Verse:Mwail/Ditab

Mwail/Ditab /diθaβ/ is a language of Ldon Źama inspired by Iau, Natqgu and Semitic languages (particularly Biblical Hebrew).

Phonology

Mwail/Ditab has 4 consonants: b d t k, and a large inventory of vowels (about as many as Khmer), with 3 tones (level, rising, falling).

All four consonants have fricative allophones /β ð θ x/ after vowels, unless they're geminated.

Orthography

Mwail/Ditab has an ASCII friendly orthography in addition to the 'default' one, where some vowels are written with consonant letters.

Morphology

Mwail/Ditab morphology is entirely suffixing except for adjectives. Adjectives are a small closed class and work by infixing and/or changing the vowels in the noun according to a predictable umlaut pattern.

There is no grammatical gender, and two declension classes:

• Class one nouns mark the construct state with the suffix -bẽ́.
• Class two nouns mark the absolute state with -bẽ́.

Verbs inflect by aspect but not tense. Curiously, the imperfective and perfective forms are interchanged when the verb follows the interrogative particle kủ-.

Mwail/Ditab is borderline polysynthetic in that some verbs have to incorporate their objects. Mwail/Ditab also uses bipersonal inflections.

Syntax

Mwail/Ditab is strictly OVS.