Kuma-Koban

Old Verat Verát
Spoken in:	Terek Highlands (Teregvérga)
Conworld:	Khelivega Continuity
Total speakers:	Roughly 300 Thousand
Genealogical classification:	Indo-European Indo-Caucasian Vertaic Old Verat
Basic word order:	SOV
Morphological type:	Inflecting
Morphosyntactic alignment:	Split-S
Writing system:
Created by:
S. G. McCabe	c2002 CE

Overview

The Vertaic languages, of which only Old Verat attested example, were a continuum of Split-S, SOV/PV order, Indo-European languages. The Vertaic pseudo-family is monophyletic; the most recent common ancestor of Old Verat and any other IE language must be Proto-Indo-European itself. The family as a whole is too divergent to be linked conclusively with any other branches. Old Verat is a Satem language which displays the Augment, and shows conditional delabialization of PIE labiovelars, as does Greek.

As a Split-S language, it divides verbs into two morphosyntactic categories, Active and Middle, on the basis of transitivity and the volition of the subject/experiencer. There are two accompanying noun classes, Animate and Neuter, the latter of which cannot be maked as an Agent (nominative). Despite this, the language is syntactically Nominative-Accusative, as the verbs agree in person and number with the subject in every case, not with the patient, as is the case with its Ergative North-Caucasian neighbors.

History

Commonly known as Verat, this was the language spoken by the southern Khelivega tribes, those who's clans entered union at Terek, in particular. Old Verat is the langauge spoken by Undun and his compatriots, as opposed to the slightly younger and only slightly changed Terek Verat. These can be considered dialects of the same language, only differing slightly. Genetically, Verat is an old Indo-European language, an early branching-off, indicated by some archaic and otherwise unusual features. It shares many traits with the Indo-Iranian languages in particular, but is very clearly not a member of that family.

Old Verat was spoken in the south and east, especially at Terek, presumably as far north as Kuban. So-called Terek Verat, on the other hand, became the lingua-franca of most of the cis-Caucasian territory, incorporating a large number of loans from its North-Caucasian counterparts.

Orthography and Phonology

The Phonology of Verat is somewhat simpler than that of Proto-Indo-European. It shows 15 phonemic consonants and 5 vowels with phonemic length contrasts. Traditionally, the consonants are divided into three main series.

Consonants

Vowels

For vowels, we have a rather typical five-vowel system. The short vowels are somewhat more lax than the long vowels, and the language shows a distinctively lowered /uː/. Long vowels are denoted in the standard orthography by a macron; accented short vowels have a high or rising tone, denoted by the acute accent á, while accented long vowels have a rising-falling tone, denoted by the circumflex â. Some orthographies use the an acute-with-macron ā́, as is done in Sanskrit; this is avoided due to the lack of standard Unicode support for these characters, and poor integration of Opentype into most software.

Short Vowels

i [ɪ̝]			u [ʊ]
	e [ɛ̝]		o [ɔ]
		a [ɐ]

Long Vowels

ī [iː]			ū [u̞ː]
	ē [eː]		ō [oː]
	ā [aː]

Noun

There are eight noun cases: Nominative, Absolutive, Genetive, Dative, Instrumental, Ablative, Locative, and Vocative. This is alongside two noun classes: Animate and Neuter, and three numbers: Singular, Dual, Plural. There are sixteen declensions, in total, split among three inflectional patters.

Verb

Unusual among early IE languages, Verat is best classified as a Split-S language. Verbs are split into two categories by morphosyntactic behavior, the Active and Middle. All transitive verbs are Active, but not all intransitive verbs are Middle. Most, such as those where the experiencer has no control, such as gābo ‹to float› or mergă ‹to rot› are Middle and mark the experiencer in the absolutive case, but those where the experience has volition, statives such as dagī ‹to be silent›, or xarpo ‹to toil› are Active, and the experiencer here is marked in the nominative, rather than the absolutive.

As an Indo-European language, Verat has a fairly complicated verb system displaying an ablaut. Conjugational and inflectional patterns of the tenses are grouped into three systems by aspect: Imperfective in the Present, Perfective in the Aorist, and Perfect in the Perfect.