User:Aquatiki/Sandbox2

Goals

1. Endgoal - A truly verbless language I can use
2. Vague phrases
   1. Glacial pace
   2. Navajo-of-nouns
   3. lazy but clever
   4. carved in stone
   5. complicated rituals
3. Naturalism - 6/10
   • I want some naturalistic elements
   • Different setting (parallel Earth)
   • Different nature (immortal humans)
   • Irregularities but not many
   • Idioms within reason
4. Complexity - insane. Navajo but with only nouns
5. Derivation - clear. Agglutinative, basically
6. Features
   1. Phonology
      1. Lazy whole-mouth harmony
      2. A couple of clicks and ejectives (un-earth-like)
      3. CV, and CVC (no ejective coda)
   2. Grammar
      1. No verbs at all
      2. assumed copular between topic and subject
      3. 6 nouns classes (genders), like animacy
      4. Many cases (12?)
      5. Case-stacking
      6. word glue, like German
      7. mostly agglutinative, touch of fusional
   3. Culture
      1. things happen, not because someone does them, but because the world unfolds in prescribed patterns
      2. discourse is formulaic, ceremonial, or sacred: more on set relational expressions and fixed semantic roles, rather than on active description of novel events
      3. agency is less linguistically salient, so predicates assigning blame, initiative, or creativity are avoided
      4. Tidally Locked Planet
         1. The sun never moves in the sky.
         2. The world is divided into zones of permanent day, eternal night, and a narrow habitable twilight ring.
         3. People live in a stable band where temperature and light are forever the same.
      5. Mountain life
         1. Isolated communities → heavy internal consistency, less external pressure to simplify
         2. Thin air → favoring sharp, closed articulation: ejectives, glottalization, voiceless stops
         3. Cultural inwardness → deep philosophies of stasis and permanence
      6. Time is measured in generations, epochs, weathering of stone, growth cycles of ultra-slow plants

Existential cases

Case	Function	Gloss
Topical	Frames the referent of the utterance	“As for…”
Identity	Category, essence, nominal predicate	“is a…” / “equals…”
Possessive	ownership, authorship, kinship, part-whole	“X’s Y”
Genitive	association, content, theme, objective, attribution	“Y of X”

Where/When Cases

Case	Function	Typical gloss
Locative	Place, state, context of being, time-within	“in,” “at,” “on”, "during"
Dative	Target, direction	“to,” “for,” “until", "as far as"
Ablative	Source, cause, origin	“from,” “because of,” “due to”
Benefactive	Advantage, interest, concern	“for the benefit of…”, "at the behest of"
Abessive	Absence, privation, “lacking”	“without,” “lacking,” “free from”, "exclude"

How Cases

Case	Function	Typical gloss
Instrumental	Means, medium, material	“by (means of)”, “through,” “with”, "using"
Adverbial	Role/state modifier, part of speech shift	“as (a) X,” “in a X way”, "like"
Translative	Change of state, transformation	“becoming,” “into,” “turning into”

Noun Classes

	Not "Container" (mass: ?, ??)	"Container" (count: ?, ??)
Idea + Matter	Animals (also temperaments)	Persons / Gods
Matter only	(Diffuse) Substances: air, fire	Tools , "rocks"
Idea only	Actions	Abstracts, Categories, Sets

Number: Containers are unmarked for number, as in Chinese/Japanese/Korean. Non-containers default to a collective/mass-noun number, but can take a partitive (which can mean as few as one).

Polypersonal pronouns: