#ConlangApril 21

Messuk has two superstrata, Arhenese and Caolsuq, contributing 80% and 20% of the lexicon, respectively. Its substrata are the indigenous languages of West Canyon. These influenced Messuk grammar and phonetic patterns. Creolization has simplified some grammar systems as well.

full gloss:

Malajosotà qo pàttarekin

flavor-experiment-1sgABS like bread.ABS-cooked_cheese.COM

“I play with flavors like bread cooked with cheese”

rough syntax:
[with flavors-OBL] [play] [I-ABS]
[like [bread-ABS [cooked [cheese-COM]]]]

#ConlangApril 21:
Messuk speaking lands have a really rigorous kitchen culture. Many chefs in the Castlelands are Messuk or trained in West Canyon. The affix -in means “cooked with”, from the Arhenese case -in “with”

Malajosotà qo pàttarekin

“I play with flavors like bread cooked with cheese”

#ConlangApril 20: Messuk conversational words. Messuk is very verb-heavy, so these words are verbs unlike English’s interjections.

Lumehime [lumɪ̯ɯɣimɪ̯ɯ] - hello, or really, “I greet you”

Kahhana [kaɣːana] - goodbye, “stay well”

Kalihime [kaliɣimɪ̯ɯ] - sorry, “I make peace with you”

Sociolinguistically, Messuk is seen as being inherently informal. Most speakers are low-class, rural workers under a monarchy. Arhenese is the prestige language. Speaking Messuk is seen as being uneducated, or if you speak it proudly, revolutionary. Speaking Messuk breaks social cohesion (final)

Messuk mirrors this as well. It has a T-V formality distinction in pronouns: si (formal 2nd) and hi (informal). However, both would still be seen as improper Arhenese by speakers: Tse (2nd - Arhenese). The formality distinction would be lost because they would see them both as a mispronounciation.

Pidgin, or ʻōlelo paʻi ʻai, a creole of Hawaii, is a real-life example of this. It is continuously seen as ‘broken English,’ yet it’s a living mix of Hawaiian, English, Cantonese, and Portuguese. It even has variants; however, they are also written off as broken English.

#conlangapril18

In world, Messuk is seen as the working-class form of Arhenese. It is spoken in rural areas, so it is seen as a ‘poor man’s dialect’ when in reality it is a distinct language and a creole. This mirrors real-life prejudice against creoles as being bastard forms of English 🧵1/4 🧵

the example is an infinitival clause but -jen is used for both i just didn’t have a dependent clause prewritten

#conlangapril 17.
Messuk has a coreferentiality affix (-jen) that connects clauses + verbal moods to cover “because, if, while, begin to, narrowly finished”, etc.

eg. matàppijjenitanaraq
“I will walk then begin to eat”

Time can b pretty unstable in the world, so two events are grouped as one.

#conlangapril 16 Questions in Messuk are SVO. Polar questions use the participle -na & wh-questions use: siq “where”, rijo “what / who” & moofaang “when.”

Anticausitive verbs (when the subject is also the patient | eg: break, fall) can’t be used in questions; they are fixed by being made reflexive

Also, this is prosody and different than tone sandhi because the terracing and plateau is a result of the initial stressed syllable carrying the highest pitch and subsequently lowering the other tones.

#conlangapril 15

Like all natural languages with tones, Messuk has prosodic downdrift. It also has initial stress, so much of my work with prosody is the interactions between stress placement, phonemic tone, and downdrift/plateau.

#ConlangApril 13

Messuk is VSO, and it’s a language universal in VSOs for the noun to precede adjectives. As of now, its strictly VSO — though verbs with incorporated objects can appear to be OVS, the “object” is actually part of the verb and doesn’t have a syntactic position anymore.

fuck the examples are switched 😢 flip them mentally

I can justify this in a creole too, I imagine this system forming from one substratum having austronesian alignment and the other a simple erg-abs. contact simplified and reduced both alignments (as typical of a contact language) until they fit nicely into a co-system.

#ConlangApril 11

Messuk has a standard alignment of ergative-absolutive. It uses two contrasting tones: high and low to mark it [see image]

However, in the participial voice (X is VERB’ing) it is instead a hierarchy in which agent is decided by animacy & saliency. 1 > 2 > 3 animate > 3 inanimate

#ConlangApril 10

Messuk is agglutinative with most of the defining features of polysynthesis: polypersonal agreement (verb must agree w/ both subject and object) & noun incorporation (verb forms a compound w/ the object). Words w/ suprafixes (tones acting as an affix) can border on fusional.

#ConlangApril 9

I kept Messuk’s allophonic variation low. All allophones occur word finally. Plosives always become fricatives, unless they go through assimilation when a consonant follows (clusters aren’t allowed), where the replacing consonant retains it’s value and instead lengthens.

AFAIK /s/ epenthesis in vowel hiatus is attested in exactly one language irl, but I can’t remember the language. looked through my textbooks but I can’t find it.

#ConlangApril 8

Messuk is (C)V(C) in monosyllablic and (C)V(Cː)V(C) in multisyllabic words. In the case of CVVC occuring, there is an epenthetic (interrupting) /s/ added between the vowels. Eg. maat -> /masat/. Consonants are realized differently in the word final position. eg. /k/ -> [ç]

#ConlangApril 7
Sòjipan [siœ˨jipan]
“Fog,” also meaning “Steam”
water.ABS=to_smoke

#ConlangApril 6
Messuk uses a syllabary called Pasanafi I created based on Ogham, a medieval Irish alphabet and Gomgwejui'gasit, Mi’kmaw hieroglyphics. Every “letter” is an entire syllable or mora

Messuk vowels used to be /i a u ɯ œ/; however, /ɯ œ/ were too unstable (lack of symmetry) and collapsed: /œ/ -> /iː/ -> /i/ and /ɯ/ -> /uː/ -> /u/. The remains only survive in diphthongs. There are also two tones: high and low 3/3

All consonants can be geminated, when called repaired geminate, is mandatory when two consonants meet and the primary one is lost (eg ap + qa -> aqːa), sans laterals and rhotics, which instead take murmured voice (eg ap + la -> alʱa). Allophonically, this can happen after low tones also. 2/3

#ConlangApril 5:

Up so i’ll do this early ig. Messuk has 22 distinct consonant phonemes with phonemic contrast between plain, pharangealized and palatized nasals & fricatives. No voicing in plosives, but plosives have a fricative form through spirantization /p t k q -> v ð ɣ ʁ/ 1/3 🧵

#ConlangApril 4
I see a priori and a posteriori as a continuum, not in black & white. Messuk is in the middle. Lexically and at times, grammatically, it is a priori. However, I created it with influence from and to be visually recognizable as a sort of in-world form of greenlandic. see graphic below

#ConlangApril 3

As a creole, Messuk
isn’t in a language family. However, both its substrata are in the West Canyon family, in the West Canyon sprachraum, so it retains genetic and social ties to a larger family. There are three dialects across the colonies; the one I focus on is the basilect

bass fish

pelican with a blue beek

April #promosky 🌧️

lets be moots if you like:
☂️ photography
⛈️ linguistics
🌈 language learning
💧 writing & worldbuilding
☕️ chemistry
🦩 sea life & the ocean (i’m always there)
🐸 dnd & the elder scrolls

2/2 This history influenced even the name. Messuk is word meaning “jabber, to talk nonsense”

a corruption from Mes “to be clear” + -Suq “to not” -> “to not be clear”