The Great Game: Kanhlengo Topic

General Characteristics

Keywords: typology, syntax, grammar

(This stub article will be used to make grand, sweeping statements about the overall structure and characteristics of the language, for ease of reference - don't go into the weeds, anything complicated should get its own Topic.)

The name of the language is Kanhlengo, and its speakers are the Kanhlengi.

Kanhlengo is a topic-prominent language. It allows for marking more than one topic in the same sentence.

Adpositions are suffixed to their object nouns.

Kanhlengo associates the past with the forward direction and the future with the backward direction. The suffix 'za' means 'before' temporally and 'behind' spatially. The suffix 'ræn' means 'after' temporally and 'in front of' spatially.

No word may be more than 4 syllables long. If an affix would make a word 5 syllables long, the root must be reduced to a shorter form, or the word must be broken into two.

There are no distinctions made in the inherent structure of the language (vocabulary, grammar, &c.) for any register; all societal distinctions are conveyed solely in the choice of phrasing.

There are to be no Loanwords/Borrowings for any words apart from Proper nouns and ideas/phenomena that originate from the 21st century and onwards. (words that are clearly onomatopoeia do not count as borrowings so we dont get into arguments about that down the line)

All words for nations, ethnics, languages, places, etc. have to be derived from one of their endonyms, if there are any, and adapted to our phonology and morphology.
The exception is conlangs which aren't supposed to represent natlangs in a fictional world (so the word for Klingon must come from "tlhIngan Hol", but the word for Esperanto can mean "sexist eurocentric language" or whatever).

There are three main parts of speech: nouns, modifiers, and conjunctions. Verbs formed from nouns are intransitive, verbs formed from modifiers are transitive, and verbs formed from conjunctions are ditransitive. Each main part of speech has special sets of closed-class words. Special types of nouns are pronouns, interjections, and numbers. Special types of modifiers are adjectives and particles. A special type of conjunctions is measure words. Modifiers can modify nouns, verbs, conjunctions, and other modifiers, except adjectives only modify nouns. Conjunctions can conjoin two nouns, two verbs, two modifiers, or two claues, except measure words only conjoin a number and noun. Proper names are considered a fourth part of speech, which can act either like nouns or modifiers.

Vocabulary

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