LotM - Apr 16: Thuun: view article

Oh boy do we have a lot to discuss here. Thuun has a delightfully Finnic-meets-Inuit aesthetic, and is in no way short on vowels.

Starting with the consonant inventory, Thuun is delightfully sparse: /m n ŋ p t k s ʃ l j/. /ŋ ʃ/ can only appear medially and finally. Nasals and /l/ have a habit of devoicing near other voiceless consonants, and the stops will voice in specific scenarios. There are a variety of other allophones than appear, as well as restrictions on consonant clusters. The full details can be read in this article. The consonants, orthographically, are pretty straightforward, though /ʃ/ is written as <r>.

Vowels have a much more intricate situation. There are ten phonemic vowel qualities, which appear in various lengths. /i y ʉ e ø ɤ æ ɑ/ all appear in short, long (:) and overlong (::) qualities. /o/ only can be long and overlong, and /u/ appears as just short. These are just the monophthongs.

Diphthongs and triphthongs, however, are a giant mess. There are 38 different phonemic combinations, each of which comes in long and overlong varieties. I really can't even begin to explain them all, so just check out its summary page. january has also been kind enough to prepare an article about the phonemic vowels and polypthongs.

All fun to mention are two other orthographic devices used in Thuun, the colon (:) separates morphemes within a compound word, while a hyphen (-) marks a syllable break between vowels (since polypthongs can be a couple letters long) within a morpheme.

Thuun also features vowel harmony of the front-back variety, and many affixes have front and back varieties. In compounding, buffer vowels (such as /i/) can be used to join words with vowels of different backness.

[edit] [top]Grammar and Morphology

Thuun is an agglutinating language with some fusional aspects. There are a ton of grammatical cases, covering things from basic cases such as accusative and dative, to locatives like inessive and subessive, and others such as comparitive and comitative. All cases are marked with endings that are directly affixed to applicable words, and each suffix comes in a singular and plural variety.

Thuun also likes to incorporate nouns into verbs or attach adjectives right to the nouns they describe.

[edit] [top]More on Thuun

Can we just look at that flag? Damn it's perdy.

Crave more? Check out its articles, translations, or LexiBuild sets.

[edit] [top]A Note on LotM

Got suggestions for how the next LotM should be written? See something in Thuun that wasn't covered and you wish it had been? Hate my guts and want to tell me? Feel free to shoot us (either argyle or phi2dao) a PM with your thoughts, suggestions, and hate mail. Also feel free to drop by the LotM clan if you have other feedback, want to join in the voting process, or nominate a language! ✎ Edit Article ✖ Delete Article