Yuktepat

This is an abridgment of my more comprehensive grammar on my hard drive. As I work through editing my general grammar, filling out the patchy spots, I will be adding new sections to this page, section by section - hopefully every week, although knowing myself, it probably won't be.

Background

Tepat

Tiptum, the continent on which Tepat sits, is the easternmost and second largest continent on the planet. The continent as a whole stretches from the tropics to the polar regions. The lifeline of Tepat is the great river valley cutting diagonally through its center. The two major rivers of the north, the Pemet and Phitim, merge in the center of the country at Xhangtyel, the 'Meeting of Waters,' to form the Yot Klun, 'Wide River.' The Klun is also Tyel Kyet or Yot Kyet, possibly meaning 'Braided River' and referring to the fact that the waters of the two rivers are ‘twisted’ together here - or that the lower reaches of the river, winding and surrounded by oxbow lakes, resemble braided hair. Further northeast, the Salpit River flows into the Phitim. Tepat claims all land south of 37 degrees latitude, as well as land within 50 km on either side of the Pemet, Lower Phitim, and Salpit rivers not otherwise within that range. In the east, the Xhop river forms the boundary between Tepat and Notoq.

Different regions of Tepat have different seasonal patterns of precipitation. The eastern part, with a humid subtropical climate, gets precipitation mainly in the summer in the form of thunderstorms, with less in winter. The western regions with more Mediterranean climates have dry summers with rain in the winter. In the middle of Tepat where the two climate zones transition, there is a zone with two annual peaks in precipitation, in the summer, and the winter. By coincidence, this area corresponds largely to the drainage basin of the Klun River. The availability of so much water year-round made it ideal for agriculture and transport, however, floods were also a risk. The eastern branch of the upper part of the Phitim River, through which most of the country’s thunderstorms and tornadoes pass, was known as the Winds’ Road, or Khat i-Xyul.

Above: Map of Tepat, in the central region of Tiptum - the area where Yuk Tepat is spoken

Familial Relationship

Yuktepat is in a relationship with around 20 other languages.

It is a member of an important language family, known as the Macro-Tepatic family, naturally, which covered the majority of the middle latitudes of Tiptum. The most closely-related one is Yuk Notoq. Notoqic is very similar but more conservative; in the feudal age of Tepat, they are nearly indistinguishable, and Yuk Notoq has remained in that mold. Notoq inherited the same basic writing system, and the languages were easily legible to each other before the Great Script Reform. Outside of Yuknotoq, Yuktepat’s closest relative is Yuh Rolov, the former majority language of the Qolup Autonomous Region, followed by Teenotkutsu on the eastern coast (a captive of the East Coast City States Sprachbund). The existence of other closely related languages is implied, by surviving place names and personal names, and references to other nations in Tepatic historical records. It has been speculated that, in the shadows of remote and rugged mountains, certain languages persist undercover, regarded as divergent dialects of Yuk Tepat.

History

Yuktepat is often broadly divided into Conciliar, Pre-Conciliar, and Post-Conciliar Yuktepat, which may also be called Classical, Old, and New Yuktepat. Pre-Conciliar Yuktepat stretches from the earliest written sources into the unified era of Qom. Conciliar Yuktepat is dated from the year of the Great Script Reform. New Yuktepat begins after the Swira Invasion and the disintegration of the Conciliarity, as local dialects begin to take on a life of their own. Archaic Yuktepat is also sometimes used to refer to a variety of the language predating true written records. This page focuses on written Classical Yuktepat; when I refer to the spoken language, I am generally referring to how it was spoken in the capital.

The Script Reform, which marked the beginning of Classical Yuktepat, also marked the beginning of traditional Tepatic linguistics. Intellectuals believed the standard language was a force for progress, and naturally, linguistics was used as a tool for this, making it very prescriptive. Tepatic linguistic philosophy was greatly concerned with proper order. It was taken for granted that in different dialects a glyph would have different pronunciations, but they were quite picky about how things were written and in what order. Because of this, and the analytic nature of the language, traditional linguistics was almost exclusively about syntax and semantics. Pontification on the details and implications of grammar also influenced the development of logic and philosophy.

