Quetch
| X-3 | |
| Spoken in: | n.a. |
| Timeline/Universe: | n.a. |
| Total speakers: | n.a. |
| Genealogical classification: | a priori experimental language |
| Basic word order: | SVO |
| Morphological type: | agglutinating, polysynthetic |
| Morphosyntactic alignment: | to be determined |
| Created by: | |
| Jörg Rhiemeier | 2006 |
X-3 is an experimental language by Jörg Rhiemeier. It is a speedtalk-style language with a huge phoneme inventory allowing for very short words - one phoneme per morpheme, such that a word of three phonemes may contain an entire transitive clause.
Phonology
The phoneme inventory of X-3 is very large: it contains several hundred consonants, 100 vowels and four tones, which means that there are as many as 40,000 CV syllables.
Vowels
There are 10 basic vowel qualities:
| Front unrounded |
Front rounded |
Back unrounded |
Back rounded | |
| High | i | ü | ï | u |
| Mid | e | ö | ë | o |
| Low | ä | a |
Each of these ten vowels can be plain, rhotacized (as in American English her), lateralized (pronounced with the sides of the tongue lowered, as if pronouncing the vowel and [l] at the same time), or can form a diphthong with either an i-offglide or an u-offglide. Each of these 50 vowels can furthermore be nasalized, making for a total of 100 vowel phonemes.
Tones
There are four tones in X-3: high, low, rising and falling.
Morphology and syntax
In X-3, each morpheme consists of a single phoneme. Nouns and pronouns consist of a single consonant, verbs, prepositions and a small number of other particles consist of a single vowel with distinctive tone. There are no derivational or inflectional affixes.
A word in X-3 contains an entire clause. Morpheme order is SVO. Thus, in a word such as bat, b would be the subject, a the verb and t the object.
