!Xóõj
| !Xóõj / Khouin | |
|---|---|
| Language family | Tuu
|
| Era | Before the 1920's to present day |
| Writing system | Bonabéri Alphabet, Latin |
| Official status | |
| Spoken in | Realm of Madness, Namibia, Botswana |
| Speaker | |
| Number of speakers | unknown |
| Technical information | |
| Usage | Horror |
| Language code | XOY |
!Xóõj (anglicized: Khouin), not to be confused with the real language !Xóõ, is a dialect of Ikai Taa. This dialect is the most phonologically complex and difficult to pronounce, yet is described as "simple" due to it being "all sound, every time". It's the first Ikai Taa dialect to adopt the Bonabéri Alphabet, having done so at some point between 1920 and 1942.
Phonology
Phonemically, !Xóõj has over 1,000 consonants and 0 vowels. While nasalized vowels do exist phonetically, they exist only in a state of free variation with some consonants. Some would consider them not functionally part of the dialect as their presumably involuntary articulation results in confusion about what is being said.
This lack of clarity is not related to the fact it has a thousand phonemes, but to the hard-to-follow interplay between clicks, nasalization, and the aforementioned nasalized vowels which muddies speech, making things harder to understand. This is not helped by the fact that many words contain the same sequence of sounds as many other words, leading sentences to be filled with similar-sounding words.
In Ikai Taa dialects, words with the same sequence of sounds are known as "cognates", but to avoid confusion with actual cognates, they will be referred to as "taagnates".
Morphosyntax
Morphosyntactically, !Xóõj is very simple and provides much of the framework for learning Ikai Taa. The reason being that they are very similar, but without any phonemic vowels, the tedious aspects of Ikai Taa grammar go away almost entirely.
Lexicon
!Xóõj has a high lexical complexity.
Sample Sentence
Pantaloon! kaiya !oo̡ kaiya !oo̡ ka! . : othaa pantaloon! lara kaiya !oo̡ kaiya !oo̡ ka! . : pantaloon! kaiya !oo̡. : qan pantaloon kaiya !oo̡ kaiya !oo̡. : masao pantaloon kaiya !oo̡ kaiya !oo̡. : khaiya pantaloon kaiya !oo̡ kaiya !oo̡. : kao pantaloon kaiya !oo̡ kaiya !oo̡. : aya . : hayao kia . : pantaloon. : aya. :. . : kauponta . : khauponta kauponta kauponta. : !oogoo . : koukata koukata koukata. :. . : matu. :
Audio: https://mc.nguh.org/w/images/6/6d/Khoin_sample_sentence.mp3
Translation: Ho! This guy is very large!