Characteristics

What kind of language is Yuk Tepat? Some of the salient and / or interesting characteristics:

Logographic writing - Almost every morpheme has a unique symbol - usually with two parts, a semantic element and a phonetic one - made by combining a set of several hundred ‘radicals.’
Self-segregating - almost. Most words are CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant). Function words are mostly CV (if they come at the beginning of phrases) or VC (if they come at the end). This means that most consonant clusters occur at word and phrase boundaries, so many sentences can be parsed by sound alone.
Monosyllabicity - morphemes are one syllable. In the ancient language words are also mostly one syllable / morpheme, but the number of compound words has grown massively
Head-Modifier - Yuk Tepat has strict word order, and that order is consistently head-first, modifier second: Nouns come before adjectives and relative clauses; possessors come after possessed items; sentences overall are SVO. Word order is the same in questions; question words do not move to the front of the sentence.
Analytical / Isolating - Yuk Tepat has little morphology; almost none of it would be considered inflectional.

The main way of forming new words is compounding.
Words do not change to mark case, gender, number, tense, mood, voice, etc. Most words are invariable in form, no matter how they are used, or where.
Word order, with some relational words, is the main way of indicating the relationship between words.
There is no distinctive form for ‘nouns,’ ‘verbs,’ etc. Words can change part of speech without changing form, simply by changing position. Similarly, verbs can alternate between transitive and intransitive simply by adding or dropping arguments.

Dependent-marking - when marking occurs at all, it’s usually on dependents (but, check the archaic pronominal suffixes).
Two-argument limit - Verbs have at least one argument, and at most two. Complex situations with multiple arguments in English require tacking on additional verbs for each added argument, which leads to long chains of verbs. This also means there are no subject-less verbs, which leads to…
Non-pro-drop - in subjects at least. Every sentence has an explicit subject, including commands. Objects, however, can be omitted and inferred from context.
Alignment is nominative-accusative, indicated through word order; for “experiential” verbs though it tends to make the experiencer the OBJECT and the stimulus the SUBJECT.
Negation is treated similarly to counting with numbers. There are also some suppletive negative verbs.
The reference system in pronouns and third person nominals operates on what I’d call an “early bird” basis, where participants get assigned to pronouns based primarily on the order in which they appear in discourse.

Turning to the typological categories that were in style in their own world, Yuk Tepat was also described as

“Linear,” meaning that words had a strict order within the sentence, and also incorporating the 2-arguments-only, one on each side; opposed to “radial” languages, such as Arajan, where the verb was conceived of as the hub of a sentence-wheel, with multiple arguments emanating from it, and variable word order
“Relativist,” meaning that words derived their role solely from their position relative to other words; opposed to “absolutist” languages where words had inherent categories that were evident on the form of the word.

Phonology

Yuk Tepat distinguished aspirated and unaspirated stops (and affricates), and also had fricatives, nasals, a lateral, and semivowels, with consonants at six points of articulation - labial, alveolar, palatal, velar, uvular, and glottal.

Behold, the consonants of Yuk Tepat, with their usual ‹way of transcribing›, their /phonemic representation/, and other [phonetic variations].

	Labial	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Uvular	Glottal
plain stop	‹p› /p/	‹t› /t/ [t~ɾ]		‹k› /k/ [k~q~c]	‹q› /q/ [q~k~c~ʔ]	(‹q› /ʔ/)*
aspirated stop	‹ph› /pʰ/	‹th› /tʰ/		‹kh› /kʰ/ [kʰ~cʰ]	(‹qh› /qʰ/ [qʰ~q͡χ])*
plain affricate		‹c› /ts/ [ts~tɕ]
aspirated affricate		‹ch› /tsʰ/ [tsʰ~tɕʰ]
fricative		‹s› /s/ [s~ɕ]		‹x› /x/ [x~ç]	‹xh› /χ/	‹h› /h/ [h~ç~ɸ]
nasal	‹m› /m/	‹n› /n/		‹ng› /ŋ/ [ŋ~ɡ~ɲ~ɴ]
lateral		‹l› /l/ [l~ɮ~ɬ]
glide	‹w› /w/ [w~ʋ~β~ʍ~ɸ]		‹y› /j/ [j~ʝ]

*In the capital dialect, the glottal stop only occurs at the end of syllables, and /q/ only occurs at the beginning, becoming [ʔ] elsewhere; hence they are regarded as the same phoneme. Contemporaneously, some dialects also have /qʰ ʔ/.

