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.