Having begun as the dialect of an unassuming colony on the coast of the Eritōske sea,
Nekāchti ultimately became the language of one of the greatest nations in history.
While with the passing of many centuries its purity has been sullied
from mixing with the mongrel tongue of the commoners,
it is still recognized by scholars and learned men
as the language of science, knowledge, and logic.
To learn Nekāchti is to show great wisdom, and to come to know the glory of our forefathers.
Or at least that’s what a Nekāchti speaker might tell you.
In actuality, Nekāchti is just a conlang I started working on in 2016, and, at, the
time of recording, it’s my most thoroughly developed and possibly my favorite language
that I have yet created.
Nekāchti belongs to the Thirēan language family, one of the largest and most diverse
language families in the world.
Nekāchti has undergone many tumultuous changes over the 6000 years since the proto-language
was last spoken, foremost among them is the phonetic inventory, which has simplified considerably.
Within the main branches of the Thirēan language family tree, the sound series of proto-Thirēan
merged in various ways.
Specifically, in the branch leading to Nekāchti, in due order, the uvulars merged with the
velars, front-rounded vowels lost their rounding, the prenasalized stops became plain voiced
stops, aspirated stops became fricatives, and finally, voiced stops ended up being lost
in various ways, leaving Nekāchti with a rather modest collection of only 13 consonants
and 4 vowels.
Concurrent with all these sound changes, the basic CVC syllable structure of Proto-Thirēan
increased in overall complexity in Nekāchti, but with a lot more restrictions on how syllables
can be put together.
No word may begin or end with more than one consonant.
A word may begin with any consonant, but the only consonants permitted to end a word are
/m/, /n/, /s/, and /k/.
A word-internal cluster may consist of a maximum of a nasal or obstruent followed by an obstruent
followed by /r/.
There are no diphthongs and no geminates.
In addition to these constraints, however, Nekāchti’s long and turbulent history has
resulted in a host of phonological quirks that only apply sometimes.
Sometimes /k/ disappears between vowels, sometimes it doesn’t.
Sometimes /t/ turns into an /r/, sometimes it doesn’t.
And sometimes sounds just appear or disappear seemingly at random when words are conjugated,
and, frustratingly for new learners, the only way of dealing with these is through brute
force memorization.
Default stress is on the antepenult, with stress falling on the penult only if it contains
a long vowel or is closed.
Nekāchti uses its own script which…
I’m honestly not really sure how to classify it in terms of system.
The closest real-world equivalent would probably be Hangul, or maybe Sinhalese, I guess?
It’s a system I like to call a super-alphasyllabary, and once again, the best way to grasp what
that means is with a history lesson.
The Nekāchti people were first introduced to the concept of writing when they encountered
the Edun script, one of the oldest writing systems in the world, which became very popular
in the central regions in the years before the First Empire of the Sun.
Thing is, though, learning to read and write with the Edun script is, to put it lightly…
STAGGERINGLY difficult.
Explaining the complexity is well beyond the scope of this video, I’ll save that for
another time, but here’s the basic gist of it: Let’s say you wanted to write the word qhan
or “to sell”.
One way to do this is to use a determinative like suunnga, “gold”, to hint that the
word has something to do with money, then you can follow it up with a character for
a word that begins with the same Consonant-Vowel sequence, like qhambu, “armor-fish”,
or one ends with the same Vowel-Consonant sequence, like thaan or “sun”, or, if
you’re feeling particularly generous, you might even include both.
In which case, since qhan is a one-syllable word, the syllable characters will have an
overlapping vowel, and using this method, you can even write out every single syllable
of a polysyllabic word, giving you a pretty airtight way of conveying the exact word you’re
trying to transcribe.
The only problem is that, by the time the Old Nekāchti speakers were introduced to
this system, the syllable characters and determinatives had been created and standardized…
over a thousand years prior.
And in that time, the Edun languages had gone through a number of substantial changes, none
of which had been documented in the writing system, giving Edun one of the worst spelling
systems in history.
So, while this word used to be pronounced exactly how it’s spelled, /thangqərkhiim/,
after a thousand years of history it’s pronounced dzvirzhã, but the spelling is still exactly the same.
Needless to say, the Nekāchti weren’t particularly impressed.
It was already bad enough that they had to map the characters for Edun’s foreign sounds
onto their own phonology, and that they needed to memorize hundreds of syllable characters
on top of thousands of logographs, but throw in these terrible spelling rules on top of that
and you might as well just call it a day.
But the Nekāchti didn’t want to pass up on an invention as useful as writing, so the
royal council of scribes convened to try and find an easier way to write.
After countless hours of scrutiny, they started to notice a pattern amid the madness.
Often, definitely not always, but often, when written in the expanded form, the top character
will hint at the first sound of the syllable, while the bottom character usually indicates
the sound that ends the syllable.
