Seqaal

Seqaal or Seqaalqun is the foremost surviving 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.

topics sidebar cult1 of the Issid language family, spoken primarily in the Sekalkot province of central Ororr.

The language has existed in various forms for at least four thousand years, descending from the early tongues of the Issid Block Culture.

Words have a minimum three letters, which form the base of each word. There are also three modes of vowels, short, medium and long, making the language partly tonal. Vowel tone changes the inflection of the word, particularly indicating plurals and cases. Consonants also shift from voiced to unvoiced forms, conveying additional meaning.

A perfect example is the word Seqal itself. Seqal is the subject, as in, “Seqal is a city”. Seqaal is “of/from Seqal” (eg I am from Seqal=Ġé Seqaal). “to Seqal” is Séqal (stress the first syllable). With Seqal is Seqalé, without Seqal is iSeqal.

Words are normally weakly stressed in the nominative, if at all. Inflections primarily come from changes in stress, which thereby modifies the vowel sound or adds prefixes or suffixes.

subject Subject/Nominative No stress Seqal from/of Possessive/Genitive Stress on second Seqaal object Object/Accusative -uch Seqaluch (done) by Indirect Object/Ablative ay- aySeqal With Comitative -é Seqale Without Anti-Comitative i- iSeqal to Progressive Stress on first syllable Seqal Some Plural (2-5) According to case Seqyal Many Plural (4+) According to case Seqral

There is an additional Locative case, which is modifier for prepositions (below, above etc). Vocative cases, ie calling a noun, or using the noun in an imperative form, inverts the middle consonant to a voiced form (if it is not already). Eg Segal! This is also the only time when all consonants are stressed equally, unless some other meaning is intended. Eg. Segal! Means “(Go) to Seqal”.

Adjectives follow the

There are five basic vowel sounds as written, however their pronunciation has three lengths depending on meaning.

• i (sit), ee (seed), ir
• e (get), eh, air (lare)
• a, aa (cart), aar
• o (hot), or (store), oor (ewer)
• u, ow (row), oo (boot)

There are two levels of plural, loosely indicating some (a handful, meaning 2-5) and many (more than a handful, ie 5+). For some, insert -y- before the last vowel, for many insert -r- before the last vowel. (Interestingly neither of these sounds were considered present in Issid, though they crept into common speech.) eg. Seqyaal means “some (people) of Seqal”, whereas Seqraal means a crowd of people from Seqal, or the people of Seqal. Some words have irregular plurals, particularly foreign loan-words, and pronouns, which insert “s” before the vowel.

Most consonants have two spoken forms, voiced and unvoiced, though they are written as the same letter. Like the change in vowel stress, different voicing alters the meaning of a word. (This is called lenition.) The Issid language group was a precursor of the more formally tonal languages found in modern Ororrplugin-autotooltip__small plugin-autotooltip_bigOrorr

Ororr [o-ROARR, ɒ̝rɔ'ɾ], also called the Holy Motherland of Ororr, is a theocratic nation in Anásthias, one of the world's great powers. It the largest nation in the world, perhaps the largest empire in history, occupying the entire northwest of the continent between the mountains and the sea. Ororrviridlanguagelanguagelanguage.

UnVoiced Voiced B P S Z K Kh G* Q H CH L Y d Th N M ġ ğ J X

There are several levels of “g” sound, which are separate consonants. “G” is spoken with the tongue behind the teeth and the back of the throat open. The “Q” is merely its unvoiced form, sounding close to K. K is spoken with the tongue behind the teeth, but the middle tongue pressed against the palate.

is spoken rather as in “got”, but Seqaal accent gives it an additional popping sound, almost a glottal stop. is its unvoiced version, which adds a kind of swallowing motion to the sound, and is used particularly when followed by a consonant.

Old Issid was developed in the ancient sunken river valleys of what is now the Gulf of Wiyel. It is a reed-script, with letters formed by pressing the cut end of a read stalk into mud bricks. Issid had only four eight letters, based on pictographs, but they were given meaning by a complex series of diacritics, indicating mode, voice, and pointers to intermediate vowel sounds. The later language expanded the alphabet to twelve, and then eighteen letters, influenced by other languages.

I - ġé We (I plural) – ğsé That (he, she, it) You (sing) Them (you pl., they)

Seqaal is interesting, and divergent from High Issid, in that it has a curious form of “implied verbs”. This means that commonly used simple verbs like “to go”, “to be” and often “to have”, are implied rather than specified. This started as a colloquial, idiomatic form of Low Issid, but developed into a useful feature of the Seqal language.

For example, as stated above “Segal” means “to Seqal”, in an imperative form. Hence it implies the instruction “go to Seqal!”. Implied verbs are most often carried by pronouns. For example, “Ğsé Seqaal” means literally “We from-Seqal”. However, it obviously implies “We are from Seqal”. Pronouns on their own often dispense with the verb “to be”, because it is implied by the case.

Similarly, “Ġé Seqal” means literally “I to Seqal”, but implies the meaning “I go to Seqal”, or “I am going”. Even tense is often dispensed with in these cases, in spoken language at least, because depending on the context, “Ġé Seqal” can equally mean “I went to”, “I will go to”, or “I am going to”.

Plurals can dispense “to have”. “Ğsé chebyeen” means “we some food”, but implies “we have some food”.

This can make the spoken language extremely efficient, without losing specificity of meaning. The full form of these verbs still exists, and is used to clarify meaning, or when using highly formal speech.