Zjugo

Zjugo
Pronunciation	[ˈʑɯ.gɤ̞]
Language family	Paleo-Hlabiglan
Early form(s)	Zjiogeo
Era	today
Writing system	Latin alphabet, Zjugohai
Official status
Spoken in	Hiso Zju'a
Speaker
Endonym	Zjugo (in Zjugo) Zjuan (in English)
Technical information
Language code	ZG

Zjuan /ˈʒuw.ən/ (ZG Zjugo /ˈʑɯ.gɤ̞/) is a Paleo-Hlambiglan language spoken in Hiso Zju'a. It is one of the three languages spoken there, each belonging primarily to one of the three most represented ethnicities residing there. Zjugo belongs to the [unnamed] group, native to Zju'an land and is the only language in Zju'a, which doesn't have a major speaking population anywhere else.

Phonology

Consonants

Zjugo's consonants feature a full voicing distinction in all plosives and fricatives except for the velar fricatives. They also include a palatalization distinction for all plosives and fricatives and alveolar/palatal nasal consonants. Especially in recent times, labial and velar palatalized consonants are often articulated as consonant clusters with the palatal approximant.

		labial		alveolar	palatal	velar		glottal
		plain	palatalized			plain	palatalized
nasal		m		n	ɲ
plosive	unvoiced	p	pʲ	t	t͡ɕ	k	kʲ
	voiced	b	bʲ	d	d͡ʑ	g	gʲ
fricative	unvoiced	f	fʲ	s	ɕ	x	xʲ	(h)
	voiced	v	vʲ	z	ʑ
trill/approximant		w		r~ɾ	j
lateral				l

Vowels

Zjugo features a simple five vowel system. Main things to note is the lack of an open central vowel, as it is being replaced instead with the near-open front unrounded vowel, and the lack of rounding.

	front	back
close	i	ɯ
mid	e̞	ɤ̞
open	æ

Diphthongs

Any vowel in Zjugo except /i/ and /ɯ/ may appear as the first vowel in a diphthong followed by /i/ (frequently articulated as [ɪ] when appearing like this).

Phonotactics

Any Zjugo syllable is made up of at least a vowel or diphthong, which may be preceded by any consonant and/or followed by /n/. Note that a syllable ending with /n/ can be followed by a syllable starting with a vowel. This is phonemically distinct from a syllable ending with a vowel followed by a syllable starting with /n/, that is, for instance, /ˈme̞n.æi/ is distinct from /ˈme̞.næi/. Obstruents and /n/ get palatalized by default when followed by /i/, plain variants are not allowed in that position.

Phonetic variations

Due to the root system, which behaves as if they didn't apply, the following aspects of Zjugo's pronunciation are not widely considered phonemic.

The sequences ⟨wi⟩, ⟨wu⟩ and ⟨ji⟩ are never pronounced the way they're written. Specifically, ⟨wi⟩ is pronounced [i] word-initially and [hi] otherwise (this is the only phonetic occurrence of [h] in the language and is the reason for its inclusion in the consonant chart). ⟨wu⟩ is pronounced [ɯ] word-initially and [fɯ] otherwise and lastly ⟨ji⟩ is pronounced [i] word-initially and [d͡ʑi] otherwise.

Spelling

Latin alphabet

Here are the letters and digraphs used to spell Zjugo, when using the Latin script. Whenever a sequence of letters is ambiguous, an apostrophe must be used to clarify syllable boundaries. For example /ˈme̞.næi/ is spelled menai, meanwhile /ˈme̞n.æi/ is spelled men'ai. This is also done to clarify whether something is or isn't a palatalization digraph, for instance /ˈfʲæn.jæn/ is spelled fjan'jan, however fjanjan would be pronounced /ˈfʲæ.ɲæn/, except for that it isn't a real word. Consonant letters followed by i, not separated by an apostrophe are automatically considered palatalized.

