Thaduracian
Suprisingly, a fair bit is known about early Thaduracian pronunciation and grammar. This was aided by the discovery of documents (thought to be that of Thadurac himself), detailing various points on word markings, inflections and indeed some on pronunciation.
Initial studies showed that early Thaduracian was quite synthetic. Verbs were highly inflected to denote things such as: person, modality, mood, voice (always the indicative as there was no passive), and tense. Pronouns were rarely used with the verb, possibly only for emphasis.
The alphabet consisted of 17 consonants, 15 of which had inherent vowels (that is, consonants were always followed by a particular vowel; 2 that didn't were the sounds of ch and th). These 'inherent vowel sounds' remained static in base words and roots, but could be changed in affixes. Vowel sounds could also be silenced. The alphabet was as follows (inherent vowels included with an English sound representation):
bi-as in bit
po-as in pot
de-as in street
to-as in boat
c/k/qa-as in father
gu-as in but
fo-as in caught
va-as in bait
su-as in soon
zi-as in like
le-as in bet
ma-as in father
ni-as in bit
re-as in street
hu-as in root
th-
ch-
As we know, King Thadurac was a Carthaginian and would have 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 created glyphs which had a morphemic identity, assigned in word and stand alone values to each character, and also marked some characters with diacritics, also giving 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/.
ch was classed as a single sound and represented by a ligature (though for the purpose of this article, ch is a fair representative).
Word order was based on the Irish Celtic system: VSO in every day speak (but could vary due to syntheticity) and OSV in prayer and ritual.
Below is a rare and very well preserved leaf from a Thaduracian prayer book discovered in 1726. It's a pagan 'Prayer For The Dying:
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.
Other Thaduracian traits :
- Adjectives and nouns with a verbal relative were formed with derivational affixes.
- It was highly morphemic; for example, free adjectives (non verb-related) were formed with bound morphemes to denote opposition, eg: ged-big, stiged-small, belu-cold, stibelu-warm.
- It only had one past tense: preterite and perfect were rendered as the same, although telecity could be accounted for with a marker.
- It would appear from spelling that all consonants were unaspirated, although it can't be substantiated as to whether aspiration occured in various constructs. The only exception was the letter g.
- There was no copula 'to be', a feature that still exists in the language today.
- There was a high degree of phoneticity (much like that of today). Even vowel combinations were pronounced individualy, for example: the ei in FALACHEILD would have been pronounced FALACHE-ILD with glottalization.
