Having begun as the dialect of an unassuming
colony on the coast of the Eritōske sea, Nekāchti ultimately became the language of one of the greatest nations in history. While with the passing of many centuries its purity has been sullied from mixing with the mongrel tongue of the commoners, it is still recognized by scholars and learned men as the language
of science, knowledge, and logic. To learn Nekāchti is to show great wisdom,
and to come to know the glory of our forefathers. Or at least that’s what a Nekāchti speaker
might tell you. In actuality, Nekāchti is just a conlang
I started working on in 2016, and, at, the time of recording, it’s my most thoroughly
developed and possibly my favorite language that I have yet created. Nekāchti belongs to the Thirēan language
family, one of the largest and most diverse language families in the world. Nekāchti has undergone many tumultuous changes
over the 6000 years since the proto-language was last spoken, foremost among them is the
phonetic inventory, which has simplified considerably. Within the main branches of the Thirēan language
family tree, the sound series of proto-Thirēan merged in various ways. Specifically, in the branch leading to Nekāchti,
in due order, the uvulars merged with the velars, front-rounded vowels lost their rounding,
the prenasalized stops became plain voiced stops, aspirated stops became fricatives,
and finally, voiced stops ended up being lost in various ways, leaving Nekāchti with a
rather modest collection of only 13 consonants and 4 vowels. Concurrent with all these sound changes, the
basic CVC syllable structure of Proto-Thirēan increased in overall complexity in Nekāchti,
but with a lot more restrictions on how syllables can be put together. No word may begin or end with more than one
consonant. A word may begin with any consonant, but the
only consonants permitted to end a word are /m/, /n/, /s/, and /k/. A word-internal cluster may consist of a maximum
of a nasal or obstruent followed by an obstruent followed by /r/. There are no diphthongs and no geminates. In addition to these constraints, however,
Nekāchti’s long and turbulent history has resulted in a host of phonological quirks
that only apply sometimes. Sometimes /k/ disappears between vowels, sometimes
it doesn’t. Sometimes /t/ turns into an /r/, sometimes
it doesn’t. And sometimes sounds just appear or disappear
seemingly at random when words are conjugated, and, frustratingly for new learners, the only
way of dealing with these is through brute force memorization. Default stress is on the antepenult, with
stress falling on the penult only if it contains a long vowel or is closed. Nekāchti uses its own script which… I’m honestly not really sure how to classify
it in terms of system. The closest real-world equivalent would probably
be Hangul, or maybe Sinhalese, I guess? It’s a system I like to call a super-alphasyllabary,
and once again, the best way to grasp what that means is with a history lesson. The Nekāchti people were first introduced
to the concept of writing when they encountered the Edun script, one of the oldest writing
systems in the world, which became very popular in the central regions in the years before
the First Empire of the Sun. Thing is, though, learning to read and write
with the Edun script is, to put it lightly… STAGGERINGLY difficult. Explaining the complexity is well beyond the
scope of this video, I’ll save that for another time, but here’s the basic gist of it:
Let’s say you wanted to write the word qhan or “to sell”. One way to do this is to use a determinative
like suunnga, “gold”, to hint that the word has something to do with money, then
you can follow it up with a character for a word that begins with the same Consonant-Vowel
sequence, like qhambu, “armor-fish”, or one ends with the same Vowel-Consonant
sequence, like thaan or “sun”, or, if you’re feeling particularly generous, you
might even include both. In which case, since qhan is a one-syllable
word, the syllable characters will have an overlapping vowel, and using this method,
you can even write out every single syllable of a polysyllabic word, giving you a pretty
airtight way of conveying the exact word you’re trying to transcribe. The only problem is that, by the time the
Old Nekāchti speakers were introduced to this system, the syllable characters and determinatives
had been created and standardized… over a thousand years prior. And in that time, the Edun languages had gone
through a number of substantial changes, none of which had been documented in the writing
system, giving Edun one of the worst spelling systems in history. So, while this word used to be pronounced
exactly how it’s spelled, /thangqərkhiim/, after a thousand years of history it’s pronounced
dzvirzhã, but the spelling is still exactly the same. Needless to say, the Nekāchti weren’t particularly
impressed. It was already bad enough that they had to
map the characters for Edun’s foreign sounds onto their own phonology, and that they needed
to memorize hundreds of syllable characters on top of thousands of logographs, but throw
in these terrible spelling rules on top of that and you might as well just call it a day. But the Nekāchti didn’t want to pass up
on an invention as useful as writing, so the royal council of scribes convened to try and
find an easier way to write. After countless hours of scrutiny, they started to notice a pattern amid the madness. Often, definitely not always, but often, when
written in the expanded form, the top character will hint at the first sound of the syllable,
while the bottom character usually indicates the sound that ends the syllable. The vowel, on the other hand, is basically
