Ksah-Choo [KSC]
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Typology
On hold
46 words
Ksah-Choo
Ksah-Choo [ˈksɑcu]
Ksah-Choo [ˈksɑcu]
Registered by
[Deactivated User] on 15 November 2015
Language type
A priori
Species
Human/humanoid
About Ksah-Choo
A language I'm developing for an as-yet-unnamed webcomic. Spoken by the Moh-Ksah-Ee, a short, stubby, yellow-skinned, reptile-like race that eventually finds itself forced to abandon its home planet for Earth, Ksah-Choo is conveyed entirely in a simple English orthography designed to be relatively intuitive for non-linguists. It is a VSO, nominative-accusative, mostly agglutinative language with some fusional elements in the form of multi-exponential affixes. Ksah-Choo could be considered unusual for its complete lack of a voicing contrast in consonants; its lack of fricatives besides /h/, /ɬ/, and the nearly-always-affricated /t͡s/; its two click consonants; being synthetic but possessing no person-marking (pronouns are treated like any other noun); and its two-dimensional grammatical gender system contrasting two sexes (male and female) and three sizes (small, medium, and large) - for example, the name "Ksah-Choo" lacks a gender/size affix because "choo" (language) is a feminine medium noun, which is considered default, but the "ee" in "Moh-Ksah-Ee" signifies male and medium. In many other respects, however, Ksah-Choo is a fairly average affixing language, and its vowel inventory, for obvious reasons, would be quite familiar to an Anglophone.
Sample of Ksah-Choo[view] Choh-lyah-toam-ken lyew-kyoo-oh kots-tthong peel-tee-leh. Choh-ah-mew-kway noo-yeh-tthah-oh way choh-ah-eh-mah lwayk poh mot-tee way eh-poh-ah-toh-hlee lee-tway noo-koo-choh-oh tah!
I’ve been like a mother to that girl. I’ve locked her in her room, told her she was fat, and once I even left her in a store![view all texts]
I’ve been like a mother to that girl. I’ve locked her in her room, told her she was fat, and once I even left her in a store![view all texts]
Phonology
Consonants | Bilabial | Dental | Alveolar | Palatal | Labio- velar | Velar | Glottal | |||||||
Nasal | m | n | ɲ | ŋ | ||||||||||
Plosive | p | t̪ | t | c | k | |||||||||
Fricative | (s)1 | h | ||||||||||||
Affricate | t͡s | |||||||||||||
Lateral approximant | l | ʎ | ||||||||||||
Lateral fricative | ɬ | |||||||||||||
Approximant | j | w | ||||||||||||
Click | ǀ | ǃ |
- Only in a few culturally significant words and loanwords, after a mostly complete merger into /t͡s/.
Vowels | Front | Near- front | Back | |||
Close | i | y | u | |||
Near-close | ɪ | |||||
Close-mid | e | o | ||||
Open-mid | ɛ | ʌ | ||||
Near-open | æ | |||||
Open | ɑ |
Polyphthongs | [oi]1 | [æu]2 |
- allophone of /ɪ/
- allophone of /æ/
Orthography
Below is the orthography for Ksah-Choo. This includes all graphemes as defined in the language's phonology settings - excluding the non-distinct graphemes/polygraphs.
Ksah-ChooOrthography [edit] | ||||||||||
Aa/æ/ | AH ah/ɑ/ | AY ay/e/ | CH ch/c/ | CLOP clop/ǃ/ | EE ee/i/ | EH eh/ɛ/ | EW ew/y/ | Hh/h/ | HL hl/ɬ/ | Ii/ɪ/ |
Kk/k/ | Ll/l/ | LY ly/ʎ/ | Mm/m/ | Nn/n/ | NG ng/ŋ/ | NY ny/ɲ/ | OH oh/o/ | OO oo/u/ | OW ow[æu] | OY oy[oi] |
Pp/p/ | Ss/s/1 | Tt/t/ | TS ts/t͡s/ | TSK tsk/ǀ/ | TTH tth/t̪/ | UH uh/ʌ/ | Ww/w/ | Yy/j/ | ||
✖ Unknown alphabetical order [change] |
- Only in a few culturally significant words and loanwords, after a mostly complete merger into /t͡s/, loan words only