Lashagah language

Lashagah (Lashagah: Prašapkaw, pronounced /praʃapkaw/; or Zpunkprakaw, pronounced /θpunkprakaw/) is a Sitouatian language spoken by the Lashagah people, mainly in Ceciliana, in Cornelia. In 2016, the language had 1,001,658 native speakers, divided among three main dialects: the dialect found at Golden Lake, that found in the Woodland, and the dialect spoken at Lake Beesaw, the Golden Lake dialect being the dialect with the most speakers.

History
Lashagah has been spoken in the area where the nation of Ceciliana is today for many thousands of years, although the first written records of Lashagah only appear in the early 1500s when Umber voyageurs began to explore the area for themselves. Before contact between settlers and native Lashagah people, the Lashagah language was purely oral, and only simple mnemonic markings were used as a form of proto-writing. The language lies in the middle of the approximate maximal extent of the Sitouatian language family, and as such only had extensive linguistic contact with other members of the same family. Linguists estimate that the Proto-Sitouatian language had diverged into separate languages by at least 4000 BCE, and the Central Sitouatian languages had diverged from each other at around 1000 CE.

The language was used by colonizers and missionaries for administrative and religious purposes, although it was not made an official language of the colony. Lashagah was only made an official language upon independence from Umbrellia in 1899, when the Golden Lake dialect, that spoken at the capital and largest city, was chosen to be the standardized dialect for the language.

Phonology
The contrastive phonemes in Golden Lake Lashagah can be divided as follows:

Vowels
Vowels have both stressed an unstressed qualities, though these are not contrastive and purely phonetic. The vowel /a/ has front and back allophones, as well as an unstressed and non-contrastive nasalized form. Nasalization is also purely phonetic and is quite common preceding the nasal consonants /m/ and /n/.

Consonants
As voicing is not contrastive for stops, fricatives and sibilant fricatives, they have both voiceless and voiced allophones, with the voiced allophones being measurably more common word-medially. /χ/ has velar allophones, the result of a merger of a previous velar fricative phoneme with its uvular counterpart, leading to its variable pronunciation. The trill /r/ has the allophone /ɹ/, considerably more common among younger speakers. Phonemically, the approximants /w/ and /j/ are not short variants of /u/ and /i/, they are instead considered full consonants, occurring most commonly in clusters in word roots.

Phonotactics
The maximum syllable structure for roots is (C)(C)V(C)(C), where C is any consonant and V the nuclear vowel. Final consonant clusters are considerably more common than initial ones, and in most cases consonant clusters in roots involve any consonant plus an approximant /w/ or /j/. Note that approximants cannot occur both preceding and succeeding a vowel, they are exclusive with each other. Across syllable boundaries, geminate consonants are not allowed, an epenthetic vowel is therefore inserted based on surrounding conditions. Clusters of two plosives are in this way idsallowed. However, clusters of fricatives, nasals, sibilants or approximants and plosives are allowed, although the length of the cluster may not exceed two consonants in a row. Nasals are permitted to be the nucleus of a syllable, however this may only happen outside of roots. /χ/ is frequently lenited to /h/ preceding the uvular plosive /q/ by dissimilation. The glottal stop /ʔ/ occurs naturally at the beginning of words starting with a vowel, thus it is not written in those positions. It is, however, a contrastive consonant word-medially and word-finally.

Grammar
Lashagah is a highly grammatically complex language, featuring a high degree of synthesis, where many small word components, without meaning on their own, so-called morphemes, combine together with various roots and stems to have a correct grammatical sense. An effect of this is that words can be translated from Lashagah as full sentences in other languages, where many small components in Lashagah influence the meaning in different ways. An example of this is the Lashagah word:

ru·hu·naka·kupsašakjup·an

"I heard that they therefore couldn’t continue showing you the bear."

Lashagah words can be divided into three main categories: verbs, nouns and adverbs. Pronouns are usually written as part of the verb, though they may be added separately and explicitly for emphasis.

Verbs
Verbs in Lashagah feature and. Verbs mark for all persons, animacy, number and obviaton, and have 5 levels of. Nouns can be incorporated as direct objects, as a way of removing focus from the noun in question. Transitivity is marked on the verb through the use of a theme suffix, which can sometimes also be inferred to be a third-person singular animate proximate personal argument, as that person goes without an explicit person marker, while theme markers are required on all verbs.

An interesting feature of Lashagan verbs is that causatives are not a valency-increasing operation, rather, an increase in valency one above what would be considered a logical sense, creates a causative. This leads to the use of a tritransitive affix for quadrivalent personal agreement, a feature that is quite uncommon cross-linguistically.

Person
Person is marked on verbs in slots, though the personal markers do not change to show action or to describe how the action was carried out, rather, it is the position on the verb in which they are placed that determines their function. As such, there are no pure slots for subjects or objects, only up to four slots in relation to their integrity to the verb. The subject invariably fills the first personal slot, as Lashagah is unusual for a Sitouatian language to not feature a. The roles of the other slots are more flexible, depending on things like voicing and causatives. Personal arguments that attach to verbs in Lashagah can be described as clipped or shortened versions of the full emphatic pronouns.