impossible to predict. By this point in history, the Edun vowels
had shifted around so much that you might as well just make a blind guess because those
“syllable” characters certainly aren’t going to help you out. “So”, said the Nekāchti scribes, “we’ll
just ignore the vowel. Let’s just take the glyphs for the /a/ syllables,
which most often keep their quality, and if the vowel is something other than /a/, we’ll
mark that with a diacritic." Using this system, the number of characters
was reduced from multiple thousands to only 36 The simplicity of this system made it spread
like wildfire across the subcontinent, and, after a few centuries of hand-writing, once
the initial and final characters blended together into ligatures, the Nekāchti super-alphasyllabary
was born. In this system, entire syllables, including
onset, nucleus, and coda are encoded in a single character. There are also three special characters that
represent a voiceless stop followed by /r/, a particularly common sequence in Old Nekāchti. The script also uses a basic system of punctuation
and, while edun was pretty flexible in terms of writing direction, Nekāchti is now written
exclusively right to left. The Nekāchti are very proud of their writing
system and frequently impose reforms, though there are always a few lingering instances
of historical spelling. Unfortunately, however, Nekāchti’s grammar
is not so straightforward, Nekāchti is highly synthetic, more than a
little irregular, and has features such as split-ergativity, non-configurationality,
and double-marking. Nekāchti takes animacy very seriously. All nouns are classed as either animate or
inanimate, and are treated very differently depending on how they’re classified. Typically only animate nouns take plural marking
or the definite article, while most inanimate nouns are treated as mass nouns and are ambiguous
to number; however, to emphasize exactly one of something, a singulative marker exists,
which also has a number of unique derivational properties The animacy of a noun also interacts with
case marking. While some older Thirēan languages had over
a dozen cases, Nekāchti retains only seven. The core arguments of a verb phrase are most
often marked with one of three cases; The Nominative marks both animate subjects and
inanimate direct objects, the Accusative marks animate direct objects, and the Ergative marks
Inanimate subjects of transitive verbs. However, Nekāchti also features a high degree
of quirky subject, so the subject and object can be marked with other cases depending on
the properties of verbs. For instance, the Benefactive marks the subject
of a verb of experience, the Instrumental is used for the agent of an accidental or
involuntary action, and the locative and genitive mark the objects of a change of state. The subject and direct object are also marked
on the verb with an obligatory set of prefixes, including separate markers for animate and
inanimate 3rd person, and a distinction between proximate and obviate arguments. Marking an argument as obviate indicates that
it’s less salient or relevant to the conversation, or that it’s already been introduced to
the discourse and is therefore background information. The indefinite marker expresses that the argument
is unknown or undefined, and is often used to derive intransitive verbs from transitive
ones. There’s an ergative split in these prefixes
as well, with 1st, 2nd, and animate 3rd person following an accusative pattern, while the
obviate and inanimate 3rd person, and indefinite person follow an ergative pattern, that is,
the subject prefixes of an intransitive verb serve as object prefixes on a transitive verb. Note that since a 3rd person animate subject
and a 3rd person inanimate object are both encoded by the absence of a prefix, and that
the nominative is marked by a lack of a case suffix, then in a sentence with an animate
subject and inanimate object, like for example Ankāli tōko kirok “The king looked at
the tree”, neither of the nouns nor the verb will take any role-marking at all. The sentence is still understandable because
more often than not, the subject of any given transitive verb is going to be animate while
the object will be inanimate. So in this case, we can assume that the king
is the subject, since trees aren’t particularly well known for looking at things. If, however, it is in fact the tree that is
the subject, then the marking changes to become Tōkos ankāliri īnkirok, with all that
extra marking reinforcing that this bizarre and counter-intuitive notion is indeed the
meaning that’s being communicated. Verbs are also marked for tense by combining
a stem alternation system with a series of suffixes. Back in Proto-Thirēan, a bare verb was interpreted
in the simple or perfective aspect, and reduplicating the first syllable resulted in an iterative
or imperfective reading. Modern Nekāchti retains this system, having
a long and short stem for every verb. However, while in the old days, the form of
the long stem was perfectly predictable, so many sound changes have happened since then
that now some of the long and short stems are virtually unrecognizable from each other. For example, the short stem of the verb “to
create” is nios, and so you’d think the long stem would be “ninios”, but actually
it’s “nerios”. Why? Well, in Proto-Thirēan, the verb was completely
regular, formed with the short stem “ndeu” with a prenasalized stop, and the long stem
was therefore “ndendeu”. As the language evolved, however, /e/ became
/i/ when next to another vowel, and /u/ became /o/ in all environments, which obfuscated
