Neo-Akkadian/Kaschdean/A-Leschān A-Labār

[Shemtov]

This is a language in an altworld where small amounts of Babylonian Akkadian speakers survived to the modern day, though of course with a large amount of influence and borrowing from Aramaic and Arabic. There are about 17,000 speaker worldwide, who all belong to Non-Arab ethnic group called Kaschdeans. Their historical home has been the Al-Qādisiyyah region of Iraq, though only c. 5,500 speakers still live in that country, mostly living in the Mesopotamian Marsh alongside the Marsh Arabs, the rest having left as part of the Iraqi Diaspora. There are c. 2,500 speakers in Iran (as most Kaschdeans are Shia Muslims-in other parts of the diaspora and for some of the Iraqi speakers a religion called Kaschdean Gnosticism survives.) c.1,500 in North America and the UK each, 2,000 in Sweden and 4,000 in Germany, whose system for transcribing names this thread's romanazation is based on.

PHONOLOGY:
Parenthesis indicate loan phonemes from Arabic.
/m n/ <m n>
/b t tˤ d k q ʔ/<b t ṭ d k q '>
/f θ ð ðˤ s sˤ z ʃ x ɣ (ħ) (ʕ) h/ <f th dh ḍ s ṣ z sch ch gh (ḥ) (c) h>
/tʃ d͡ʒ/ <tsch dsch>
/r/ <r>
/l/ <l>
/j w/ <j w>

/a a: i u e o/ <a ā i u e o>


PERSONAL PRONOUNS:
Pronouns have 2 cases, Common and Genitive-Dative.
1P Sing. Common: Anāk
1P sing. Gen.-Dat.: Jāt
1P PLR. Common: Ninu
1P PLR. Gen.-Dat.: Nāti
2P Sing. Masc. Common: Atta
2P sing. Masc. Gen.-Dat.: Kāt
2P Sing. FEM. Common: Atte
2P sing. Fem . Gen.-Dat.: Kate
2P PLR. . Common: Atton
2P PLR. . Gen.-Dat.: Kāton
3P Sing. Masc. Common: Schuwa
3P sing. Masc. Gen.-Dat.: Schāsch
3P Sing. FEM. Common: Schija
3P sing. Fem . Gen.-Dat.: Schāscha
3P PLR. Masc. Common: Schun
2P PLR. fem. Common: Schina
3P PLR. Gen.-Dat.: Schāschon

[WeepingElf]

Cool! A modern-day East Semitic language! This looks like a good start, and a candidate for the League of Lost Languages.

But you have forgotten the nasals in your phoneme inventory.

[Shemtov]

NOUNS:
Nouns have two genders, Masculine and Feminine. Most nouns are Masculine, except for those with feminine referents, parts of the body and those that end in /t(V)/.

Nouns have two cases, Common and Genitive, and two numbers, Singular and Plural. A large class of Masculine nouns end in <o>, especially those that would otherwise end in a consonant cluster.

Declension of regular Masc. noun <Kalbo> "Dog":
Sing. Common: Kalbo
Plr. Common: Kalbānu
Sing. Gen.: Kalbe
Plr. Gen.: Kalbāni

Declension of regular Fem. noun <Kalbat> "Bitch":
Sing. Common: Kalbat
Plr. Common: Kalbātu
Sing. Gen.: Kalbate
Plr. Gen.: Kalbāti

Nouns can take Pronominal Possessive suffixes:

1P Sing. : -i
1P PLR. : -no
2P Sing. Masc. : -ka
2P Sing. FEM. :-tschi
2P PLR. . : -kon
3P Sing. Masc. : -scho
3P Sing. FEM. : -scha
3P PLR. Masc. : -schon
2P PLR. fem. : -schen

Example:
Mare kalbat
"The boy's bitch"

Kalbatscho
"His bitch"

"Mari"
"My son"

[Shemtov]

THE DEFINITE ARTICLE:
Kaschdean has no definite article, per se, but has borrowed the Arabic "Al" for certain usages. When used with words that begin with coronals, the <l> is deleted and the initial consonant is geminated. It is also used with adjectives that describe the nouns to which it applies.
It has two usages:
1. Certain Arabic loans, usually relating to Islam:
Al-Qur'ān "The Quran"
Ar-Rasul "[Appellation of] The Prophet Muhammad"
2. Names of languages:
Al-Alamani "German language"
A-Leschān A-Labār "The Ancient Language" (Name of Kaschdean)
3.For Collective nouns:
Al-Kalbo
"Dogs" (Collective)

Al-Mar
"Boys" (collective)

[Shemtov]

VERBS:
The Kaschdean verb was six stems I-VI, each which has a different valancy. In this post, I will only be considering Stem I, the Simple Active. I will be using the stem Dh-K-R "say; speak" for all presentation of Verb form.
The Verb has five Tense-Mood-Aspects, Past, Non-Past, Interrogative, Imperative and Stative.


Examples:

Mare kalbat mandat 'akkalu
"The boy's bitch eats the gift"

Mare kalbo mandat e'takal
"The boy's dog ate the gift"


Mandat ta'kol?
"Did you eat the gift?"

