Vingdagese

Vingdagese Vưng-Ḍác Tǫ
Pronounced:	Native: /vɪŋ.ɗaːg tõ/ Anglicized: /vɪŋ.dəg.iːz/
Timeline and Universe:	Alternate Earth
Species:	Human
Spoken:	Carnassus
Writing system:	"Logography"
Genealogy:	Language Isolate
Typology
Morphological type:	Isolating
Morphosyntactic alignment:	Direct Inverse
Basic word order:	SVO; Head-Initial
Credits
Creator:	Thrice Xandvii | ✎
Created:	September 2017

Phonology

Vưng-Ḍác Tǫ (File:VDT-tox.png) has 17 distinct consonants in its inventory (with a bit of allophony) and has 14 vowel phonemes. The vowel space is divided into 3 groups, namely: the a-group, i-group, o-group. This gives Vưng Ḍác Tǫ a rather large range of possible syllables despite the fact that clusters are limited and most words are only one syllable in length with a smattering of two syllable compounds.

Consonants

		Labial	Coronal	Dorsal	Laryngeal
Nasal	Short	m /m/	n /n/	ng /ŋ/
	Long	mm /mː/	nn /nː/	nng /ŋː/
Plosive		p /p/ ~ [b]	t /t/ ~ [d]	c /k/ ~ [ɡ; q]	Ø (’) /ʔ/ ~ [q]
Implosive		ḅ /ɓ/	ḍ /ɗ/	ġ /ɠ/
Fricative		v (w) /v/ ~ [w]	đ (dh) /ð/	j (gh) /ʝ/ ~ [ɣ]
Rhotic			r /r/ ~ [ɾ]

Vowels

	Plain	Lax	Long	Nasal	Diphthong
A-Group	a /a/	e /ɛ/	á (aa) /aː/	ą /ã/	ay /aɪ̯/
I-Group	i /i/	ư /ɪ/	é (ee) /eː/	į /ĩ/
O-Group	o /o/	ơ /ɔ/	ú (uu) /uː/	ǫ /õ/	oy /ɔɪ̯/ ~ [oɪ̯]

Phonotactics

The general description of the syllable unit in Vưng-Ḍác Tǫ is the following: (C)(r, w)V(P, N, F). There are, of course, some provisos that go along with that generic description. Many of the constraints and other changes to that basic structure are described in the following section on allophony.

Allophony

Some general allophonic rules (as well as mentions of orhography in the romanization):

• If /k/ appears in a syllable directly before a vowel belonging to the o-group, it becomes /q/ (and is written as such; this process is blocked by an intervening consonant).
• If a glottal stop ends a syllable, it becomes /q/ and is written as such.
  • Therefore, if a syllable ends in q it came from a glottal stop, however if it begins a syllable it came from /k/.
• Long nasal consonants cannot form clusters, nor can they occur in the coda of a syllable.
• Implosive consonants cannot form clusters.
• When initial, the rhotic is trilled, when it appears in consonant clusters it is tapped.
• When /ʝ/ appears as a final, it moves to a velar realization, namely: /ɣ/.
• If a vowel would begin a syllable, it instead begins with /ʔ/, which is unwritten.
• If a glottal stop begins the second syllable in a two syllable compound, the consonant is written as an apostrophe.
• Stops that appear in the coda of a syllable are voiced, however the spelling isn't changed (the /ʔ/ → /q/ situation being an exception).
• The o-group's diphthong's two realizations are in free variation and depend on the speaker.

Another allophonic variation occurs in two-syllable compound words (such as the language's name). Whenever an implosive appears second in one of these two-syllable compounds, it laxes the vowel in the first position of the compound if it is a plain vowel and de-lengthens a long vowel to its plain equivalent.

Grammar

Other stuff will go here.

Pronouns

		Number
Person		Singular	Dual	Paucal	Plural
First	Incl	cwơc I, me	twon you and me	mmưng you few and me	vơ you (pl) and me
	Excl		cwơc-ay we two	qodh we (few)
Second		regh you	ḍú you (few, two)		đi you (pl)
Third		đưn he; she; they (sg)	đregh they (few, pl)

Classifiers

Classifiers in Vingdagese are used whenever a number is used to refer to the quantity of an object. They can also be used as a kind of pronoun when referring to an object or idea that has been previously referenced in the context of the current conversation.

Each classifier is used as a suffix to the noun to which it refers. In some cases, this will trigger vowel laxing/shortening since a number of classifiers contain an implossive consonant. This system is much smaller than some East Asian languages' classifier (measure word) systems, and is more in line in number of items with European noun class systems.

Physical						Non- Physical
Human	Animate	Inanimate
		Tall/ Long	Round	Flat	Amorphous
-ngi	-qo	-ġi	-ġo	-ḍi	-ḅa	-ḅo

• Ḅo's phonogram, when used as a clasifier, is not the traditional symbol with an open bottom, but instead a version of it using a closed rectangle instead. This may have become common practice to make it less similar to the long-object classifier and/or animate classifier.

