Gaaziketti
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Pronunciation
The vowels are read approximately as in Spanish. But double vowels are pronounced long. Double consonants are pronounced double. Like Finnish.
'q' is pronounced like the 'ni' in 'onion'.
'c' is pronounced like the 'ch' is 'chair'.
'n' when at the end of a word, is pronounced like the 'ng' is 'song', or else is assimilated to the following consonant, as in Japanese. Elsewhere, it is pronounced like the 'n' in 'sonnet'.
'ai' is pronounced like 'eye' in 'eye'.
'au' is pronounced like the 'ow' in 'cow'.
Other sounds are pretty much pronounced as one would expect. But unvoiced consonants are not aspirated. E.g. 'p' is pronounced always as in 'spot', never as in 'pack'.
In a word with more than one syllable, the first syllable takes the stress.
Sample lexicon
I have arbitrarily picked the following words for the purposes of illustrating grammar. See Gaaziketti: Lexicon for more words.
kossakaidu jeweller
nauzu to be original
mennu name
raazu to criticise
cooqi to be silent
haiga movie
kuubu slave
deela enemy
cecca soldier
paa to be (only for linking noun phrases)
Grammar
Basic syntax
In Gaaziketti, just about any kind of word can modify (qualify) just about any other kind of word. Verbs, nouns and adjectives fall into essentially a single part of speech.
For example, kossakaidu means 'jeweller' -- if thought of as a noun.
But consider this one-word sentence: Kossakaidu.
Here kossakaidu acts as a verb, meaning: 'There is/are a jeweller/ some jewellers.'
Kossakaidu le raazu. means 'The jeweller criticises (something).'
But raazu, thought of as a noun, means 'criticising' (n.) or 'criticism'.
Thus " Kossakaidu le raazu. " can be read as 'There is criticising by the jeweller.'
Adjectives are generally treated as verbs. E.g. cooqi: to be silent. For such an "adjective" (which is really a verb), if you want to treat it as an attributive adjective, e.g. as in 'the silent movie', then you put it like this: 'the movie which is silent'. This isn't particularly unwieldy in Gaaziketti, because there is a concise relative pronoun (d). Thus cooqi de haiga le means 'the movie which is silent'/ 'the silent movie'.
The syntax tends to be agglutinative.
Parsing markers
These markers indicate exactly what qualifies what. One must compulsorily be tacked onto the end of any morpheme ending in a vowel (or diphthong) (noting that one of these parsing markers is a null).
Gather one element, modify next element (nil)
Gather one element, do not modify next element -s
Gather two elements, modify next element -n
Gather two elements, do not modify next element -k
It's kind of hard to explain how these work. If you've got a noun phrase, say, and it's modifying the next phrase to appear in the sentence, then you don't need to tack on any parsing marker at all. But say you want noun phrase X not to modify the very next phrase in the sentence. Then you tack on -s. Say the order of phrases is XYZ. Say you want X to modify Z and Y to modify Z. This generally occurs when Z is appearing as a verb, and X and Y are the subject and object respectively. Then X gets -s and Y gets -n. But say you've got WXYZ. You want W, X and Y each to modify Z. Then W gets -s, X gets -k (which serves to "gather" W and X into a unit containing two phrases, both of which will end up modifying the same unit, without modifying the very next unit), and finally -n. Note that Z gets no marker, because it appears as a verb.
Word order
SOV (usual)
or
OSV
In general, a modifier precedes what it modifies.
Noun phrases
Articles
These follow the noun and are, in general, compulsory, for any phrase intended to function as a noun phrase. But pronouns, of course, do not need articles.
(Syntactically speaking, the noun is thought of as "modifying" its article, even though semantically speaking, it seems to be the other way round. This is why the article comes at the end of the noun phrase.)
Articles receive compulsory case endings. (See below.) Nouns aren't inflected at all as such: articles indicate number and case for noun phrases.
Sing. def. l
Pl. def. k
Sing. indef. s
Pl. indef. m
Case endings
nominative -e
accusative/ genitive -o
dative -ai
Note that these are added to articles and pronouns, but not to nouns, and not to demonstratives.
Verbal endings
Verbal endings indicate aspect, tense and mood. But is no passive voice as such; and verbs are not altered for number or person.
Mood
These come last of all.
Indicative “there is” (nil)
Imperative (informal) -p
Imperative (formal) -vaa
Infinitive -ce
Tense
These come just before the mood marker.