[Shemtov]

Verbs can take pronomial suffixes that indicate the person and number of the direct object. These are only used when a pronoun would otherwise be used, or very rarely, for intense emphasis on the object. They are also commonly used in Verbs in Stem form IV and VI, but I will discuss this use when I discuss the other verb root froms:
1P Sing. : -ni
1P PLR. : -nāsch
2P Sing. Masc. : -ka
2P Sing. FEM. :-tsche
2P PLR. . : -kon
3P Sing. Masc. : -(a)sch
3P Sing. FEM. : -schi
3P PLR. Masc. : -schon
3P PLR. fem. : -schen

Examples:
Efallachuni
"She fears me"

Atschtabatasch
"I captured it"

[Shemtov]

Slight change of phonology now in OP, based on discussion on the other forum.
Also major change to my third post, on the use of Al-.

[Shemtov]

POST NOW INVALID
Sound Changes from Akkadian:
(All conditioned sound changes, when applied to verb radicals, are based on the stative 1P sing. forms)
/kʼ tʼ tsʼ/>/q tˤ tsˤ/
/ts tsˤ q/>/s sˤ ɢ/ V_V _V
/dz/>/z/>/s/
/g/>/ɣ/
/ɢ/>/g/
If an emphatic is followed by an emphatic in verbal radicals, the first emphatic becomes non-emphatic.
/e/>/a/
/ĭ/>/e/
/ŭ/>o
/g/>/d͡ʒ/
/p/>/f/
In affixes and nouns, /k x ɣ/>/t͡ʃ ʃ ʒ/ _i _e
/ts tsˤ/>/t͡ʃ t͡ʃˤ/
/t͡ʃˤ/>/t͡ʃ/

[Avo]

Don't get this the wrong way, but you do realize that's an awfully low number of sound changes right? I mean, your modern day Akkadian would have changed less in what, 2000-3000 years than English did in a few centuries. Or in other words, it looks like a dialect of Akkadian that hasn't changed at all.

[Shemtov]

It's a minority language, so the sound changes would probably stay similar to that of the majority language, and a lot of the phonemes that are the same have stayed stable in Aramaic and Arabic.

[Avo]

It's a minority language, so the sound changes would probably stay similar to that of the majority language, and a lot of the phonemes that are the same have stayed stable in Aramaic and Arabic.

That's not how language change works. And both Aramaic and Arabic are a lot younger and, despite that, show considerably more variation in their spoken forms, while your sound changes are pretty much trivial replacements of one phoneme with another, similar one.
But it's your conlang, so artistic freedom etc I guess.

[Shemtov]

OK, I've ruminated over it and I've decided to Introduce new sound changes (Therefore everything above has been edited to reflect this):
/kʼ tʼ tsʼ/>/q tˤ tsˤ/
/ts tsˤ q dz/>/s sˤ ɢ z/ V_V _V
/g/>/ɣ/
/ɢ/>/g/
/e/>/a/
/ĭ/>/e/
/ŭ/>o
/ts tsˤ dz/>/t͡ʃ t͡ʃˤ d͡ʒ/ _i _e
/t͡ʃˤ/>/t͡ʃ/
/ts tsˤ dz/>/tθ tθ dð/>/θ θˤ ð/
In the same syllable as or adjacent to an emphatic /x ɣ/>/ħ ʕ/
/g/>/d͡ʒ/
/p/>/f/
/θˤ/>/ðˤ/
/k x ɣ/>/t͡ʃ ʃ ʒ/ _i _e
/f/>/h/ V_V
/ʒ/>/z/

Some words that show the sound changes. Ancient Akkadian in parenthesis:
/d͡ʒekru/ (/dzikru/) "Name"
/eʃa:t/ (/iʃa:tu/) "Fire"
/esˤðˤor/ (/isʼ:uru/) "Bird"
/fu/ (/pu:/) "Mouth"
/rud͡ʒ/ (/ru:kʼu/) "Foreign"
/efro/ (/ipru/) "Sand"
/ert͡ʃet/ (/irsʼitu/) "Mud

[Shemtov]

FORM II OF THE VERB:
Form II of the Verb doubles the middle radical, and makes an intransitive form I verb Transitive and intensifies already Transitive verbs:

Examples:
Form I:
Edhtakar
"He said"

Form II:
Odhtakkarni
"He spoke to me"


Form I:
Mare kalbat mandat 'akkalu
"The boy's bitch eats the gift"

Mare kalbat mandat O'akkalā
"The boy's bitch devours the gift"

[Shemtov]

THE FUTURE TENSE:
The Future is considered a sub-category of either the The Non-Past, or the Interrogative given that it is derived from one of those forms, depending on the verb.
Most verbs form their future by prefixing <sa> to the Non-Past:
Sa-Efallachuni
"She will fear me"

Sa-A'akkalasch
"I will eat it"

