I will be making a series of posts about Wozal Nijön, the only spoken language in my world. Today I'm going to post about the sound-table and the meaning of Wozal Nijön.

Nijön (hereafter N_) Wo is translated into the Tongue of Man. (Wo_, being the name of the first man.) N_ is the word for tongue, while Wo_ is the word for a male human after puberty, and zal indicates that Wo possesses Nijön. (Wo_ is also used as a prefix to establish the gender of a noun. More on that later.)

Consonants

The consonants are all voiced, and nearly all of them are semivowels. Also note the prevalence of the three most common forms of retroflex, r, the rolled r, and l.

Place in order of places of speech, we find these sounds:

B, w, m, v, my, th, d, z, r, rr, l, n, zh, j, y, ny, g, ng, ny, h.

Again, all these sounds are voiced. Hence, we find /z/, but not /s/. Be careful to roll a double rr and to voice the h, as those can slip past you easily when reading the Roman Style Orthography.

Vowels

i (as in high)

í (as in high, with a nasal pitch)

e (as in eh)

é (eh-nasal)

a (say)

á (say-nasal)

o (oh)

ó (oh-nasal)

ö (aw)

ô (aw, nasal)

u (you)

ú (you-nasal)

The nasal tones generally indicate a negative connotation (in the sense of addition-positive and subtraction-negative), but this is not a firm rule, and the use is often arbitrary, as the gender in Spanish has a meaning but is also arbitrarily assigned to many objects.

I'd also like to note, for posterity, that copying and pasting these symbols is driving me absolutely insane. I will find out how to program my keyboard to write these symbols as soon as possible.

Taking advantage of the ability to post twice in a row, I install the next installment:

STRESS

No, I'm not talking about that feeling of incredible weight on your shoulders while you save the world every day.

Stress is an emphasis (in volume) on a syllable in a word. In many languages, such as Latin, stress is meaningless and a system of rules guide it's placement in a sentence. In other languages, like Spanish and Wozal Nijön, Stress is used to differentiate between words. For example, wozal and wozal are different words. Italics indicate the stress. (In the writing system, stress is indicate by underlining, but HW doesn't allow me to underline.)

Another phenomenon that may be foreign to you is the use of:

INTONATION

Intonation is a a pattern of high and low vocalizations of a syllable. Some should register high on your vocal chords while others ought to be low. Unlike stress, intonation does not differentiate between words. It is a left-over of an older language (see the melodic language in my A New Tongue thread) and functions on a set of rules based on word length.

If a word is a single syllable, the tone is high. However, if a second single syllable word follows, then the second syllable is low. A third single syllable word would be high, etc. (The likelihood of encountering more than two single syllable words in a row is rare, but not impossible, as far as I know. But I haven't developed the Lexicon yet.)

Two syllables: low, low. (A second two syllable word would be high, high.)

Three syllables: low, low, high.

Four syllables: high, low, low, high.

Five syllables: high, low, etc. (Six, etc. syllable words follow the high, low, etc., pattern.

Wow That's in depth. Good work Neil, I wasn't at all confused. You outlined things well and broke it down nicely. Has learning other languages helped you in creating your own?

Well, I've been learning Spanish, and even though this language bares almost no trace of the influence, it really helped me understand how a language effects the way the user thinks about things, and how many different ways there are to express the same thought.

Next Installment:

PHONOLOGICAL CONSTRAINTS

As you probably know already, every word is made up of syllables, which are the basic roots (and are often the root words) of language. Each language has a set of rules governing the construction of a syllable.

English, in it's traditionally complicated fashion, has a highly complicated and poorly understand system that is basically a compilation of such droll rules as : I before e, except after c.

In generally, languages are less complicated than English, and Wozal Nijön is no exception. I permit this pattern:

(C) + (SV) + V + (C) + (V)

()=optional C=consonant SV=semivowel

Thus, we end up with the word Huri, which uses: C + V + C + V (The pattern minus the optional semi-vowel only area.)

Let me remind you that C includes SV, but SV excludes C. SV's are not V's, period.

At this point, a lot of language builders think that they are finished, not realizing that I haven't even touched on GRAMMAR. Check in tomorrow and take a look at my CASE, GENDER, and VOWEL DISTINCTION systems.

Makes sense. Cool.

CASE

Most languages have a system of cases or forms for nouns that allow us to distinguish between the subject, object, possession, etc. Although my system is not as complicated as Latin's system, it's a good system.

