Word of the Week - Wednesday 21.5.2025
iṇṇaq /iɳ.ɳaq/ [ɝɳːɑ˞q̚ ]
Welcome to the first ever Viil WotW! Viil is not a very developed language yet, definitely much less than my other conlang Kolic, and I only have a few words so far, and just vague ideas about grammar, which I want to explore here over time. Let's talk about the first of those features, verbs!
Viil is a polysynthetic heavily head-marking language. Its verbs have polypersonal agreement, and agree with the subject, object, and even indirect object. In this simple case of an intransitive verb, only the core argument is marked with the absolutive prefix agreeing with its noun class.
The lemma form of Viil verbs is the infinitive, where this absolutive prefix is replaced with the infinitive prefix, i'-. The apostrophe, by the way, is not a phoneme in Viils present form, it has no phonetic realisation anymore, but it used to be a phoneme and it has an effect on surrounding phonemes, namely leniting them due to past assimilation. In this case, when it attaches to the root ṇaq, it results in the lemma form iṇṇaq.
If you were to say "i go," you'd switch this infinitive prefix for the first person singular prefix (first and second persons are the only two cases of Viil distinguishing grammatical number) a'-, resulting in aṇṇaq. Perhaps a little confusingly, the word for "he/she/they goes/go" (singular they, in some cases plural as well, as I will explain in a later post) is exactly the same, as attaching the human class prefix aq- results in "aqṇaq," but applying Viil's assimilation yields aṇṇaq as well. In this case, you would know which one it is from context, or specify using an explicit subject, such as a noun or a standalone pronoun.
By the way, please let me know if the ṇ for /ɳ/ is a good choice! I haven't really made any proper consistent romanisation yet, I've only really been making notes on paper and using IPA characters where possible, but I would like to write Viil on my puter easily as well. I looked up the voiced retroflex nasal and it seems that most romanisations use the letter ṇ for it so I decided to follow suit, but I don't know.
Viil has five phonemic nasals and I'm only sure how to romanise two of them (/m/ and /n/ which are kinda obvious). /ɳ/ is the one I've been talking about, for /ŋ/ I could just use ŋ, since it's easily typable on my keyboard, but probably not on most peoples? and then there's /ɴ/ which I really have no idea about. I could introduce capital letters and make the romanisation look like Klingon, but that runs the risk of just looking like a sore thumb.
If I wanted to go without diacritics, there's the option of using digraphs like dn for /ɳ/, gn for /ŋ/ and qn for /ɴ/ (I don't want to do it in the reverse order because unlike these sequnces, the sequences nd and nq might actually be possible in Viil). That would also mean having the g character only to use it in a digraph, which is also meh. (But it gave me an idea to use g to represent /ŋ/ if we're not doing digraphs, which is a little unintuitive but kinda nice imo). Idk. Let me know what y'all prefer.
Before I give you my example sentence, let me remind you that the grammar doesn't really have a solid foundation yet, and will most definitely change a lot in the early stages. Some mandatory markings might appear, etc. But with that in mind, here's the example sentence:
aṇṇaq aqqutaq. /aɳ.ɳaq aq.qu.taq/ [ɑ˞ɳːɑ˞ʁɑqːodɑq̚ ]
Note: Aqqutaq is a given name. the 3AQ marks a 3rd person in the AQ class (noun class for people and deities).
Yes, this is the best sentence I can put together so far 😅
