Ikai Taa
| Ikai Taa | |
|---|---|
| Language family | Tuu
|
| Era | Before the 1920's |
| Writing system | Latin |
| Official status | |
| Spoken in | Realm of Madness, Namibia, Botswana |
| Speaker | |
| Number of speakers | unknown |
| Technical information | |
| Usage | Horror |
| Language code | IKT |
Ikai Taa is an attempt by the now-defunct Inferkit A.I. (IKAI) to generate text from a factual prompt about the real-world language Taa (also known as !Xóõ). Suqi, who had the language generated, partially guided the process in order for the A.I. to explain some nonsensical phrases so that they could understand and complete the language themselves (which has not yet been done).
While Taa itself is a dialect group, the prompt gave the A.I. no such indication. However, due to vast amounts of contradictory information in the text and the A.I. generating the language's name inconsistently, Suqi chose to analyze the generation as describing 4 different dialects and organized the information in a document according to the dialect it pertained to. Due to this apparent splintering, the A.I. wrote very little information about the language the dialects stem from.
According to the A.I., Ikai Taa exists in the real world alongside its real counterpart and was greatly studied by Anthony Traill, who was the leading expert on Taa during his lifetime.
The description of Ikai Taa's dialects as dialects is questionable. Ikai Taa is more similar to a proto-language because the daughter-languages' phonologies and morphosyntax are drastically different from it and each other. Not to mention one of the dialects is canonically a conlang and another has become 2 entire language families. Nonetheless, they are referred to as dialects. The Ikai Taa dialects are:
More information about the generation and Suqi's interpretation can be found here.
Phonology
There is very limited information about Ikai Taa, so its full phonology is not known. This article contains what little information can be extrapolated, but may not be the full extent of it. The complex and highly unnatural structure of the emergent dialects also puts this (admittedly simplistic) analysis into question.
Consonants
| Alveolar | Lateral | Velar | Unknown | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fricative | x | |||
| Click | ǃ | ǁ | ǁ* | |
| Cluster | !ǁ*ǁ, !ǁǁ̀ | |||
Some phonemes are composed of multiple clicks, as shown in the cluster category. Not all clicks can be used to make a phoneme, but the ones that can't are not known.
Vowels
| High Tone | Long | |
|---|---|---|
| Open | á | aː |
It is said that non-speakers are able to identify words just from hearing the clicks they contain.
Morphology
The majority of Ikai Taa's vocabulary is composed of the same 7 root words and 14 prefixes.
Lexicon
The only known words are:
| Word | Meaning | |
|---|---|---|
| Root | ǁ*xǁaːǁ | "milk", "dirty", "dirty milk" |
| Conjugation 1 | !ǁǁǁ | "sacred" |
| Conjugation 2 | !ǁǁáǁ | "sweet" |
Writing
The writing system originally used to write Ikai Taa is largely undocumented, but was likely to be a logography. One character of the writing system, known as "mpipa", had a particular ability to make those who saw it say, ".h h?!". Today, Ikai Taa is more commonly written in romanization with influence from IPA, and some dialects use the Bonabéri Alphabet.