Fith

Fith
Spoken in:	Planet Fithia
Conworld:
Total speakers:
Genealogical classification:	Fithian Fith
Basic word order:	stack-based
Morphological type:	isolating
Morphosyntactic alignment:
Created by:
Jeffrey Henning	1997-2005

Fith is a stack-based alien language invented by Jeffrey Henning. It is spoken by centauroid sapient marsupials on the planet Fithia.

LIFO Grammar

The grammar of Fith is based on a stack, which operates by the LIFO principle: last in, first out. Like, for instance, a stack of cards on which you can put a card on the top, or remove a card from the top.

Consider the sentence hong zhong lin lo rumn shkrung e 'The loyal man of the nation deactivates the robot'. The first word, the noun hong, is pushed onto the stack:

hong

'man'

The second is also a noun which is likewise pushed onto the stack:

hong	'man'
zhong	'nation'

The next word, lin, is an adjective. This results in the top item being modified:

hong lin	'loyal man'
zhong	'nation'

The fourth word, lo 'of', is a postposition which pops the two top elements from the stack and pushes a modified noun phrase onto it:

zhong hong lin lo

'loyal man of the nation'

The next word is a noun which is pushed onto the stack:

rumn	'robot'
zhong hong lin lo	'loyal man of the nation'

This is followed by a verb, in this case a transitive one, which takes two arguments and combines them into a clause that is placed on the stack:

zhong hong lin lo rumn shkrung

'loyal man of the nation robot deactivate'

Finally, the stack conjunction e finishes the sentence and pops it from the stack. As long as the e is not uttered, the sentence is still "under construction".

External link

Fith: The Alien Language With A LIFO Grammar (archived)