The vowel, on the other hand, is basically impossible to predict.
By this point in history, the Edun vowels had shifted around so much that you might
as well just make a blind guess because those “syllable” characters certainly aren’t
going to help you out.
“So”, said the Nekāchti scribes, “we’ll just ignore the vowel.
Let’s just take the glyphs for the /a/ syllables, which most often keep their quality, and if
the vowel is something other than /a/, we’ll mark that with a diacritic."
Using this system, the number of characters was reduced from multiple thousands to only 36
The simplicity of this system made it spread like wildfire across the subcontinent, and,
after a few centuries of hand-writing, once the initial and final characters blended together
into ligatures, the Nekāchti super-alphasyllabary was born.
In this system, entire syllables, including onset, nucleus, and coda are encoded in a
single character.
There are also three special characters that represent a voiceless stop followed by /r/,
a particularly common sequence in Old Nekāchti.
The script also uses a basic system of punctuation and, while edun was pretty flexible in terms
of writing direction, Nekāchti is now written exclusively right to left.
The Nekāchti are very proud of their writing system and frequently impose reforms, though
there are always a few lingering instances of historical spelling.
Unfortunately, however, Nekāchti’s grammar is not so straightforward,
Nekāchti is highly synthetic, more than a little irregular, and has features such as
split-ergativity, non-configurationality, and double-marking.
Nekāchti takes animacy very seriously.
All nouns are classed as either animate or inanimate, and are treated very differently
depending on how they’re classified.
Typically only animate nouns take plural marking or the definite article, while most inanimate
nouns are treated as mass nouns and are ambiguous to number; however, to emphasize exactly one
of something, a singulative marker exists, which also has a number of unique derivational properties
The animacy of a noun also interacts with case marking.
While some older Thirēan languages had over a dozen cases, Nekāchti retains only seven.
The core arguments of a verb phrase are most often marked with one of three cases; The
Nominative marks both animate subjects and inanimate direct objects, the Accusative marks
animate direct objects, and the Ergative marks Inanimate subjects of transitive verbs.
However, Nekāchti also features a high degree of quirky subject, so the subject and object
can be marked with other cases depending on the properties of verbs.
For instance, the Benefactive marks the subject of a verb of experience, the Instrumental
is used for the agent of an accidental or involuntary action, and the locative and genitive
mark the objects of a change of state.
The subject and direct object are also marked on the verb with an obligatory set of prefixes,
including separate markers for animate and inanimate 3rd person, and a distinction between
proximate and obviate arguments.
Marking an argument as obviate indicates that it’s less salient or relevant to the conversation,
or that it’s already been introduced to the discourse and is therefore background
information.
The indefinite marker expresses that the argument is unknown or undefined, and is often used
to derive intransitive verbs from transitive ones.
There’s an ergative split in these prefixes as well, with 1st, 2nd, and animate 3rd person
following an accusative pattern, while the obviate and inanimate 3rd person, and indefinite
person follow an ergative pattern, that is, the subject prefixes of an intransitive verb
serve as object prefixes on a transitive verb.
Note that since a 3rd person animate subject and a 3rd person inanimate object are both
encoded by the absence of a prefix, and that the nominative is marked by a lack of a case
suffix, then in a sentence with an animate subject and inanimate object, like for example
Ankāli tōko kirok “The king looked at the tree”, neither of the nouns nor the
verb will take any role-marking at all.
The sentence is still understandable because more often than not, the subject of any given
transitive verb is going to be animate while the object will be inanimate.
So in this case, we can assume that the king is the subject, since trees aren’t
particularly well known for looking at things.
If, however, it is in fact the tree that is the subject, then the marking changes to become
Tōkos ankāliri īnkirok, with all that extra marking reinforcing that this bizarre
and counter-intuitive notion is indeed the meaning that’s being communicated.
Verbs are also marked for tense by combining a stem alternation system with a series of
suffixes.
Back in Proto-Thirēan, a bare verb was interpreted in the simple or perfective aspect, and reduplicating
the first syllable resulted in an iterative or imperfective reading.
Modern Nekāchti retains this system, having a long and short stem for every verb.
However, while in the old days, the form of the long stem was perfectly predictable, so
many sound changes have happened since then that now some of the long and short stems
are virtually unrecognizable from each other.
For example, the short stem of the verb “to create” is nios, and so you’d think the
long stem would be “ninios”, but actually it’s “nerios”.
Why?
Well, in Proto-Thirēan, the verb was completely regular, formed with the short stem “ndeu”
with a prenasalized stop, and the long stem was therefore “ndendeu”.
As the language evolved, however, /e/ became /i/ when next to another vowel, and /u/ became
/o/ in all environments, which obfuscated the original reduplication pattern slightly.
