Elkarîl
Facts
- Language: Elkarîl
- Created: 2002
- Alternate names:
- Language code:
- Language family: fictional diachronic language
- Script:
A constructed language by Mark Rosenfelder.
"Each CVC syllable in Elkarîl is drawn in the form of a face-- taking advantage of the hominid brain's ability to perceive faces quickly and easily as a gestalt." "Elkarîl is the language of the elcari... It is the best-known non-human language of Ereláe... elkar is literally `the making people'. I write elcar, plural elcari, because this is the form of the word in Verdurian. I avoid the translation `dwarf' since it imports too many associations from terrestrial legends."
It employs a large number of single-phoneme affixes, which allow some fairly frightening consonant clusters: gnqêtkh, `despised father'; p-tñêchôngmsh, `and full of iron ore'. Though most words can be analyzed as a sequence of phonemes, the language makes semantic use of some continuous phonetic variables, such as frontness, tongue height, or length of articulation. There are no personal pronouns; however, variables can be arbitrarily and explicitly assigned. Verbs don't morphologically indicate tense (that is, time of action) or the perfect (that is, completed action), nor are there any subjunctive or evidential inflections. Default categories are often narrower than in human languages. E.g. where we would say `tree', an elcar must specify ngach `conifer' or bosh `deciduous tree'. And where we have `hill' and `mountain', Elkarîl has ten words.
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