Some verbs, mostly those used in the Kaschdeans' legends (ie. not very practical verbs in the modern day) or those referring to religious practice, though only when referring to the religious practice of the minority Kaschdean Gnostics or other non-Islamic religions, form their future with the prefix <Ki> before the Interrogative:
Ki-Arkob
"I will ride [the horse]"

Ki-Eqborā
"They will bury [in a non-Islamic ceremony]"

[zyma]

This is a language in an altworld where small amounts of Babylonian Akkadian speakers survived to the modern day, though of course with a large amount of influence and borrowing from Aramaic and Arabic. There are about 17,000 speaker worldwide, who all belong to Non-Arab ethnic group called Kaschdeans. Their historical home has been the Al-Qādisiyyah region of Iraq, though only c. 5,500 speakers still live in that country, mostly living in the Mesopotamian Marsh alongside the Marsh Arabs, the rest having left as part of the Iraqi Diaspora. There are c. 2,500 speakers in Iran (as most Kaschdeans are Shia Muslims-in other parts of the diaspora and for some of the Iraqi speakers a religion called Kaschdean Gnosticism survives.) c.1,500 in North America and the UK each, 2,000 in Sweden and 4,000 in Germany, whose system for transcribing names this thread's romanazation is based on.

Very cool! What particular varieties of Aramaic and Arabic influenced it the most? In Iran, has Persian influenced the language to any notable degree? Is there a thread I'm accidentally overlooking on Kaschdean Gnosticism? If not, is there anything you can tell us about it? The German-based romanization system certainly gives the language a distinctive look.

/a a: i u e o/ <a ā i u e o>

The lone long vowel is interesting.

Kaschdean has no definite article, per se, but has borrowed the Arabic "Al" for certain usages. When used with words that begin with coronals, the <l> is deleted and the initial consonant is geminated. It is also used with adjectives that describe the nouns to which it applies.

A-Leschān A-Labār "The Ancient Language" (Name of Kaschdean)

I'm probably missing something, but why isn't it Al-Leschān Al-Labār? Is the initial consonant not geminated if it's /l/?

[Shemtov]

I gave up on this language, after being worn down with rude claims on the other boards about how "this language can't exist" since, given that it's also Semitic, it would be so assimilated to Arabic it would basically be an Arabic dialect

[zyma]

I gave up on this language, after being worn down with rude claims on the other boards about how "this language can't exist" since, given that it's also Semitic, it would be so assimilated to Arabic it would basically be an Arabic dialect

Oh no, I'm very sorry to hear that. I disagree with those claims; they certainly sound rude, and even seem to be ignoring one of the possible main purposes of this kind of conlanging (that is, reviving something that people might think somehow "couldn't exist" just because it doesn't in our world). I know I can't make you change your mind about moving on from this project, but again, I am sorry people did that.

[Lambuzhao]

I gave up on this language, after being worn down with rude claims on the other boards about how "this language can't exist" since, given that it's also Semitic, it would be so assimilated to Arabic it would basically be an Arabic dialect

Here's a Semitic word for the naysayers:


! פֿע
okay, Yiddish

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeioaBNYB5U




Just grow your conlang, mon.




By way of suggestion, to help distance from Arabic contagion, you might want to research some hapax legomena
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hapax_legomenon

in Akkadian (or Hebrew, or Aramaic), and use them as building blocks for vocab, especially if they have no cognate in Arabic.
Though that may seem like servicing the neighsayers, it may open up some new avenues for you.

[Isfendil]

How on earth does an East Semitic language become a dialect of Arabic, that's like Russian becoming a dialect of english. Who on earth even bothers to say this stuff when they clearly don't know what they're talking about? Not even the surviving Aramaic dialects became "dialects of Arabic", and they're much, much closer to it on in the family. Furthermore, I'm pretty sure your consonant correspondences aren't as bad as people say they are as it's generally assumed proto-semitic (and thereby Akkadian) consonants were more strong (i.e. affricates where now there are fricatives, ejectives where now are emphatic, etc.) then our working reconstructions actually provide. Like honestly what on earth is this about.

I think it's nice that I can now no longer count the amount of extant semitic conlangs online with just one of my hands. My only complaint is with the orthography but that's aesthetic more than anything else.

[qwed117]

How on earth does an East Semitic language become a dialect of Arabic, that's like Russian becoming a dialect of english. Who on earth even bothers to say this stuff when they clearly don't know what they're talking about? Not even the surviving Aramaic dialects became "dialects of Arabic", and they're much, much closer to it on in the family. Furthermore, I'm pretty sure your consonant correspondences aren't as bad as people say they are as it's generally assumed proto-semitic (and thereby Akkadian) consonants were more strong (i.e. affricates where now there are fricatives, ejectives where now are emphatic, etc.) then our working reconstructions actually provide. Like honestly what on earth is this about.

I think it's nice that I can now no longer count the amount of extant semitic conlangs online with just one of my hands. My only complaint is with the orthography but that's aesthetic more than anything else.

Well, maybe not Russian becoming a dialect of English, but rather given how Arabic spread, the language would quickly be assimilated, becoming little more than a husk loaning down a few words. It needs a religious foundation if it were to survive like Hebrew or Aramaic.