Escinet or Escinian is an inflectional ergative-absolutive language with a Subject-Verb-Object word order; noun phrases are head-final. Like many related languages, Escinian also discerns firsthand- and second hand knowledge.
Background
Before the annexion of Esciny by the Prakyat Empire of Üsmeraž,
several tribes lived in the area, all of them speaking closely related
languages. By building roads for commerce and warfare, founding cities
for administration and trade and establishing a well-organised
bureaucracy, the Üsmeražd Empire developed the mountainous region
into a highly civilised country. As a result of the increasing commerce
and mobility, the regional languages fused into what is now called
“Early Escinian”. The dialects around the new provincial capital were
its main sources, and the vocabulary was heavily influenced by Prakyat,
both the Classic and the Common variant.
When the Üsmeražd Empire collapsed, the fringe province of Esciny was left largely undisturbed by the ensuing turmoil; the city prefects tried to keep the province out of the war by not meddling with any of the warring factions and instead fortifying the passes into the country. Officially, they still deemed Esciny loyal to the now defunct Empire, and the more this became a distinct memory of the past, the more the Escinians deemed themselves the last outpost of a glorious, nearly lost civilization.
Phonology
Consonants
| labial | coronal | postalveolar | velar | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| plosives | unvoiced | p | t | k | |
| voiced | b | d | g | ||
| fricatives | unvoiced | f | s | š | h |
| voiced | z | ž | |||
| affricates | unvoiced | c | č | ||
| voiced | dz | j | |||
| nasals | m | n | |||
| approximants | w | r | |||
| lateral | l |
Escinet distinguishes voiced and unvoiced consonants, and three main points of articulation: labial, coronal and velar. The palatal row that is so important in Escinets ancestral languages is completely lost, and the voiced and unvoiced labial and velar fricatives have merged into one sound whose voicedness depends mainly on the speaker’s dialect. Thus, while voicedness is phonemic for all plosives, the sibilants are the only fricatives where this feature is important. The alveolar row is also the only one to feature affricates: Every one of the four fricatives s, z, š and ž has its affricate counterpart: c, dz, č and j.
Some phonemes are realised in different ways: The plosives are sometimes aspirated if no sound precedes them and a vowel follows; the fricative f is spoken voiced in front of voiced plosives, nasals, z and l. The velar h varies a lot across Escinian speakers: Most pronounce it [x], but as [ç] in front of or after front vowels and labials; some voice it in the same instances f is voiced. A word-initial h is sometimes reduced to [h]. Traces of the old distinction between the voiced and unvoiced velar fricative can still be found in orthography (see below).
The sonorant l is found as velarised alveolar lateral approximant, like in Russian; before or after velars, a velar lateral approximant is used, like in “milk” in some English dialects. r is usually an alveolar approximant, as in the English word “red”, though some dialects reduce intervocalic r to a mere flap or tap. In front of velar consonants, n is pronounced as velar nasal.
Vowels
| |
front | central | back |
|---|---|---|---|
| closed | i î | u û | |
| mid | e ê | è | o ô |
| open | a â | à | (a â) |
The vowel inventory consists of 7 phonemic vowels: a, e , i, o, u, è and à. While the meaning of the first five is rather straightforward, the last two need some explanation. è is used to transcribe a mid-central vowel, much like a schwa – think of the “a” in “about” – , and the à describes a half-open or nearly open central vowel oscillating between a lazy a and a lazy o.
Escinet discernes long and short vowels for front and back vowels; length is marked by a circumflex, so ê is used for a long e. Unlike German or English, vowels are pronounced the same way in stressed or unstressed syllables.
Phonotactics
Escinet is very tolerant of consonant clusters, though not of vowel clusters. Thus, there are no diphthongs. Nevertheless, the core of every syllable is a vowel, which may or may not be surrounded by one or more consonants. There is a simple hierarchy of sounds: A plosive may be followed by any other sound, a fricative or affricate by a sonorant, sonorants by no other consonant. For the syllable ending, this rules apply in reverse: Any other consonant may be followed by a plosive etc. Usually, sounds of the same articulation point do not go together, with the exception of sc, zdz, kh, gh and the whole coronal and postalveolar affricates.
There are more rules governing longer consonant clusters, like in gzambde, and there are exceptions to the simple rules laid out above. For example, in the outset of a word or syllable, a labial or velar plosive may be combined with a coronal one, as in bt or kt; the coronal comes always second.
Phonetic changes
If due to morphological rules one vowel would succeed another, the first one is lengthened and the second one is dropped. In some cases however, outlined below in the section about morphology, the second vowel is lost without a trace. If two consonants of the same type of articulation (i.e. plosives, or fricatives, etc.) follow due to morphological rules, the second one is dropped. If an obstruent is preceded by a vowel-ending prefix and succeeded by a vowel, the consonant is voiced. Phonetically, this also happens for obstruents were voicedness is no phonemic feature, although it is not reflected in the actual spelling.