Case is distinguished by these suffixes:

Subject: /my/

Object: /ny/

Indirect Object: /gy/

Possessive: /zal/

GENDER

Gender is also used to distinguish between nouns and verbs, as a prefix. As in Spanish, gender is applied appropriately to people and animals, but when it comes to inanimate objects the language has a tendency to apply them arbitrarily, as in Spanish (where "gun" is feminine). Verbs must agree with the noun to which they belong.

Male, before puberty: /v/
Female, before puberty: /w/

Male, during puberty: /ve/
Female, before puberty: /we/

Male, after puberty: /wo/
Female, after puberty: /wi/

Male, inanimate: /vu/
Female, inanimate: /wu/

Neuter, sexless: /th/
Neuter, unknown: /thu/

VERB DISTINCTION

Also known as tense, a manner of distinguishing between times. Suffix.

Past (probably happened): bá
Past (happened): ba

Present (believed to be happening): wô
Present (is happening): wö

Future (a thing that may happen): mô
Future (a thing that will happen*): mö

*this is used only for formal declarations, such as a prophecy, a business plan, etc.

PRONOUNS

() indicates the extra ending to indicate the plural. Note that the gender endings are not applied as gender is already specified.

First Person
Male: (e)vev
Female: (e)wev

Second Person:
Male: (e)vez
Female: (e)wez

Third Person:
Male/female: (e)thuz

NUMBER SYSTEM

The number system is based on the number of fingers on a hand. Thus, you have the basic unit, the finger, which is: Gya. Two: Nya. Three: mya. Four: tha. Five: zha.

The word for hand, zhab, is used when a number exceeds five. Take, for example, six. This requires joining zhab and gya into zhaga. Seven, zhana. Eight, zhama. Nine, zhatha. Ten requires a new form, “two-hands”, which is nya-zhab. To form twenty-two, one would say tha-zhab-nya.

Please note that I'm missing the other pronouns, the ones that would normally be on the table of correlatives. I still haven't invented those, so hang on.

Next up are NOUN PHRASE, SENTENCE ORDER (Which will be a real treat.), and RELATIVE CLAUSES. Later in the future, QUESTIONS, CONJUGATION, POLITENESS, ARTISTRY, and finally, LANGUAGE BACKGROUND AND HISTORY, including a brief note on Proto-Melodic.

ARTICLES

Articles, "a, an, the." THE: you know what I'm talking about. A: I'm being general. (That's a rough summary.)

Some languages don't use them, but instead use sentence order to communicated the ideas normally communicated by the order in a sentence. Wozal makes a compromise.

I=the, and yi=a. (They don't specify plurality or gender, because the noun does already. On certain levels its an economic language that avoid redundancy.)

However, I always comes before the subject, while yi always comes before the object. Therefore, when you are introducing something into a conversation, that noun will be the object. When the noun is old news you make the subject.

This will lead us nicely into a discussion of the NOUN PHRASE and the SENTENCE ORDER tomorrow.

Incidentally, it is possible to take my use of verbs rather than adjectives and reverse the idea, replacing all verbs with adjectives and nouns. But since you'll no longer be able to base your sentences on a principles of verb, subject, and object order, you'll have to invent a new syntactical principles for sentence structure. I intend to do this for another language.

This is easily the highest developed language (outside of elvish) that I have seen. I'm thoroughly impressed.

I accept your compliment, but I have to say that it's only the work of a beginner. There are a number of far more advanced languages, such loglan and lojban, that put mine to shame. (Go to www.conlang.org and check out some of the languages there, especially Kelen.)

NOUN PHRASE

The noun phrase is a noun, and then other words which belong to it. In Wozal, the order is like this.

article-descriptive verb-noun (Remember that the article is determined based on whether the noun is the subject or object.)

SENTENCE ORDER

While English is based on a subject-verb-object system (I ran home.), many languages are based on other patterns.

Wozal is based on a verb-subject-object pattern, so, "I ran home," is actually "ran I home".

So, sentence order translated literally into English looks like this:

Verb-I-descriptive verb-subject-Yi-descriptive verb-object.

A sample sentence in English (translated literally):

"Killing angry I the evil man."

Translated properly into English, you would get:

"I am angrily killing the evil man."

Hopefully that doesn't confuse ya'll to much. Tomorrow will talk about circumstances that break the above rules-RELATIVE CLAUSES and QUESTIONS-and CONJUGATING NOUNS.