Mayápo Language
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Mayápo was the formal language spoken for several thousand years in what has been called the golden age of Helevos, in the now sunken land of Miyarous (or Miarris). It has been extinct as a spoken language for over two thousand years, but it still used as a scholastic written language throughout the world. The Bordani dialect of Marr Sirque (Miyarsich) is closest to the original tongue, but there were many offshoots of the language, including all the Eloyoun dialects of Bordan, Oonar and Saloya. Modern Hartheran has many Mayápon loan-words.
Pronunciation RulesStress, falls only in one place, except in foreign load-words. Rules for multi-syllabic words:
Apostrophes signify a break in sounds during a word, or are a mark of irregular stress. When separating consonants, it indicates a minor vowel transistion between these consonants (the schwa or ugh sound in English). Between vowels it indicates an unvoiced glottal stop rather than running the vowels together, eg eeah is pronounced "EEyah" ; whereas ee'ah has a distinct unvoiced stop between the two. This difference was gradually lost in modern Bhordani.
Vowel sounds Words are transliterated for British English. Single-letter vowels are short and pure: a like cat, o like pot, e like pet. Short vowel sounds are almost always maintained, even at the end of words, as in áhro (o like pot , not like low ).
There are other consonant sounds unfamiliar to English speakers:
Absent sounds There is no g, j, ch, sh or voiced h sound. Gender
There are no "genders" in the language, although there are two sets of pronouns denoting human and inanimate neutral objects.
Nouns
Nouns are not gendered, but they are declined as to "definiteness", and follow slightly different rules in each case. There are four groups:
Great wordplay can be made by interchanging the declension used. For example, the stem-verb, fahnook, meaning 'to govern', may be described as a concept ( fahnookbee=governance), a solid thing ( fahnookdee=the institutions and government buildings), people (fahnookee=the government) or an activity (fahnookuk=governing). This allows great subtlety and specificity of meaning, as well as word-economy.
Adjectives
Firstly, it must be noted that there is no explicit verb for "to be". There is no "I am", because in Mayapo that makes no sense. "I am" means "I exist". When adjectives are required in a complex sentence, the tense-appropriate participle is used. (NB In later Mayapon and modern Bhourdani, this was simplified.)
Verb Tenses
Verbs are constructed by agglutinating prefixes. It is quite straightforward, adding two prefixes to the verb stem: one for the tense of the verb, and one for the subject pronoun .
However, there are more tenses than the three norms of Past , Present and Future . Discussing everyday actions (I eat, I sleep, I run) are quite straightforward, but when describing something or expressing an opinion there is a requirement for using "evidential" tenses. There are different forms for negatives, conditionals and "evidentiality", or the certainty of the speaker as to how true a statement may be. The nature of the language is highly philosophical and expressive, particularly because it is now only spoken as a language in academic and scientific circles.
To illustrate evidentiality, take a sample statement, "grass is green". In Mayapo, this is expressed as the Definitive truth, saying "all grass is green". A listener might argue however that that it is not always true. So he should use the Speculative case, "it is probable that all grass is green", based on all likely experience. Or he could say "grass is mostly green" in the Generic tense, to the extent that grass is on the whole green. To save this frustration, the speaker could instead a definitive article, speaking in the Specific Objective tense, meaning "this/that grass is green".
The Definitive is mostly used in everyday speech and transactions. For general discussion and academic speech, the Evidential cases are used extensively, whereas the Definitive is saved for expressing a particular emphasis. |