Now also, behold the vowels:

	front	central / back unrounded	back rounded
high	‹i› /i/	‹û› /ɯ/ [ɯ ~ ɨ]	‹u› /u/
mid		‹ô› /ʌ/ [ʌ ~ ǝ]
low	‹e› /ɛ/	‹a› /a/	‹o› /ɔ/

The central vowels [ɨ ǝ], which only occur in "weak" syllables, are considered variants of the two circumflexed, non-low back unrounded vowels, and spelt as such. The vowels /ɛ ɔ/, while technically being about the same vowel height as /ʌ/, are considered "low" for phonological reasons, because they act more like /a/ than /ʌ/.

Syllable structure of Yuk Tepat

C1(G)V(C2)

hence

CV
CVC
CGV
CGVC

...are all possible with CVC being most common. C1 can be almost any consonant; G is the sonorants /l j w/; C2 is only plain stops, nasals, and /l j w/. There is an additional constraint that, with few exceptions, C1 =/= C2.

A few other restrictions apply; for example, /i/ cannot occur with /j/, or /u/ with /w/, and front vowels /i e/ cannot occur next to uvular consonants.

Traditional Tepatic grammar divides syllables (and morphemes, which are one syllable) into 2 types:

Qak (strong, bold) syllables have C(G)VC shape, contain any of the vowels, and mostly correspondent to ‘content words.’ They receive a ‘beat’ in prosody.
Hûk (weak, pale) syllables are either CV or VC, contain only the unstresed vowels /i u ɨ ǝ/, and are function morphemes. They do not receive a ‘beat.’ CV is used for prefixes and proclitics, and VC is used for suffixes and enclitics.

Yuktepat has distinct patterns for monosyllables and bisyllables, and content and function words / morphemes. Content words are considered qak syllables and typically follow a CVC pattern, with restrictions on repeat consonants. Function words / morphemes are traditionally considered hûk, and of the form V, VC, V - typically CV when prefixes or proclitics, and VC when suffixes or enclitics.

Because of all this, words and phrases typically both begin and end in consonants, and since initial consonant clusters are very restricted and certain clusters only occur across morpheme boundaries, syllable and morpheme boundaries largely coincide, so Yuk Tepat has an almost self-segregating morphology: it is generally possible to tell where morpheme boundaries occur based on the phonological shape of the phrase. Tepatites are very proud of their orderly, logical language.

Lexicon

Man v. Nature

Yuktepat frequently distinguishes words for people and animals. There are many special words for things relating to humans. For example, although the common word for ‘bare, naked’ is lak, there is a special word, tam, for the naked human body as a whole. Beyond body parts, the human / non-human distinction is made in a number of other words, including verbs.

xhat ‘tooth’ v. qom ‘fang’
nwet ‘nail’ v. syûl ‘claw’
khal ‘human head’ v. sûq ‘animal head’
hk 'eat' v. thyup ‘feed’
tlup ‘corpse’ v. sot ‘carcass’
... 'walk (two legs)' v. ... 'walk (four legs)'

In many cases, the animal-related term is more general, corresponding to several human-related words that make finer distinctions. Some of the animal terms are very broad, extended even to plants.

tey ‘hand,’ sin ‘arm,’ noq ‘leg,’ swot ‘foot’ v. paw ‘paw’
lyat ‘skin’ v. kil ‘(animal) hide, (tree) bark, (fruit) peel’

Words for kinds of animals and plants are often very broad. They may conflate species distinct to other culture, and require various qualifiers to distinguish more finely.

