Bixînke language

Bixînke Language
Family	Chalmean language
Spoken in:	Isle of Chalmea, Bawám
Spoken by minority communities in:	northwestern Namjog, south Keskus savanna.
approximate number of native speakers:	240.000 in Chalmea 100.000 in Bawám 6.000 in north-west Namjog

Bixînke [biʔǐŋke] is the language spoken throughout the southeastern coast of Chalmea. It will also be, in the centuries to come, the language which will give way to the Chalmean family. It has a simple, almost non-existent morphology, SOV-SVO syntax with head-first phrase order. It is grossly underdeveloped, as it is a protolang.

Phoneme Inventory

/ p t k b d g ʔ tʃ dʒ m n w j l ɾ s h /

< p t k b d g x ch dj m n w j l r s h > a e i o u (flat tone) á é í ó ú (high tone) à è ì ò ù (falling tone) â ê î ô û (rising tone)

Phonotactics

All syllables have consonantal onsets, and as such strings of two vowels don't happen. Any hiatus resultant from word compounding and loanwords is resolved with intrusive /?/. Only non-obstruents, /m n w j l ɾ s h/ take the role of coda.

Grammatical Morphology

There are two broad classes of non-grammatical non-particle words in Bixînke; nominals and verbals. Nominals fill the roles of traditional adjectives and nouns, serving as verbal arguments or argument modifiers, and are indifferentiated otherwise. They have no known grammatical morphology.

sêhí

"snake"

kûbà

"genitals"

Although there are many forms of productive nominal morphology, all of them fullfill semantic, as opposed to grammatical, functions, so they will be discussed elsewhere. Nominals serve as verbs and adverbs, serving as pivots, encoding dynamic information about propositons, and modifying either other verbals or nominals. Verbs come in two flavours in Bixînke; finite and non-finite. Finite verbs are syntactic pivots and act as the head of a verbal phrase, which is in turn the 'main' verb of a proposition. Non-finite verbs act a bit like nominals, modifying either nominals or other verbals. Non-finite verbs act as action nouns, gerunds, and infinitives.

chóta

"I search"

chótam

"you/they/he/she/it/we search"

chotál

"to search/searching/searched"

So we have three verbal stems, or rather, two, the non-me -m morpheme, which reflects that the agent of the verb is not the first person singular, and the -l morpheme, which also concentrates any tonal features in the root into the last syllable, and turns a verb into a non-finite one. There is another piece of morphology that can be considered grammatical, which is productive reduplication to reflect number. To indicate a plural whenever it is strictly required to distinguish it from a singular, that is, when you want to specifically state that you're not referring to a single thing, the nominal is uttered twice: this induces no subsidiary process.

sêhí

"snake"

sêhí-sêhí

"snakes"

Syntax

There are two syntactical structures dominant in Bixînke, and use of one or the other marks sentence, level modality: Realis utterances, this is, those in which the speaker is speaking about an actual occurence or relationship other proposition, which he believes to be true, have a Subject - Verb - Object structure, while irrealis utterances such as interrogative, conditional, desiderative or hypothetical phrases are verb-final, that is, Subject - Object - Verb. Bixînke syntax is strictly left-branching, placing the modifiers after the head. Adverbs and adverbial phrases are considered modifiers, so adverbials follow their verbs just like adjectives follow their nouns.

lahichèm kuko - cold night

lahichèm noriwlû - long night

Numbers

1 ʔu

2 li

3 no

4 tol

5 hu

6 bê

7 já

8 sil

9 ki

10 pôba

11 tʃi

12 tʃiʔu

13 tʃili

14 tʃitol

15 tʃihu

16+ banka

~30+ kúlte

~80+ no

Further than that the Bixînke language has no larger number, and superior quantities are referred to with the word xaxúl, meaning a whole lot, a large quantity of something.

Pronouns

Chalmean has some 10 different personal pronouns, but not all of them are used throughout the Chalmeosphere.