Present (usually ommitted) -nee-
Past (sometimes ommitted if context allows) -co-
Future -tau-
Aspect
These come just before the tense marker.
simple (nil)
habitual -baa-
continuous -nii-
perfect -haa-
future -tau- (same as tense)
Examples
raazuco, criticised
raazuhaaco, had criticised
raazutauce, to be going to criticise (in the future)
raazuvaa, please criticise
raazutauco, was going to criticise
raazubaaco, used to criticise
Pronouns
For demonstratives, see the next section.
Personal pronouns
These are listed below in order of nom., acc., dat. forms. Possessive (genitive) forms, as attributive, precede the noun phrase, and the noun must still take the article, e.g.: qo haiga le, my movie; gotos nauzun mennu ke, their original names.
1st person singular: qe, qo, qai; plural: goqe, goqo, goqai.
2nd person singular: ve, vo, vai; plural: gove, govo, govai.
3rd person animate singular: te, to, tai; plural: gote, goto, gotai.
3rd person inanim. singular: ze, zo, zai; plural: goze, gozo, gozai.
Relative pronouns
These are quite frequently used. The relative clause precedes the modified noun.
There are two relative pronouns. There is a concise one, which cannot handle more complicated types of construction; and there is a less concise one, which can handle complex constructions.
The concise option: d-
Declined according to the modified noun's case with respect to the verb in the relative clause.
Placed directly after the relative clause's verb. The relative clause's verb is in the indicative.
The flexible option: siim-
Declined according to case within relative clause.
Placed within the relative clause itself, i.e. somewhere before the relative clause's verb.
The relative clause's verb is in put into the infinitive.
Demonstratives
These can serve as adjectives or as pronouns. As an (attributive) adjective, the order is: noun-demonstrative-article. The article is compulsory. As a pronoun, the construction is demonstrative-article. Again the article is compulsory.
taa that, those
nii this, these
E.g.: kooba taa le, that jacket (nominative); nii lo, this (as pronoun, accusative); taa kai, those (dative); Kooba nii se, one of these jackets (nom.).
Postpositions
These come after the article, which must be in a case appropriate to the postposition.
baa (governs genitive) with, using, via, by means of.
bii (governs dative) in, at
nuuta (governs dative) on
Some illustrative sentences
Kuubu lo deela les cecca sen paa. The slave’s enemy is a soldier.
Kossakaidu les haiga lo mennu lon raazu. The jeweller criticises the movie’s name.
Kossakaidu les siimo mennu lon raazuce haiga le nauzu. The movie whose name the jeweller criticised is original.
Haiga lo mennu lo raazu de kossakaidu le cooqi. The jeweller who criticises the movie’s name is silent.
Cooqi de kossakaidu les haiga lon raazu. The silent jeweller critises the movie.
Kossakaidu les haiga lok cooqi den raazu. The jeweller criticises the movie silently. (Can be read as: "There is some criticising, which is (a) by the jeweller, (b) of the movie, and (c) silent.)
Lexicon
Background
I invented Gaaziketti for the fun of it. I wanted it - among other things - to have a grammar which parses unambiguously, i.e. so that you always know what qualifies what in a sentence, and furthermore so that (even ignoring the written spaces between words) it is always possible to figure out where the boundaries between morphemes are (say if you are a computer). (Basically, i, a and u occur as single vowels only in the second and subsequent syllables of a morpheme, and no other vowel can occur in such a syllable.) I also wanted the grammar to be flexible and uniform, i.e. to be very general, with few or no exceptions and few "sub-rules". Also it had to be reasonably concise, but while being fairly easily pronounceable, having few consonant clusters, few vowels and diphthongs, and few rare consonants. Also, I wanted to minimise the number of pairs of words in the lexicon that differed only slightly, i.e. I built redundancy into it, as in real languages (although the way I built it in was somewhat artificial and "automatic"). Also I wanted to respect as far as possible the language "universals" that are true of most natural languages. And I wanted easily to be able to make new words by just conjoining two existing ones. On the other hand, I didn't care about resemblance between the Gaaziketti lexicon and that of natural languages.
Trying to reconcile all these goals was something of a challenge, but I think I've got something I'm reasonably happy with.
There is a bit more to it than what is above, incl. a (lazily auto-generated) provisional vocab of 1600 words. But I've yet to finalise a lot of the "small" words like personal pronouns, postpositions, conjunctions, tense-markers and so forth.
I hope to add to this page gradually as I work out more of the details.
