vowels are:

- a
- e
- i
- ï /ɨ/
- o
- u
- ü as in German, /y/

ïy, ei, ai, ou, and eu are diphthongs.

Phonotactics is mostly everything goes except that only vowels can be syllable nuclei. Kinda like English.

Grammar and syntax

Basic word order is SVO, just like home sweet English. There are 4 particle positions (terms made out of thin air xD):

- predictal (before a clause)
- preverbal (before the main verb)
- postverbal (after the main verb)
- postdictal (after a clause)

Copula particles, expressing "there is blah blah blah", are all predictal:
- yara...: there is/are...
- yümmï...: there was/were...
- lhird...: there will be...

Example: yara mni kïm. - there's a person. Note that prefixing a clause with a main verb already in it implicitly makes the clause a relative clause: yara mni kïm khaqï Areki - there's a person (who) loves Areki.

Aspect particles, expressing aspects other than the gnomic, are postverbal.
- ...ash: progressive
- ...ïnna: perfective

Example: yara mni kïm khaqï ïnna Areki. - there's a person (who) has loved Areki.

Tense particles, a pure innovation of Dümlyaghzhic, express tenses other than the default present. Some are preverbal and others are postdictal, indicated by direction of ellipsis:
- sü...: near past
- su...: far past
- ...hada: emphatic present
- ar...: near future
- ...aishh: far future

Example: yara mni kïm khaqï ïnna Areki aishh. - there's a person (who) will have loved Areki (in the far future).

Mood particles, expressing volition etc. Most are postdictal, though a handful are predictal:
- ...shhïy: volition
- yordü...: imperative
- ...akhïs: causative
- ...asrïs: passive
- nar...: question

Example: Nar yara mni kïm khaqï ïnna Areki akhïs asrïs aishh? - Is there a person who will have been caused to love Areki in the far future?
(just for fun an comparison, the equivalent Tamaissa-lêk sentence is Arekis kelanatisrasere kam nathê?. Much shorter...)

TO BE CONTINUED