Kinta Facts 10: Language

What? Two days in a row? Finally, the highly anticipated conclusion of Kinta Facts which took way longer to make than I expected. Oops.

Here's the language that they use. You've probably seen it used before with no key, but here is the formal introduction. The alphabet is a nasty mixture of random European characters that at best don't match their IRL sound and at worst are completely mutated so it looks wrong to everyone. But don't be fooled, it's an actual constructed language, not a substitution cipher. The grammar is intended to be reasonably consistent, and overall it's like a mixture of English, 2 years of high school Spanish, and 2 hours of reading about Esperanto.

No dictionary here yet since the words are made up on a need-to-know basis. Some of the words obviously derive from real ones:
  sedad "city" (from city, ciudad)

Sometimes the connection is less clear:
  uzhukrar "to cross" (from cruzar)

And sometimes they are completely random:
  aveshiko "electricity"

Transcript:
Most kintas can speak our ancestral language. During the imperial era, we spread it around the globe. In some places, it stuck, so varieties of it are in use worldwide. The kinta alphabet has 24 letters. Formerly written with doubled glyphs, a unique form or diacritic is now preferred to write voiced consonants. Accent marks may be used to indicate stress where it differs from the usual pattern.

The language uses SVO word order. There are three noun declensions, adjectives precede and agree in number with nouns, and prepositions are used. Aside from pronouns, there is no grammatical gender. An inflected, null-subject language, verbs are conjugated based on person, number, and tense. Kintas count in base 10, but our traditional numerals are falling out of use.

/ˈelaː/! /ˈjeʔˌo ˈd̠ɛzd̠eg/!
 -> "Hello! I am Desdeg!"

/naˈʒelaˌme/!
 -> "Don't hurt me!"

/ˈel jɛl ˈnal, ˈkas d̠o ˈso ˈsɛdad/?
 -> "Yes or no, are you going to the city?"

Traditional dialects use diminutive forms to address smaller folks; their use today may be endearing or condescending:

/ˈd̠atas ˈkon/?
 -> "What are you doing, little one?"


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