I started this conlang when I wanted to experiment with chaos and irregularity. It turned into... something else? It is heavily inspired by O'eaia. You'll see why soon. Everything other than the obvious O'eaia stuff, I have no clue why I've added.
Part of the language's design is that it would be kitchen-sinky, if not for its pragmatics. There are some sentences with, like, a dozen ways to say them, but the ones that you can actually use always depends on the context you're in. Sentences often carry a lot of the context inside of them.
Nouns
Noun Classes
There are noun classes, ranking every word based on their importance to Tsiəra society.
| tsiəʃa | miŋ | vreham | nraan | vraʃtsa |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sheep | Important | Animate | Inanimate | Unimportant |
Cases
Tsiəraqa has many, many cases. Here are the most commonly used ones. Case suffixes agree with the root's noun class.
| Direct | Dative | Locative | Comitative | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| tsiəʃa | -ʃei | -koa | -plu | -vis |
| miŋ | -isa | -kia | -tre | -ras |
| vreham | -ula | -via | -ʒa | -mrav |
| nraan | -ara | -qia | -ʒri | -qras |
| vraʃtsa | -ura | -loa | -eʃ | -tsel |
There are also number suffixes. There exist singular number suffixes because there are words that are not defaulted to singular, like tsiəra, which is plural.
| Singular | Dual | Plural | |
|---|---|---|---|
| tsiəʃa | -tse | -vim | -miv |
| miŋ | -mer | -nav | -siv |
| vreham | -pu | -viʃ | -taʃ |
| nraan | -qai | -var | -ver |
| vraʃtsa | -miə | -uv | -um |
Articles
Articles appear as prefixes, except in names, where they appear as separate words before the proper noun particle.
| Prefix | Meaning |
|---|---|
| fa- | A/an |
| lo- | The |
| vaŋ- | General |
| sia- | None |
| ni- | This |
| dʒa- | That |
| mo- | That over there |
Verbs
Verbs inflect by tense and voice. Tense suffixes include evidentiality.
Evidentials
Evidentials may be a misnomer, since rather than expressing how the knowledge of the expressed proposition is obtained, it expresses the proposition's relation to cultural knowledge, or the speaker's certainty of the knowledge and its context.
| Common Knowledge | Personal Knowledge | Soundness Uncertain | Depth Uncertain | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Past | -vrəʃ | -roa | -vriə | |
| Present | -zre | -sal | -mil | -mriəl |
| Future | -zer | -hro | -qlaa | -vaa |
| Not Present | -qur | -vur | -vrur | -ivrə |
| Never | -vroi | -mrav | -pil | -tsil |
| Forever | -qei | -qle | -qlei | -qaa |
Voices
Tsiəraqa has something that I think counts as austronesian alignment. Every verb has a voice. The voices are redundant with cases, but the noun hierarchy dictates that the most important noun must be fronted using a voice. Here are the most common voices:
| Active | Passive | Dative | Locative |
|---|---|---|---|
| -mroi | -irai | -mriə | -ileʒ |
Twin Languages
There are two registers in Tsiəraqa. The common register, and the explanatory register. These act as slightly different languages, with completely different lexicons and slightly different grammar.
An easy example is that the noun hierarchy doesn't always favor the most lexically important noun, instead favoring the most explanatorily important noun (whatever is being explained). This creates three levels of formality, as opposed to the two from the common register.
There are many other details, here is an example of the same sentence in two different registers:
Common: ʒime Lo Te Haʃisarai Mavlara
Explanatory: Lo Se Haʃisarai Vuʃtisa Kana vasalmroi
Notice how the explanatory register uses the copula verb va, where the common register omits it.