[1]1st and 2nd person arguments are always animate.

Tense-aspect-mood
In addition, Lashagah verbs also exhibit a complex (TAM) system, marking verbs with various aspects, moods, voices, tenses and evidentials. The base around which the TAM markers are placed is the tense marker, which is either a vowel, or unmarked, in the case of a present tense, where phonotactically allowed. If phonotactics demand a vowel in the tense slot, the present tense takes the form -u-. The past tense always takes the form -a-, and the future always -i-.

Lashagah has three, the standard active voice, which is unmarked, the passive voice, marked with the affix -u- or -w-, depending on the environment, and a middle voice, marked -a-. Both the passive and middle voices are valency-reducing voices, meaning that they reduce the transitivity of a verb. It is still possible, however to have multiple personal arguments on a passive voiced verb. Middle voiced verbs, however take only one personal argument. They are not a description of a whole action, rather just a statement without movement, in Lashagan grammar. Where aspects describe more how the action happens, moods describe an attitude towards an action, and Lashagah counts 8 distinct ones.

The final element of Lashagan TAM marking is evidentiality, which is linguistically an extension of mood, but is marked separately on Lashagah verbs. There are two types of evidentiality in Lashagah, experiential, meaning the speaker experienced it firsthand, as in, Iwa a·mušakjiz, "I saw a mouse", where the experiential portion is unmarked. An example contrary to this would be Iwa ak·mušakjup, "I heard that you saw a mouse". Anything that is not experiential can be optionally marked as reportative, which indicates that the speaker did not directly experience it, but figured it out in some other way. The affix for marking reportative evidentiality is therefore -k-, and is used only in the past tense.

Degree
The final element of a verb in Lashagah is the degree, which also includes negation of that verb. There are many elements that make up the degree system in Lashagah, and can combine together in many different ways.

In addition, there are several final suffixes that attach to the ends of verbs, to indicate their relevance to each other, in both coordinate and subordinate senses. Note that only one verb receives the final suffix, which is enough to assume the context of the other.

The total verb structure could be described thus:

Nouns
Nouns in Lashagah belong to one of two genders, animate or inanimate. Occasionally, nouns are incorporated into the verb, however this is not always necessary nor appropriate. Nouns in a sentence can also be marked for, which is used to distinguish between two noun arguments on a verb of the same gender and number. If such a case arises, a noun in that clause must be marked as obviate, while the rest are proximate. The obviate noun is chosen to be the least important, and is therefore a marking of anti-topicality. It is glossed as a "4th" person on verbs.

Gender, number, obviation and possession
Possession of a noun is marked before the root, using a set of prefixes very similar to the person arguments used on verbs, both being derived from the emphatic pronouns.

Oblique forms and conjunctions
Nouns in Lashagah can take a variety of oblique suffixes, which may contain information such as a positional case or other morphological forms. In many other Sitouatian languages, the generic and pejorative have merged, though Lashagah keeps them distinct. In this way, the generic and pejorative forms are linguistically two forms of pejorative, although the true pejorative has a specific negative connotation.

Like verbs, nouns can be connected together with coordinators, in this case -ah for a conjunct "... and ...", -(x)i for a disjunct "... but ...", and -hu for an adverse "... or ...". Akin to verbs the coordinators need not be attached to multiple nouns, the sense can be inferred from context.

Orthography
Lashagah is written today using a single standard system: an alphabet using a modified set of Agrestic characters, though it was previously common to write Lashagah with an abugida syllabary similar to those used for other languages native to northern and central Cornelia. The syllabary was the preferred system until technological limitations on printing these characters and typing them with typewriters essentially forced a shift to the Agrestic system for ease of use.

Agrestic script
The Agrestic-based script used for Lashagah is a true, meaning that one character represents only one phoneme. Šš, the only character that is not standard in many typefaces and keyboards, is sometimes written as S's' or S/s/ if Šš is not available. Grammatically separate parts of words are often separated graphically with a centre dot, ·, as in Zp·yur, "our land", broken down morphemically as |1PL.INC.POSS-land|. The possessor and the root are separated therefore with the centre dot.

Syllabary
The syllabary with which Lashagah was traditionally written is one where a base form is implied, in this system the form of the consonant plus the vowel /a/, and then this form is rotated to give syllables that are a combination of the base consonant and another vowel. An exception to this rule is the sounds /q/, /ʔ/, /w/ and /h/, which are characters that cannot be combined with a vowel. At the end of a syllable or as part of a consonant cluster not preceding a vowel, characters are written superscript in their a-rotation pattern, also called their "radical". As with the Agrestic script, the syllabary also separated grammatically distinct components of words with punctuation, although in this case the colon.