An overview of the ruqöl language
This is a short introduction to the conlang ruqöl. ruqöl is a heartlang which basically means it is a language that is built to express my thoughts and feelings to the most accurate extent. But it is not a secret language and I would very much like to share the language with everyone else too, so let's dive right into the basics of the language. The language is primarily inspired by the languages of south and west asia with minor influences from south-east asia. It has two writing systems, one a modified latin alphabet and the other an abugida. I will only showcase the first writing system which is pronounced as it is written and is also the romanisation of the language. This language is an agglutinative language with 38 consonants and 12 vowels and 18 diphthongs, displaying a slight fusional morphology along with a highly non-concatenative and fractal morphology. The base word order is VSO (verb-subject-object) but is determined by pragmatic features.
Phonotactics
The root syllable structure is (C)CV(V)C(C) but stems can morph into multiple syllables structures with up to three consonant clusters and both word initial and word final consonants. Each consonant has four 'faces' which determine its consonant mutation characteristics with the type of consonant mutation determined by inflectional morphology with the four faces being: 'aspirated', 'geminated', 'aspirated geminate' and 'fortitioned' [note: these don't literally mean what they say, they are classified as such due to historical reasons]. The language also displays a cohesive four way vowel harmony with a front-back, open-close system with thematic vowels being transparent to vowel harmony with thematic vowels being vowels that carry inherent grammatical meaning.
While the pitch-accent isn't marked in the writing system, the language does contain both a pitch-accent system and a stress system.
Primary Accent (High Pitch): Marked by a rising pitch, this will be the main accentuated syllable in a word.
Secondary Accent (Falling Pitch): Marked by a falling pitch, this occurs after the primary accent.
Neutral/Low Pitch: All other syllables will have a neutral or low pitch, for non-accented syllables.
The primary accent is always placed on the last syllable of a root and the stress of a word corresponds to the accent unless the preceding or following word is a particle or case which will shift the stress to the particle or case while the pitch-accent mostly remains the same. Take the phrase höm-ö-rulal. In this phrase the high pitch (marked with the bold is on the root word while the stress is on the case at the end.
The language has the following word classes:
Roots can either be a noun, verb or adjective/adverb and can be converted from one to the other depending on their inherent vowel.
A seed syllable is like a word that goes beyond normal meaning, it's an intuitive feeling, but is also used in the written and spoken language ubiquitously. The closest way of describing the meaning of a seed syllable is like a cross between a mantra, prayer, expression and a koan. They cannot be used in derivational morphology and can only take inflectional morphology. A light verb is used to clarify how and what to perceive in a given word or sentence. L’s can be used with all verb, noun and adjective/adverb roots but only specific forms of them. Cases display the highest degree of fractal morphology, which means that they change in meaning depending on where and which part of speech they are attached to and unlike noun cases in indo-european languages, they can be attached to verbs and adjectives/adverbs too. Particles also display fractal morphology albeit to a lesser degree. Additionally, the wall between cases and particles is quite porous. Expressions are singular words or phrases that have been 'fused' together to create another meaning. Pronouns are categorised into a different class as they can take case marking, can attach themselves to other nouns, be present on their own or dropped from the sentence depending on the meaning.
Before discussing the features the language has, it is equally important to note the ones it does not. ruqöl does not contain articles, grammatical gender, number marking or the 1st person pronoun and is a gender neutral language. It also does not contain the copula, the verb to be, is a pro drop and null subject language, does not have an infinitive or perfect tense.
A noun phrase contains a
[particle]+[pronoun]+[case]+root+[possessive pronoun]+case+[particle] ++ [light verb]
[particle]+[pronoun]+[case]+root+form+V.TAME+[case] + [particle] ++ [light verb]
An descriptor phrase contains
[particle]+[pronoun]+root+agreement+[particle] ++ [light verb]
Attributive adjectives follow the noun they modify, predicative adjectives occur before the noun they modify. Adverbs follow the verb they modify. Adjectives agree with the noun in case, adverbs agree with the verb in the inverse verb head. Particles can be prefixed, suffixed or chain linked.