Letter	Pronunciation	digraph	pronunciation
A	/æ/	Ai	/æi/
B	/b/	Bj	/bʲ/
D	/d/	Dj	/d͡ʑ/
E	/e̞/	Ei	/e̞i/
F	/f/	Fj	/fʲ/
G	/g/	Gj	/gʲ/
H	/x/	Hj	/xʲ/
I	/i/
J	/j/
K	/k/	Kj	/kʲ/
L	/l/
M	/m/
N	/n/	Nj	/ɲ/
O	/ɤ̞/	Oi	/ɤ̞i/
P	/p/	Pj	/pʲ/
R	/r~ɾ/
S	/s/	Sj	/ɕ/
T	/t/	Tj	/t͡ɕ/
U	/ɯ/
V	/v/	Vj	/vʲ/
W	/w/
Z	/z/	Zj	/ʑ/

Zjugohai

Zjugohai /ˈʑɯ.gɤ̞.xai/ is the original way used to spell Zjugo, although it has since begun to fall out of use in favor of the Latin script. It is a syllabary featuring characters for every combination of a plain voiceless consonant followed by a vowel (including the lack of a consonant). It's written top to bottom with its columns advancing right to left. Voicing and palatalization are spelled using other strategies, discussed later.

Voicing

Voiced obstruents are spelled by placing a diacritic to the left of the right syllable character. Voiced palatalized consonants still have this diacritic on the first character.

Palatalization

Consonant vowel pairs with a palatalized consonant are spelled as a digraph, including a character of the voiceless unpalatalized equivalent consonant with the i vowel. That is then followed by one of the four special palatalization characters; one exists for each vowel except i itself. Diphthongs following palatalized consonants are spelled by placing a diacritic, identical in appearance to the one used for voicing, onto the palatalization character. There are no palatalization characters for the i vowel as obstruents (and n) followed by i are palatalized by default and, in fact, are not allowed to be plain when in that position.

Diphthongs and syllable-final n

As discussed earlier, Zjugo only permits one consonant to appear phonemically in syllable codas and that is /n/. This is spelled with a special character. If syllable contains no such coda and no palatalized consonant, but it does include a diphthong, a reverse-S-like character is used to indicate that, meanwhile if a syllable contains the coda and also a diphthong, it is spelled with another special character, being a variant of the final n character, and lastly if the final n is included in a syllable with a palatalized consonant, a variant of the appropriate palatalization character is used and, naturally, the diphthong diacritic is also included on top of that if there is a diphthong in the syllable. This way any single syllable can be spelled with at most two characters, keeping the script fairly concise.

Numbers

Zjugo usually uses a base-6 system to count and there are 6 digits native to Zjugohai, used to spell these base-6 numbers. For base-10 numbers, the Arabic numerals get used and written vertically, just like the Zjugohai numerals.

Root system

Zjugo features a system of monosyllabic roots or morphemes. Due to its strict phonotactics, there are only 456 possible syllables, 346 of which are used within the language. Each morpheme is one syllable and on top of that any single syllable can represent only one morpheme. Some of these roots are reserved for grammatical purposes (eg. case endings, verb endings, certain grammatical affixes, the morphemes used to construct demonstratives), while others allow much wider usage, the latter case being referred to as "content roots", since they can usually function as most parts of speech.

Syntax

Zjugo follows an SVO word order with prepositions, adverbs appearing before verbs, used to convey some modal information and adjectives preceding nouns.

Zjugo's context clause, if used, should be the very first thing in the sentence, followed by the verb, then followed by the verb's arguments. These arguments can have various cases which usually follow the order LOC NOM DAT ACC. In particular, the nominative argument nearly always appears before the accusative argument, with variations being very rare and usually reserved for artistic purposes. The locative argument usually appears first and the dative argument usually appears right before the accusative argument or at the end if there isn't one, but those two exhibit much more variation in placement. Finally, prepositional phrases are always placed at the end of the sentence.

	Fenhuhja	lu	vjonzjo	vjusjuni	gahi	kinso	djoine	pi'en	jowo.
	last-day	CONTEXT	give-IND	work-building-LOC	somebody	1-GEN	parent-DAT	weird-ADJ	thing-ACC
	"Yesterday, at work, somebody gave my mother a strange object."

In a sentence with just a copula, both the subject and its complement follow the copula, with the subject appearing first. There are two copulas, one of them negative (equivalent to "isn't").

	Da	kin	di	lu	dja	kin	ve.
	be	1	kind	CONTEXT	be.NEG	1	rude
	"I'm good, so I'm not bad."

Any argument of a verb may be omitted, this includes subjects, which then carries a similar use case to the passive voice, which is otherwise absent from Zjugo.

Verbs

Verbs in Zjugo inflect only for mood, with four suffixes: -zjo for the indicative mood, this is the default and most common suffix, -ke for imperative, to indicate the verb as a command, -tja for subjunctive to indicate the verb as merely possible and lastly -'in, which is used in the conditional construction discussed later. Verbs may be negated by simply prefixing no- to them, which is the grammatical root used to indicate negation and can be prefixed on any word, but is by far most common on verbs. Finally, verbs, as any word, can also take extra, redundant, affirmation with the ti- prefix.