Animacy Hierarchy

Related to classifiers, and the above chart, is the animacy hierarchy. Things can be "owned" only by those things farther left on the chart than them. So, what this means is that a thought (non-physical) can't own anything through use of the poss suffix, however, anything else classed on the table can own it. What this means is that should something flat need to own something round an alternate construction would need to be used to indicate that. Typically this construction will use a verb indicating possession along with the inverse marker (ḍưm ).

The above hierarchy is followed also for transitive verbs. It is always assumed that an object/person higher on the hierarchy will perform the action on the object lower on the hierarchy. This is considered the direct construction. However, if the opposite is true, then the inverse marker must be appended to the verb to indicate that the hierarchy is working in reverse and the lower object is indeed the one performing the action. Should two participants in a transitive construction belong to the same rank on the hierarchy, then the object to which the action is occurring is "de-ranked" on the hierarchy by appending the obviative particle phonogram, namely, ti ().

As subcategories of the "human" rank in the hierarchy, the pronouns are ranked second, first, third. Additionally, a singular object always ranks higher than a plural object.

Given the above, the full hierarchy is as follows:

Human			Animate	Inanimate				Non- Physical
Second	First	Third		Long	Round	Flat	Amorphous

Singular	>	Plural

Aspects

Vingdagese is devoid of marked tenses, and instead relies on its aspectual system to convey a good portion of meaning of the verb. Of course, there are periphrasitc ways to convey things like the past tense by stating "yesterday" or the like, but aspects are the primary system. Almost all aspects are conveyed through the use of an aspectual suffix as described in the below table (some of which, like the classifiers, will add requisite laxing/shortening to the previous vowel in the root due to the implosives). There is, however, one "suffix" that results in the complete reduplication of the verb root.

In addition to the aspects described below in the table, a verb bereft of any of the aspectual markers is considered to be in a type of general gnomic aspect; that is, stating the nature of things, or without any sense of time or the relation of the action to the passage of time or manner.

Perfective File:VDT-P-'a.png -’a Action is completed. Inchoative -na Action just started. Frequentative Redupl (of root) Occurs again and again. Progressive -no Action is happening now.

Imperfective -ġa Action is continuous. Cessative -ġo Action has just ceased. Momentane -dho Action occurs once. Intensive -ḅi Done with intention.

Examples

In the following, intf signifies an "intensifier" which makes what it modifies more impactful; while inten signifies the Intensive aspect and has to do with purposefulness and sustained attention.

File:VDT-tox.pngFile:VDT-tox.pngFile:VDT-prax.png

Ḍúj-ca

/ ɗuːʝ.ka

ḍúj-ca

neg-intf

tǫtǫ-ġa

tõ.tõ.ɠa

tǫ~tǫ-ġa

to speak~freq-imp

cwơc

kwɔɡ

cwơc

1SG

ni

ni

ni

or

prą-tre

pɾã.tɾɛ

prą-tre

son-poss

cwơc.

kwɔɡ /

cwơc

1SG

Don't (keep) speak(ing) to me or my son (again)!

Cwơc

/ kwɔɡ

cwơc

1SG

im-ḅi

im.ɓi

ém-ḅi

to see-inten

vú

vuː

vú

five

pwơqo.

pwɔ.qo /

pwơ-qo

wolf-clf.anim

I stare (am staring) at five wolves.

Script & Characters

Vingdagese/Script

Lexicon

—For a partial list of words in Vưng-Ḍác Tǫ, see: Lexicon.

Commentary and discussion of words in the language will go here.

Creator Comments

Vưng-Ḍác Tǫ is a language whose script is inspired by the real-world design of Tangut. This language is spoken by peoples living on the world of Carnassus. It too is believed to be an isolate, like the majority of the languages spoken on Carnassus.

This language began life with working with the Tangut script. Obviously, as this type of thing so often does, it inspired me to want to make a language to match. The obstacle, however, was how does one use such a complex stroke-heavy written script like Tangut in such a way that it begins to look unique, yet keeps the aesthetic? This is still a problem as the script and language develop, however it is not an insurmountable one. At present, I have ripped apart many Tangut characters into some base parts and components and have begun to stitch them back together again. Generally, this consists of the creation of two parts that are composed of chunks of the 3-part Tangut characters and then placed back together in such a way as to create a 2-part character. As is clear in the above chart, each character has a pretty distinct left- and right-half. As to what those will mean or how the script will ultimately function is still somewhat debatable. I am beginning to think that one aspect will have to do with the meaning in some way, while the other the sound, but this would take a great deal of coordination and logical organization of the constituent pieces. Maybe this will begin to develop as characters are chosen for disparate meanings and then later I can glue things together logically to make this system look more cohesive as it goes. Another key feature was the addition of some pieced together elements to make it look just a bit more "Chinese." One of the aspects of that aim is the "square" as well as the "hat" glyph form.