Table of Contents

Mayápo Language

Mayápo or Mayápon [may-YAPP-poe] was the formal languageplugin-autotooltip__small plugin-autotooltip_bigLanguages

List of human languages and dialects, contemporary and extinct.

Language

language

This is in a series of articles about Languages and Communication.

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of the ancient realm of Miyarris, spoken for several thousand years in the Celadon Epoch and after.

Language

This is in a series of articles about Languages and Communication.

Though it been extinct as a spoken language for almost two thousand years, it continued to be used throughout the Beryl Epoch by academics and writers throughout the civilised world. The Kahtoyni dialect of Marr Sirque (Miyarsich) is closest to the original tongue, but all the Eloyoun languages of Kahtoyn, Oonar and Saloya are derived from it. Modern Hartheranplugin-autotooltip__small plugin-autotooltip_bigHarthera

The Hartheran Union, commonly named Harthera, is an imperialist maritime nation state dominating the northeast of Anásthias. It is one of the two great powers of the modern epoch, arguably the most technologically and militarily powerful nation in the world, only matched by the vast size and wealth of its neighbour, viridOrorrMEOrorrOrorrOrorrOrorr
also has a significant vocabulary Mayápon loan-words via Eloyounplugin-autotooltip__small plugin-autotooltip_bigEloyoun People

The Eloyoun people are an ethnic group found throughout eastern and northeastern Anásthias. They are the majority ethnicity in Kahtoyn and most of southern Harthera. Modern Hartheran language and culture is a blend of Eloyoun and Iskean.

The Eloyoun people claim descent from the ancient realm of Harthera
, as do occidental languages like Doroun.

Grammar

Pronunciation

Vowels

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).

Other sounds

Mayapo has some consonant sounds peculiar to the Eloyoun language family:

Absent sounds

Mayapo has no g, j, ch, sh or voiced h sounds.

Gender

Although Mayapo has no “genders” denoting sexual gender, it has distinct pronouns denoting humans, animals and inanimate neutral objects. There in fact are three human pronouns, enabling a speaker to always identify

eg in English, While he was talking to him, he accidentally overhead. In Mayapo, speakers label each subject as they are introduced, so that they can be referred to later by simple pronouns without having to keep repeating names. This is used to a great extent in the structured discourses of Mayapon literature, and has made such texts difficult to translate into other languages.

Stress

Stress, falls only in one place, except in foreign load-words. The rules for multi-syllabic words are as follows:

Apostrophes

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.

Nouns

Nouns are not gendered, but they are declined as to “definiteness”, and follow slightly different rules in each case. There are four groups:

  1. abstract concepts (eg thought, creativity, numbers) [dahkoobi, bee]
  2. solid objects (rock, cart) [ahkoudi, dee]
  3. people or places [boopzahki, kee]
  4. activities (present participles eg. running, climbing) [dtahki, - uk ]

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 Kahtoyni, 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 greenplugin-autotooltip__small plugin-autotooltip_bigGreen

The Green Kingdom of flora and fauna includes humans, mammals, birds, whales, greenfish, and most green plants and crops cultivated by humankind.
”. 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.