Copulas

As discussed above there are two special verbs, the two copulas: one indicative and one negative indicative. These do not take the aforementioned inflection and, in fact, rarely ever have any affixes applied to them at all. They can however be preceded by an adverb, which does carry some modal information.

	Wa	da	kin	zjoin'jin.
	want	be	1	feminine-gender
	"I want to be a girl."

When the inflection carried by most verbs is desired, a semantically similar word "tun" is used.

Questions

Any sentence may be turned into a question by suffixing -kai onto the verb. This suffix follows the mood suffixes, if they exist.

	Tuntjakai	kjole	kje?
	exist-SJV-Q	this	possible
	"Might this be possible?"

Additionally, any part of the sentence, except the verb, including content word affixes, can be replaced with the question particle "hun". The -kai suffix is still used if this is done.

	Sjunzjokai	hunhi	hjole?
	do-IND-Q	Q-person	that
	Who did that?

	Dakai	kjole	hun?
	be-Q	this	Q
	"What's this?"

	Hunkjain	lu	sjunzjokai	pin	hunwo?
	Q-time	CONTEXT	do-IND-Q	3	Q-ACC
	When did they do what?

Nouns

Nouns only exhibit mandatory case marking, however any amount of additional information may be included by affixing any number of morphemes.

Case

There are five cases nouns can take in Zjugo. Those are:

• The nominative, which is unmarked. Used on subjects of sentences as well as subjects' complements in copular sentences.
• The accusative, marked with -wo. Used on the direct objects of sentences.
• The dative, marked with -ne. Used to mark indirect objects, in particular, recipients.
• The genitive, marked with -so. Used for possessors of objects. The possessor is placed before the possessed.
• The vocative, marking with -o. Used to call for people, vocative nouns are only ever exclaimed on their own and never included as part of sentences otherwise.

Number

Number is not required to be marked on nouns, however there are a few optional markers that may be used.

• Singular, that is one, with ji-
• Dual, that is two, with nu-
• Paucal, that is a few, with vja-
• Plural, that is many, with ma-
• Null, that is none, with ka-
• Total, that is all, with kju-

Adjectives

Adjectives function extremely similarly to nouns. In fact, any noun can be used as an adjective, by simply being placed before another noun with no case marking. Sometimes the -en suffix may be added to clarify the function of a word being used like that as adjectival. Similarly, there's also a -ken suffix, which functions the same way, except that it also negates the adjective.

Relative clauses

A relative clause can follow any noun phrase. It's constructed by placing a verb, directly following the noun, then the relative particle ki and any additional arguments for the verb between it and the particle.

	Bjozjo	man	bozjo	hjoni	ki.
	arrive-IND	4	go-IND	far-LOC	REL
	Those who go far, arrive.

Concatenative derivation

Any content word can be formed by concatenating multiple monosyllabic content roots together. When this is done, the root at the end is treated as the main root with the previous morphemes modifying it. Words derived from more than two roots in this way introduce some ambiguity in interpretation. For example ninhire (lit. big person tool) could be interpreted as "big (person tool)", where both "big" and "person" modify "tool", that is it's a big tool for people, or it could be interpreted as "(big person) tool" where "big" modifies "person" and then their pair modifies "tool", so it's a tool intended for big people. This ambiguity is not grammatically resolved.

Many derived words are lexicalized and have a single canon interpretation. These can be found in Zjugo's dictionaries.

Demonstratives

Demonstratives are derived with a set of prefixes and suffixes. The prefixes indicate state of being (or interrogate it) and the suffixes indicate the type of object being referred to.

The most commonly used prefixes are

• kjo - proximal (roughly near speaker, for spacial distinctions)
• vo - medial (roughly near listener, for spacial distinctions)
• hjo - distal (elsewhere)
• pjo - nonexistent, none (used in equivalents to eg. nowhere, never)
• ga - existent, some (used in equivalents to eg. somewhere, sometime)
• hun - interrogative

The most commonly used suffixes are

• ko - place (eg. here, there)
• nje - grammatical adjectives (this [thing], that [thing])
• le - grammatical nouns (this, that)
• kjain - time (eg. now, then)

Other roots are sometimes used as prefixes and occasionally suffixes, but the above are the most common.

