Thaduracian
Not much is known about Early Thaduracian pronunciation and grammar, thus it can only be estimated due to the lack of recorded scripts. However, this was aided with the discovery of a notebook thought to be that of Thadurac himself, detailing various points on word markings, inflections and indeed some on pronunciation. Initial studies did show however, that early Thaduracian was quite synthetic. Verbs were highly inflected to denote things such as: person, modality, mood, and voice, though oddly enough they did not denote tense, this was given as a post-particle. Neither did they display concord (a feature carried through to the present day).
As we know, King Thadurac was a Carthaginian and spoke Punic, a neo-Phonecien language, and would have written in a Phonecian variant. When he created Thaduracian, he initially created an alphabet arbitrarily, of which there are some examples to be seen in the Dalcurian National Museum. The script he created resembled a kind of hybrid between arabic and hebrew. He assigned in word and stand alone values to each character, and also marked some characters with diacritics, and also gave them stand alone values (mainly to denote prepositions and conjunctions). But it seemed that his people found this hard to work with, since most were European, and those who could indeed write had long been used to the Latin or greek alphabet. Later, he chose to write it using the early Latin alphabet of that time. This didn't include the letters:
- k
- x
- y
- z
nor the sounds:
- th /ð/ and /θ/ as in the and bath
However, the k /k/ sound was used and represented by Q.
The voiced s may have also been devoiced.
The letter v represented /ʊ/, which was made long when preceeded or followed by h.
ch was classed as a single sound and represented by a ligature (though for the purpose of this article, ch is a fair representative).
It's also thought that, although the letter /b/ was written, it may have been pronunced as an unvoiced bilabial /p/.
Word order was based on the Irish Celtic system: VSO but could vary due to syntheticity.
The following example is an early latinized version of a Thaduracian pagan 'prayer for the dying':
FALOTISA NOF FALAD'AG V'NOSIBLE
MELETV AGVHI V'MALOCHLE ELANA
NEBITVN ILBRACH E'BEROS A'BENAROCH
NISOTA SA?
SAGETV QALOCH'AG, EM D'FALAD EN V'FALAD
MEROCHLE Q'NOSIBAM, HERCOMOTIS PIROCHSI
FALAD'AG NE MVMOTELA.
Find your way to the land of the ancestors,
for the way is lit from the light of God.
They wait for you with open arms,
there on the edge, between this world and the next.
See; they stand.
Ancestral spirits, welcome our brother to the place we all must go.
Although there were many prayers and ritual writings in Thaduracs's new language, standardization was lacking. It wasn't until the transition into proto-Dalcurian that a standard written form was established. This became evident after studying later versions of the same [above] prayer in which variations of verb stems and grammar can be seen.