Then later, prenasalized stops became pure nasals word-initially and plain voiced stops
word-internally, and finally, much later, /d/ became /r/ between vowels.
This same series of changes affected other words that began in prenasalized stops,
but words that began with a pure nasal in the Proto-language
follow a more transparent pattern,
and in the modern language, there’s no way of telling which pattern a given word will follow.
The long and short verb stems combine with a number of obligatory suffixes, rather innocuously
termed as the “tense” suffixes, though they encode a lot more than just tense.
Over millennia, various auxiliary verbs evolved and became suffixed, which encoded different
meanings depending on whether they were paired with the long or short stem.
As more and more auxiliary verbs became suffixed, Old Nekāchti became heavily agglutinative,
but later on, sound changes blurred the boundaries between affixes, melding them into a single
highly fusional suffix.
There’s a whole lot of information packed into these things, so we’ll take it one
step at a time.
Each of Nekāchti’s twelve tenses is formed by combining either the long or short verb
stem with a tense suffix.
The present, perfect, imperfect, and future all function as you might expect, and the
gnomic marks states of being or general truths.
The perfect, imperfect, and gnomic each have an “indirect” version, which serve to
indicate inferential or second-hand evidence.
The habitual marks actions that occur often or customarily, while the past habitual can
best be translated with “used to”.
The experiential marks actions that took place at an indefinite point in the past, and can
also be used as a sort of remote past.
Finally, the conditional is used for hypotheticals or just as a general irrealis.
Each of the tense suffixes also has a negative and interrogative form.
Proto-Thirēan and many of its descendants have a negative and interrogative auxiliary,
but in Nekāchti they became affixed to the verb and have now fused with the tense suffixes.
Similarly, what began as modal auxiliaries became suffixed to form four grammatical moods:
The Indicative for general or factual statements, The Optative for actions that are desired
or intended, The Potential for events that might or are able occur, and Necessative for
events that must or need to happen.
Finally, there are five different conjugations based on the phonology of the stem, producing
560 distinct combinations of tense, aspect, and mood.
Thankfully, you don’t have to deal with the full spectrum of verbal madness too often,
as Nekāchti permits a maximum of only one fully-finite verb per sentence.
To link clauses together, Nekāchti renders verbs in subordinate clauses as converbs,
which convey meanings that in English are usually expressed using conjunctions.
Notice how only the main verb takes person-marking.
Unless otherwise specified, converbs are assumed to have the same subject as the verb in the
main clause.
Nekachti uses these converbs extensively in clause-chaining, but also for derivation as
well, like the expression for “to weave”, “nios ipsī” literally means “to create
by means of intertwining”.
Nekāchti also makes heavy use of compounding and noun-incorporation for derivation.
Over the eons, some frequently incorporated elements have become fossilized as dedicated
derivational affixes, but one of Nekāchti’s unique tricks is deriving new words using
case suffixes.
For example, one could say something like Tōkōs tsēriok ītevik “the tree caught
fire”, where tsēriok consists of tsēri, “fire” with the locative case suffix.
While here this word functionally serves as an adpositional phrase, it can also be used
as an adjective, as in Tsēriok tōkōs “the burning tree” or more literally, “the
on-fire tree”.
This can then be turned into a noun by applying the singulative to create Tsēriōka “something
that’s on fire”, and this can then be appended with further case marking, as in
Sēli tsēriōkan “the light of the burning thing”, or it can even undergo noun incorporation,
as in Tsitsēriōkānalak, “I extinguished the burning thing", literally “I on-fire-thing-extinguished”,
This system is extremely flexible and is used pervasively to derive new nouns and adjectives.
Adjectives fall into one of two broad classes: noun-like and verb-like.
The majority of adjectives are verb-like, having been derived in Proto-Thirēan from
stative verbs.
These adjectives are able to take much of the same derivational morphology as verbs,
and can stand on their own as a predicate.
Meanwhile noun-like adjectives take entirely different morphology and require a copula
when used predicatively.
Similarly, there are two classes of postpositions; one older class derived from Proto-Thirean
verb roots, many of which shortened up to become case suffixes, while a newer class
of postpositions has since evolved from nouns that works in combination with the case system,
with the exact meaning depending on which case the noun is placed in.
Nekāchti is radically non-configurational, with word order being shuffled around to convey
focus and topic.
Focus is sentence-initial, and the topic, as well as any obviate argument or other background
information usually comes immediately before the verb, which is most often the last word
in the sentence.
And that is Nekāchti in a nutshell.
As always, there’s lots of additional details that I don’t have time to get into here,
but I hope this has been an adequate overview.
If you want to see more content like this, let me know in the comments below or consider
supporting me on Patreon.
Until next time…
Pehaspemō kiron (thank you all for watching)!