Context and conditionals

The context clause is placed at the very beginning of a sentence and indicated with the "lu" particle, which follows it. For the most part it works similarly to Toki Pona's context clause, indicated with the similar sounding "la". It is used to indicate something as the context to the main sentence (it can mean something like "in the context of X, Y", where X is what's in the context clause and Y is the main sentence) and that can be any noun phrase or even verb sentence.

In Zjugo, the context clause does also play and important role in forming conditionals. The condition is placed in the context clause as a sentence and the result is placed in the main sentence with its verb in the conditional mood, indicated with -tja.

Conjunction

There are a few conjunctions in Zjugo. These can conjoin any words of the same part of speech, whether that be verbs, noun phrases or even things like adverbs or prepositions.

They are as follows

• i - and
• gi - or
• run - and not ([this] run [that] = this and not that)
• mon - also (similar to "i", particularly common at the start of sentences or conjoining verb subjects)
• noi - not also

They can also appear at the very start of sentences, before the context clause, where they carry related meanings

• i - furthermore
• gi - or, or maybe
• run - however
• mon - also, furthermore
• noi - however

And lastly "mon" can also appear on its own as an adverb or adjective.

Comparison

Comparison is done by prefixing mai- or tei- onto an adjective (meaning "more" and "less" respectively), then following the adjective with a prepositional phrase using bei. Any noun modified by the adjective is placed before bei.

	Da	kjole	maigoi	bei	fain'en	wenzeinfi!
	be	this	more-good	to	infinite-ADJ	bee
	This is better than infinite bees!

	Da	kjole	teigoi	fain'en	wenzeinfi	bei	vole.
	be	this	less-good	infinite-ADJ	bee	to	that
	These are worse infinite bees than that.

Numbers

Base six

Usually, Zjugo uses a base-6 system to count. There are six roots for numbers one-six (and the root meaning "none" can be used to refer to zero).

Up to thirty six, Zjugo uses a similar system to that of Japanese, except base-six instead of ten, of course. Each number is split into multiples of six plus some leftover amount. In mathematical terms, any n up to 36 is thought of as k*6+m, where k and m are both in that range from one to six (except if the number is less than 6 then there are no multiple of six so the k*6 term is skipped). These numbers are formed into single words made up of up to three units, the first unit being equal to the amount of multiples of six (k), the second simply being six itself and the third being equal to the leftover amount (m). Lastly, if there is only one multiple of six then the first term is omitted and the number six is just said on its own. For example the number four is simply jon, the number ten is lunjon (six-four) and the number sixteen is nulunjon (two-six-four; two sixes and four).

Thirty six prefixes the root nin, meaning big onto six, so it's simply ninlun (big-six). From there numbers up to, but not including twelve-hundred and ninety-six (thirty six * thirty six) are broken down into two main parts: multiples of thirty six and the left over. In mathematical terms k*36+m. This is the same as before, except on a larger magnitude and this time each of k and m will be further broken down as described in the previous paragraph. For example 512 can be broken down in this way into 14*36+8, then that can be further broken down into (2*6+2)*36+(6+2) and is therefore said as nulunnu ninlun lunnu (two-six-two big-six six-two). This time, unlike before, spaces are introduced between each element.

Finally, twelve-hundred ninety-six is ninninlun, that is it prefixes nin yet again. These numbers are broken down in an analogous way, counting multiples of ninninlun as k*1296+m, further break k and m down as in the previous diagram. For example the very big number 111'875 would be broken down as 86*1296+419, then each of those parts down as (2*36+14)*1296+(11*36+23), then (2*36+(2*6+2))*1296+((6+5)*36+(3*6+5)) and so would be said as nu ninlun nulunnu ninninlun lungu ninlun senlungu, which is very long, but luckily numbers this large rarely come up and are usually rounded to the nearest multiples of powers of six for convenience.

Base ten

The base ten system appeared much later in the language's existence due to English and Ukrainian influences. The system first appeared in writing and, in spoken language, manifests simply as the digits being read out sequentially.

Each digit zero through nine, in this system, is simply pronounced as its equivalent number in the base six system, so for instance 6 is simply lun and 7 is lun'ji.

To show what it looks like in use, in this system, the number 4096 would be read as jon ka lunsen lun (four none six-three six).

Vocabulary

The current list of all words can be found in the vocabulary document hosted on Google Sheets.