There are four possible word orders depending on the focalisation of the information shared:
V S O : normal word order / focalisation of predicate
O V S : focalisation of object
V O S : anteposition of object
S V O : focalisation of subject
Derivational morphology is divided into primary derivation and secondary derivation. Primary derivation contains nine forms which can be applied to either of the three root states.
As you can see, the derivation remains the same but the root vowel changes to the state vowel and the derivation vowel follows vowel front-back vowel harmony although there are exceptions where it follows open-close harmony as well and that would override the front-back harmony.
Below is the table for secondary derivation
Verbs fall into one of five 'voices' describing the volitionality and transitivity of the verb. Depending on the voice, the verb stem will be conjugated for mood-evidentiality with four different combinations present with the fifth voice a verb that can be conjugated in 2 or more voices. To this, the thematic vowel for tense-aspect will be added. The inflectional morphology acts on all derivational forms of the verb.
Nouns inflect for case of which there are 11 syntactic cases and 10 locative cases. In addition cases exhibit fractal morphology where their meaning changes depending on the root state and where they are attached within a root state.
As mentioned above nouns inflect for case of which there are 11 syntactic cases and 10 locative cases and nouns exhibit verb agreement. In addition, nouns have a set of quantifier classifiers used with the noun when forming measures. These classifiers don’t just count or categorise, but also encode shape, collectivity, texture, and boundedness. When a classifier is added, the form of the noun usually returns to its base form with the classifier prefixed with a dash. Classifiers are thought to be the 'essence' of a root in traditional grammar. A classifier phrase will contain: [noun phrase] + [quantifier] + [classifier] with the noun always taking the partitive case.
Adjectives agree with the noun in case, if the adjective is a comparative adjective, it takes one of the case markings of comparison before the adjective. Similarly adverbs use the same root as adjectives, but take the inverse of the head of the verb they modify. Attributive adjectives occur after the noun and predicative adjectives occur before the noun they modify. Verbs can be used as adjectives when occurring after the noun they are modifying being treated like predicative adjectives.
There are three main types of pronouns: oblique, possessive and universal.
Oblique pronouns attach to the nouns and verbs in the nominative case but can occur separately with other case markers.
Possessive pronouns are suffixed to nouns they modify.
Universal pronouns occur separately and cannot take case marking.
Light verbs are a closed class of four specifiers that are used to clarify how and what to perceive in a given word or sentence.
Seed syllables are syllables that go beyond normal meaning, it's an intuitive feeling, but is also used in the written and spoken language ubiquitously. There are eight main seed syllables that are considered the primary attributes of the divine, known as Isa.
äham - absolute reflective awareness
hum - neither perception nor non perception
sham - absolute nothingness
bhrum - absolute inversion
aim - absolute consciousness
In addition to these, seed syllables can be formed by either suffixing an -m, -q or -c the former of which is considered an internal characteristic and the second an external characteristic and the third a destructive characteristic although it is not recommended for a person to derive the syllables themselves but rather to first internalise the eight main syllables and then continue.
Seed syllables cannot take derivational morphology but can take inflectional morphology and are used throughout the language as base particles, expressions, interjections etc especially the eight main ones.
One eg of the ubiquitous use is höm, which as you can see was used as the first syllable to begin the introduction, also functioning as a greeting as well as a base from universal pronouns.
There are three main types of particles:
The most common particles are given below but there are more because particles are pretty much all the words that don't fall into any of the categories above.
Expressions are one word or phrases that have been frozen and are in frequent usage with their meaning morphed or diversified from its original meaning.
ruqöl uses a completely different set of punctuation marks.
I - full stop, comma, or semicolon (marks end of a sentence or clause)
II - marks end of a paragraph or topic
༺༻- left bracket - right bracket
ᬒᬁ - begins and ends a text
ཿ - marks the end of a chapter or entire section
: - used to attach emotive particles
-x- used to attach conjunct particles
- used to attach classifiers and light verbs
This language has gone through quite a lot of iterations and may go through some more as and when more works are translated, so don't take this reference as being set in stone (if anyone is even reading it) but rather a compilation of the current state of ruqöl. Fun fact!: ruqöl is an abbreviation of ruq-ö-rul 'lit: grace of the transcendent soul'.