the original reduplication pattern slightly. Then later, prenasalized stops became pure
nasals word-initially and plain voiced stops word-internally, and finally, much later,
/d/ became /r/ between vowels. This same series of changes affected other
words that began in prenasalized stops, but words that began with a pure nasal in the Proto-language follow a more transparent pattern, and in the modern language, there’s no way of telling which pattern a given word will follow. The long and short verb stems combine with
a number of obligatory suffixes, rather innocuously termed as the “tense” suffixes, though
they encode a lot more than just tense. Over millennia, various auxiliary verbs evolved
and became suffixed, which encoded different meanings depending on whether they were paired
with the long or short stem. As more and more auxiliary verbs became suffixed,
Old Nekāchti became heavily agglutinative, but later on, sound changes blurred the boundaries
between affixes, melding them into a single highly fusional suffix. There’s a whole lot of information packed
into these things, so we’ll take it one step at a time. Each of Nekāchti’s twelve tenses is formed
by combining either the long or short verb stem with a tense suffix. The present, perfect, imperfect, and future
all function as you might expect, and the gnomic marks states of being or general truths. The perfect, imperfect, and gnomic each have
an “indirect” version, which serve to indicate inferential or second-hand evidence. The habitual marks actions that occur often
or customarily, while the past habitual can best be translated with “used to”. The experiential marks actions that took place
at an indefinite point in the past, and can also be used as a sort of remote past. Finally, the conditional is used for hypotheticals
or just as a general irrealis. Each of the tense suffixes also has a negative
and interrogative form. Proto-Thirēan and many of its descendants
have a negative and interrogative auxiliary, but in Nekāchti they became affixed to the
verb and have now fused with the tense suffixes. Similarly, what began as modal auxiliaries
became suffixed to form four grammatical moods: The Indicative for general or factual statements,
The Optative for actions that are desired or intended, The Potential for events that
might or are able occur, and Necessative for events that must or need to happen. Finally, there are five different conjugations
based on the phonology of the stem, producing 560 distinct combinations of tense, aspect,
and mood. Thankfully, you don’t have to deal with
the full spectrum of verbal madness too often, as Nekāchti permits a maximum of only one
fully-finite verb per sentence. To link clauses together, Nekāchti renders
verbs in subordinate clauses as converbs, which convey meanings that in English are
usually expressed using conjunctions. Notice how only the main verb takes person-marking. Unless otherwise specified, converbs are assumed
to have the same subject as the verb in the main clause. Nekachti uses these converbs extensively in
clause-chaining, but also for derivation as well, like the expression for “to weave”,
“nios ipsī” literally means “to create by means of intertwining”. Nekāchti also makes heavy use of compounding
and noun-incorporation for derivation. Over the eons, some frequently incorporated
elements have become fossilized as dedicated derivational affixes, but one of Nekāchti’s
unique tricks is deriving new words using case suffixes. For example, one could say something like
Tōkōs tsēriok ītevik “the tree caught fire”, where tsēriok consists of tsēri,
“fire” with the locative case suffix. While here this word functionally serves as
an adpositional phrase, it can also be used as an adjective, as in Tsēriok tōkōs “the
burning tree” or more literally, “the on-fire tree”. This can then be turned into a noun by applying
the singulative to create Tsēriōka “something that’s on fire”, and this can then be
appended with further case marking, as in Sēli tsēriōkan “the light of the burning thing”,
or it can even undergo noun incorporation, as in Tsitsēriōkānalak, “I extinguished the burning thing", literally “I on-fire-thing-extinguished”, This system is extremely flexible and is used
pervasively to derive new nouns and adjectives. Adjectives fall into one of two broad classes:
noun-like and verb-like. The majority of adjectives are verb-like,
having been derived in Proto-Thirēan from stative verbs. These adjectives are able to take much of
the same derivational morphology as verbs, and can stand on their own as a predicate. Meanwhile noun-like adjectives take entirely
different morphology and require a copula when used predicatively. Similarly, there are two classes of postpositions;
one older class derived from Proto-Thirean verb roots, many of which shortened up to
become case suffixes, while a newer class of postpositions has since evolved from nouns
that works in combination with the case system, with the exact meaning depending on which
case the noun is placed in. Nekāchti is radically non-configurational,
with word order being shuffled around to convey focus and topic. Focus is sentence-initial, and the topic,
as well as any obviate argument or other background information usually comes immediately before
the verb, which is most often the last word in the sentence. And that is Nekāchti in a nutshell. As always, there’s lots of additional details
that I don’t have time to get into here, but I hope this has been an adequate overview. If you want to see more content like this,
let me know in the comments below or consider supporting me on Patreon. Until next time… Pehaspemō kiron (thank you all for watching)!
