Darezh 国語, or my pathetic attempt at monosyllabic roots

[Alessio]

This isn't my first post about Darezh, but my previous one is a few years old and I've greatly updated the language over this time, so I felt like making a new one wouldn't be a bad idea.
Darezh is a language based on one simple concept: all of its core roots are entirely monosyllabic. By "root" I actually mean way more than that: the core lexicon, the case and number endings, the verb inflections (tense, mood, aspect...), whatever could be trated as one single thing is represented by one single syllable.
These syllables are then merged together to form actual words. This means that most of the lexicon shows a high degree of agglutination, and many not-so-uncommon words might be 4 syllable long. Take, for example, the word for "programmer", rakgozjactous 数計具人. It can be analyzed as follows: computer + person -> (count + instrument) + person -> ((number + measure) + instrument) + person.

By now you should have noticed that Darezh uses Kanji as its writing system. I thought it would be fun, since I find Kanji visually pleasant and the language uses a single syllable for every root anyways, which is practically begging for logograms. I wanted to create actual pictograms at first, but it would have been a real pain to write with characters that aren't even in the Unicode listing, so I "recycled" the Japanese Kanji.

The way I derive the Kanji for a certain syllable is mainly trying to find a character that is used in Japanese with the same meaning, or at least with a meaning that is quite similar and/or connected to the Darezh one in some way. Since Darezh words usually use more characters than their Japanese counterpart, it is not uncommon for "easy" Kanji to be used for something slightly different from their original meaning; for example, the Kanji I use for the genitive case ending -re is 父, that means "father" in Japanese. This isn't a problem since "father" is rendered as "generating man" in Darezh, and therefore uses two Kanji rather than just one.

Now, let's dive a bit deeper into the language. This is the phonetic inventory of Darezh:

Code: Select all

CONSONANTS
NAS /m n ɲ/			<m n nh>
PLO /p b t d c ɟ k g q ɢ/	<p b t d c x k g q ğ>
FRI /f v θ ð s z ʃ ʒ x ɣ χ ʁ/	<f v th dh s z sh zh kh gh qh ğh>
LIQ /l ʎ r r̝/			<l lh r rh>
APP /j w/			<j w>

VOWELS
/ɪ ʏ ʊ/	<i y u>
/ε œ ɔ/	<e œ o>
/ɐ/	<a>

/iː yː uː/	<ī ȳ ū>
/eː øː oː/	<ē ø ō>
/aː/		<ā>

DIPHTHONGS
/ai au/	<ai au>
/ei eu/	<ei eu>
/oi ou/	<oi ou>
/ui/	<ui>
/øy/	<øy>

Since Darezh allows for any (C)V(C) syllable, where C is any consonant except /j w/ and V is any vowel or diphthong, I calculated that there are in total 14.906 syllables one could use for the core lexicon, excluding the single vowels and the diphthongs that are mostly "reserved" (i.e. can not be used for nouns, adjectives, verbs or adverbs). /j w/ are also not counted because they are used to phonetically separate consecutive syllables when the former ends in a consonant and the latter begins with a vowel; /j/ is used before unrounded vowels and /w/ before rounded vowels.

Darezh nouns inflect by case and number. Darezh uses as many as 28 cases: nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, instrumental, vocative, comitative, benefactive, causal, final, locative, lative, ablative, inessive, illative, elative, adessive, allative, delative, subessive, sublative, emersive (a term I created for a case that means "from under"), prolative (motion across/along), perlative (motion through), temporal essive, temporal continuative, temporal ablative ("from" a point in time) and temporal accusative ("up to" a point in time). All these cases are only suffixes and their usage is quite clear from their names; the very few prepositions that do exist in Darezh take the nominative, effectively eliminating all difficulty in the usage of cases except the need to memorize the actual endings.

Darezh uses 5 numbers: singular, dual singulative, dual collective, plural singulative and plural collective. The collective version of such numbers is used when a group of entities has to be seen as one single agent, as in "the Avengers eliminated Thanos" (not every single one of them eliminated Thanos separately; they all acted together to do it) vs. "the children went home" (they all went to their own home, separately).

Another interesting characteristic of Darezh is the prefix ir-, spelled 脱, a Kanji that means "undress, removing, escape from" according to Jisho.org. The "escape from" part is the one that I focused on, since this character is meant as an "escape sequence": whatever comes after it, up to the next space or punctuation mark (or an apostrophe, inserted before any further ending), is not to be treated as an actual Darezh word, and its syllables have to be read exclusively in a phonetic way.
For example, I spell my home town of San Vito, Italy, as 脱圣且動 irSanVito, with syllables for "san", "vi" and "tō". While "san", by pure coincidence (or maybe not), means the same thing as "San" in "San Vito", the others do not: "vi" means "also, as well", and "tō" is the infinitive mood ending. Of course, San Vito does not mean "to saint, too", and it would be very silly to actually hear this in a sentence. 脱 thus makes it clear that one should disregard the actual meaning of the syllables.

Finally, there is one more featuer that I like in Darezh and would like to share with you: the main relative pronoun is actually a couple of words, one of which is used to mark which noun exactly the other one stands for. Those pronouns are "po" and "il" respectively. For example, "the person who eats" is rendered as "po tous il lȳri", or 記·人·付·食為 (it is customary in Darezh to separate words with a dot · instead of a space).

I'll paste a sentence in Darezh below. It would be cool if some Japanese speaker could try to figure out its meaning by drawing it from the Kanji I've used, although for some of them it would really be a stretch. But hey, it's just a game!

良面的·日頃的! 私父·名具·脱私登們牠(Alessio)·有為. 私·伊点·命場為, 記·否大面点·市点·付父·名具·脱圣且動(SanVito)·有為. 今晌迄·私父·命頃·二十四·六頃団·紀計為. 私·数計具人·有為, 尚·私父·命源場·脱記思的私(Bologna)’点·処有為.

Transcription:

Levnani nuqtibni! Are mīsjac irAlessio seri. A vokhbe shuburri, po thȳzhonabe melbe ilre mīsjac irSanVito seri. Zhiolğho are shutib zamdelnūv saqtibci rongozri. A rakgozjactous seri, ui are shufasbur irPolumnia'be urseri.

[Pabappa]

I like the idea of using kanji as a script. The language looks good, though I question just one thing.... the ir- prefix seems unnatural. All languages have some means of indicating proper names, quoted speech, etc .... but I dont know of any one that requires such words to take a marker that must be pronounced out loud.

I do the collective/separate distinction with noun plurals in Poswa, though I have come to realize it wasn't my smartest decision. It's perfectly naturalistic and workable, but I find over and over again that it would be far more convenient to mark the distinction on the verb instead.

[Sequor]

Finally, there is one more featuer that I like in Darezh and would like to share with you: the main relative pronoun is actually a couple of words, one of which is used to mark which noun exactly the other one stands for. Those pronouns are "po" and "il" respectively. For example, "the person who eats" is rendered as "po tous il lȳri", or 記·人·付·食為 (it is customary in Darezh to separate words with a dot · instead of a space).

I take it that's perhaps inspired from old Indo-European, since Sanskrit, Ancient Greek and Latin do something like that?

Is homō mē vocāvit quī edit in plateā.
that.SG.NOM man.NOM 1S.ACC called.3S who.SG.NOM eat.3S in street.ABL
'The man eating (there) on the street called me.'

The construction "is...quī..." is like your "記·...·付·..." po...il...