Mayápo Language

Mayápo or Mayápon [may-YAPP-poe] was the formal language of the ancient realm of Miyarris, spoken for several thousand years in the Celadon Epoch and after.

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 Hartheran also has a significant vocabulary Mayápon loan-words via Eloyoun, as do occidental languages like Doroun.

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).

• u is usually like hut, but can be followed by an unwritten w or y sound when followed by other vowels, eg zuéeroo (zu-WEE-roo), kuáhoo (ku-WAH-oo), úi (UH-wi')
• ee is always pronounced like see
• ay is like say.
• ah is like car, but it is important to note that there is no real consonant letter H (like in heat). Therefore in a word such as ahyahl , the stress falls on the last syllable because Y is the first real consonant. However, when a vowel follows ah (eg umahee ) there is no hard 'h' sound (as in heat), but there can be a slight aspiration, particularly where the next syllable forms the main stress of a word (eg ah'ayp, not “ah-Hayp”)
• oo is like zoo; ou is shorter as in book. There is a longer sound transcribed as ooo - like oo but doubled in duration.
• r is unvoiced at the end of words, as in UK English
• double rr signifies that it the R is rolled, particularly at the end of words (regional variations gave r a short roll, rr a much longer roll).
• s is always soft and unvoiced (like hiss ), z is the hard voiced version.
• p is pronounced with the lips curled in much like b, but it is unvoiced.

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

• pf similar to the German (eg pfennig),
• ts is an unvoiced sound like the Russian, Tsar
• ds is similar but voiced.
• dt is close to the Spanish 'd' - like a t but with the tongue behind the teeth and a slight hiss.
• tl (eg tloup) is an unvoiced sound, the t is in the starting position for a T with tongue behind teeth, but followed through as if 'kl' (eg click).

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

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

• Stress is usually on the first syllable beginning with a consonant, eg ahYAHL.
• Where there is an apostrophe, this indicates that (eg bahpf'TAmoo) the first part of the word is unstressed. The first rule is then applied to the remainder, as if it were a whole word .
• Where there are two consecutive vowel sounds after the first consonant, the second vowel sound is stressed, because in speech the vowels are separated by an unvoiced y sound, eg in the word kee-yAH-pto it falls on the second syllable, as opposed to KEE-pto where it falls on the first.
• Exceptions to these rules are marked with an accent, eg áhro (AH-ro), kuáhoo (indicates koo-AH-oo, not koo-YAH-oo). In some texts accents are written even in regular words, for the sake of clarity.
• Very long words, and foreign loan-words, sometimes have irregular stress including more than one stress point. Where words have stress-accent marks, normal stress rules are over-ridden.

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 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.

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.)

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.

• Definitive (is)
• Specific
• Generic (is generally)
• Hypothetical (might be)

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.