ASCII transcription
As is seen above, the Roman transcription of Escinet uses three diacritics: The circumflex for long vowels, the grave for central vowels and the caron for postalveolar fricatives and affricates. In environments where these diacritics are not available, the following transcription is normally used: The postalveolar fricatives are written by juxtaposing their alveolar counterpart and a h, e.g. š becomes sh. For long vowels, the vowel is simply doubled, e.g. ê becomes ee. For the mid-central vowels, the digraphs ea (è) and au (à) are used.
Morphology
Nouns
| case | singular | plural |
|---|---|---|
| absolutive | -ø | -ni |
| ergative | -um | -umi |
| genetive | -sa | -san |
| dative | -od | -odz |
| locative | -(e)g | -(e)gž |
| instrumental | -(w)u | -(w)un |
| adverbial | -če | -čej |
Escinet discerns seven cases by different endings: the absolutive,
the ergative, the genetive, the dative, the temporal-locative, the
instrumental and the adverbial case. The declension also allows
for two numbers, singular and plural. The bracketed sounds are prune to
be dropped: The locative endings lose their vowel after another vowel or
a sonorant without a trace; the instrumental suffix loses the semivowel
w if following any obstruent. As such, the Escinian declension system is
indeed simple, and robust.
Verbs
There are four aspects in Escinet: The punctual aspect is nonmarked, the durative aspect is marked by a lengthening of the root vowel, the perfect aspect reduplicating the first consonant of the root and inserting an a afterwards, the inchoative aspect by infixing the first consonant of the root plus an o after the root vowel. As the root vowel is always the stressed one, there is a marked acoustic difference between the inchoative and the perfect.
- fant zambe — “the boy goes at the moment”
- fant zâmbe — “the boys goes for quite some time”
- fant zazambe — “the boy has gone already”
- fant zazombe — “the boy is about to go”
Direct after the verb root, suffixes mark the different moods. A zero suffix is used for the indicative mood, -haz- for the potentialis, -esp- for the optative and -è for the imperative.
- fant zamhazbe — “the boy may go”
- fant zamespe — “the boy wants to go”
- fant zamè — “boy, go!”
Evidentiality is marked by two different suffixes that always come last: -be for things known firsthand, and -o for everything else. When the imperative is used, the evidentiality markers are often dropped.
- fant zambe — “the boy goes at the moment, and I see/hear/smell it.”
- fant zamo — “the boy goes at the moment, or so I have been told.”
Escinet discern two tenses, past and non-past (present, future). Past is indicated by the prefix i(z)-, while non-past is the unmarked form.
- fant zazombe — “the boy is about to go”
- fant izazombe — “the boy started to go”
The Escinet verbal system is divided in two classes of verbs: The so-called primary verbs and the secondary verbs. The primary verbs are those with a root vowel of e or a, while secondary verbs are all the other ones. Secondary words are often derived from nouns, for example, bužbe (“to become red”) from buž.However, some oft-used secondary verbs became primary verbs, i.e. they changed their vowel.
For the secondary verbs, the conjugation differs in some points from
the primary verbs: The reduplication for the perfect always uses the
root vowel, thus it is bubužbe for “to be red”, and the
inchoative infix is accompanied by a reduced vowel: u and o
become è, i becomes à.
Accordingly, bubèžbe means “to be about to become red”.
For the perfect, the second syllable is stressed, for the inchoative
the first one.
Adjectives
The main way to derive adjectives is adding the suffix -(e)t to a noun. To further the above example, buž “redness” becomes bužet “reddish”.
Compounds
Compounds are formed by combining roots. The last root is the
determined one, the earlier roots the determiners.It is possible to nest
compounds in one another to form even longer ones.
Syntax
Escinet is frequently characterised as an ergative-absolutive language, with a basic Subject-Verb-Object word order. This word order is very flexible, however, due to the language’s morphology.
Basic phrases
The simples phrases consist of a subject and a predicate. It is imperative that a subject is present.
Writing
When the tribes of Esciny started to write more than accounting lists or mere pictures, their obvious choice was the Prakyat writing system, which combines logograms with syllabic signs for affixes and diacritics for vowel changes. The system was by no means standardised; thus, the texts were only in those local centres useful where they had been written. During the Prakyat rule, parallel to the merging of the local languages into Escinian, a uniform way of writing developed, but, influenced by the Ušmarraht bureaucracy, very similar to the Prakyan script, though the phonotactics and morphology of Escinet were not terribly suited for this style.
With the increasing wealth and education in Esciny, the use of the writing spread beyond the temples and bureaucracy; thus, the so-called Common Syllabary, was adopted and adapted for Escinet..
Many Escinians can at least read the Common Syllabary; however, a really educated person can and will use the combined script – and will prefer Classic Prakyat anyways. Thus, most Escinian texts are either for day-to-day business, like accounting lists, notifications or contracts, and narrations for the broad public, like folk tales, while poetry, religious texts or official decrees are written in Classic Prakyat.