kling ‘goat, sheep’
- straight sheep = goat, curly goat = sheep
cup = slug
- cup lak ‘naked snail’ = slug, cup kon ‘shell slug’ = snail
slin ‘eagle, falcon, hawk’
yet, ‘lizard, reptile or amphibian in general’
- yet kon ‘shell lizard’ = turtle, yet loy (slimy lizard) = salamander, yet loy mi swel (tailless slimy lizard) = frog, yet tluq (dry lizard) = terrestrial four legged reptile - lizard, yet tluq mi swel (tailless dry lizard) = toad

Color Terms

Like many complex societies, Yuktepat makes a plethora of color distinctions, including special terms for ‘light red (pink)’ and ‘light blue.’ Reflecting Tepat’s extreme anthropocentrism again, ‘tan’ or ‘flesh’ color, the color of human (or at least Tepatic) skin, is a basic color term in Yuktepat.

Kinship Terms

Kinship terms are unique in that they can be possessed by a bare noun, without requiring the possessive particle i. Thus, xap wat “my father” (as well as xap i wat), xum kyat “your mother." Kinship terms also sometimes occur with possessive suffixes, which otherwise almost never occur on nouns in the modern language.

Writing System

Tepat's writing system is logographic, resembling Chinese characters. Typically each glyph represents one one-syllable-morpheme-word. Most morphemes have a unique graphic sign. This means there are thousands of signs, although most of these are compound signs, and can be analyzed into a smaller number of several hundred 'basic' signs. The majority of signs contain at least two smaller signs, or radicals, usually one being a 'semantic' part, and the other being a 'phonetic' part. Glyphs, regardless of whether they are simple or very complex, are written so as to fit inside the same 'block' shape and space. The component parts of complex glyphs are squished or wrapped around each other so they all fit in the block together. This has led most basic signs to develop several different graphic variants used when combining with other signs.

Glyphs and Parts:

Parts of Glyphs

Kinds of Glyphs

The components of complex glyphs include bases, reversals, operators.
Glyphs are categorized into Simple, Doubled, Modified, and Composite.
Bases (Mut) are simple, basic signs. Most are written with a single brush stroke (often turning or bending to form various shapes, but still a long cursive stroke). Most evolved from pictograms or iconic representations. Some are "borrowed," originating as graphic representations of different but similar-sounding words, and some have obscure origins.
Reversals (Mut hûng) are variants created by rotating or flipping bases, often with opposite meanings.
Composite glyphs are formed by combining two or more base glyphs, which in this context are called 'radicals' or 'determiners.' The majority of these are sound-meaning (phonosemantic) compounds: one of the parts (vaguely) gives a clue as to the meaning of the overall glyph, and one part (vaguely) gives a clue as to the pronunciation of the overall glyph.
Twin glyphs (Klût xil) or Doubled Glyphs consist of repetitions of the same base glyph. These may indicate plurality, repetition, or intensification of the meaning of the original glyph - however, some base glyphs, such as yong "water" are commonly written in duplicate form whenever they are not combined with another base to form a complex glyph. Twin glyphs also include a glyph combined with its own reversal, which may indicate an overall or two-way process.
Modified glyphs are formed by adding an operator to a base.
Note that a base combined with itself, a modifier, or even another base can still be used recursively as a building block for another character, so that glyphs can become very complex.

Categorization and Indexing

...or, "How does one actually make a dictionary of all this?"

The cheating, Doylean answer is that in my own lexicon, they are ordered by their phonetic form, this form is Romanized, and everything goes in Roman alphabet order.

In-world.

The ordering of radicals is largely conventional, although some patterns emerge.

Radicals are grouped into semantic categories derived from pictograms.
Categories include people, body, animals, plants, nature, clothing, containers, food, war, music, buildings, and more.
Within categories, glyphs are conventionally ordered, with simpler-looking glyphs often preferred.
Human body and nature categories follow a top-bottom approach.
Nature glyphs are arranged by altitude, animal glyphs by civilization level, and animal body parts from nose to tail.
Reversals and doubling are not considered separate glyphs but instances of the base glyph within their entry.

There are phonetic transcriptions and phonetic-lookup indexes, but these are generally used in Tepat as appendices to dictionaries, rather than the basis of the dictionay itself.