Cukish language

Cukish
Leganesian, Neo-Tauríllien
Livaléns
Region	New Leganés archipelago, Oblivion Islands, Vistari Valerijk (Vistaraland), widely spoken as second language in Shoneria and a number of states in South Hills, notable minorities in Alksearia, Peragen, Vivancantadia, Puntalia, New Puntalia, Norgsveldet and Great Morstaybishlia
Ethnicity	Cukish Laçeríner Matréliker Valrikan
Native speakers	aprox. 15 million speakers (2020) 20 million as first or second language
Language family	Carjado-Matrélikish Matrélikish Arcturian Matrélikish Cukish
Early forms	Matrélikish Old Cukish Middle Cukish
Official status
Official language in	New Leganes Vistari Valerijk (Vistaraland) Baja Utlia (South Hills) Lado Sereno (South Hills) Gran Lanjoeste (South Hills) Significant minority in Alksearia Norgsveldet Peragen Puntalia New Puntalia Vivancantadia Great Morstaybishlia
Regulated by	Cukish Regulation Academy (Livaléndraile Zhenífkale Académia)
Language codes
ISO 639-1	cu
ISO 639-2	cks
ISO 639-3	–

Cukish (Livaléns in Cukish) is a Carjado-Matrélikish language that originated in the Oblivion Islands at some point between the 1st and 3rd centuries AD, after which it was spread to the New Leganés archipelago approximately at 6th century AD. It is one of the three official languages of the Cooperative Commonwealth of New Leganés, the Oblivion Islands and Shoneria along with Impelanzan and Staynish, and it's also a notable language in other countries and territories such as Vistari Valerijk (Vistaraland), with the dialect known as Valrikan, and Peragen, Vivancantadia, Alksearia, Norgsveldet, Puntalia, New Puntalia, a number of states in South Hills, and Great Morstaybishlia.

History

Etymology

The most plausible origin for the Staynish word "Cukish" is a borrowing from the word çéqi ("island") and its older forms chwéqir and cohwéqir. The term chwéqirle(t) ("from/proper of the islands") was a common demonym in Cukish texts dating from the 9th to 15th centuries, when it became less frequent in favour of the current standard Livaléns. Livaléns, on the other hand, means "the new people": the term was used in the 1275 Nárilethál for the first time, referring to the arrival of the Cukish to the New Leganes archipelago.

Phonology

Phonemes

Consonant phonemes

Manner/Place	Bilabial	Labiodental	Alveolar	Palato-alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Uvular	Glottal
Nasal	m		n			ŋ
Stop	p b		t d			k g	q
Affricate				tʃ
Fricative		f v	s	ʒ	ʝ			h
Tap			ɾ
Trill			r
Lateral approximant			l

Co-articulated phonemes

Manner/Place	Labial-velar
Approximant	w

Vowel phonemes

	Front	Back
High	i	u
High-mid	e	o
Low	a

Diphtongs: aɪ, eɪ, eo

Stress

Seems more than possible that Old Cukish described a musical accent, but by the first times of the Commonwealth Empire the accent turned tonal, as in Staynish and Impelanzan. This tonal accent is marked by an acute over the vowel it stresses, thus being á, é, í, ó, ú, ý, and, in the case of diphthongs, ái, éi, éo. Cukish avoids as much as possible paroxytone roots, this meaning word roots stressed on the third-to-last syllable. The only case when this can be found is in roots that are undoubtedly paroxytone, or in words marked by multiple suffixes. The most usual is, hence, roots stressed on the last or second-to-last syllables, while paroxytone words usually indicate suffixation.

Grammar

Cukish is a flexive language, and hence verbs have conjugation through prefixes and suffixes, and nouns, adjectives and pronouns are marked with grammatical number and case. There may be occasional gender marks in words taken from Impelanzan or Staynish.

Nouns and adjectives

Nouns and adjectives in Cukish have two grammatical numbers: singular and plural, as well as four different cases in its declension: pure (nominative-accusative), genitive, dative and accompanying. There is no grammatical gender in Cukish.

Case is marked by case suffixes, these being "-le" for genitive, "-de" for dative and "-ne" for accompanying. Pure case is not marked by any suffix, hence the distinction between subject and direct object is made with a strict organization of nominative being placed before accusative in all sentences. If a word's root has the same letter at the end as the following case suffix, both will merge into a single letter (the word "nafión", "nation", in accompanying case is "nafióne" instead of *nafiónne), while if both letters are phonologically similar, the final letter of the root will get neutralized by the first letter of the suffix ("nafión" in genitive case is "nafiólle" instead of *nafiónle). Number is indicated by adding the suffix "-r" in plural nouns and adjectives, after the case suffix if there is such.

The following will be the full declension of the noun "çéqi" ("island"), a usually paradigmatic word in Cukish linguistics:

Çéqi

Case	Singular	Plural
Pure	Çéqi	Çéqir
Genitive	Çéqile	Çéqiler
Dative	Çéqide	Çéqider
Accompanying	Çéqine	Çéqiner

Adjectives share number with the noun they go along with, while they always go before the noun. They can be in positive, comparative or superlative degrees. The positive grade is not marked by any suffix, while the comparative is marked by "-rho" and the superlative by "-eq". The proper number suffix goes after the degree suffix.

Personal suffixes

Unlike other languages as Impelanzan and Staynish, Cukish does not use pronouns to mark possession or relation to a person. The genitive case exists in personal pronouns, but it is not usual and it is rather used with an emphatic purpose. Instead, Cukish adds personal suffixes at the end of nouns. When the non-suffixed noun ends in a consonant and the following personal suffix uses a consonant at the beginning of the morpheme, an additional "-e-" must be added between the consonant and the vowel. For instance, while "your family" would be translated to "istáremak" (istárema-k, -k being the 2nd person singular suffix), "your heart" would be translated into "tondének" (tondén-e-k). The list of suffixes is the following:

• 1st sing: -i
• 2nd sing: -(e)k
• 3rd sing: -o
• 1st plur: -(e)ri
• 2nd plur: -(e)rek
• 3 plur: -(e)ro

There might be the case when personal suffixes attach to words with roots ending in -i or -o. In these cases, Cukish will act as the following model indicates:

Roots in -i Original root: "érfi" (wing)

• Érfei (érfi + i): additional -e- associated to suffixation in order to indicate the possessive.
• Érfik
• Érfyo: final -i describes a glide and switches from a vocalic to a consonantic character.
• Érfiri
• Érfirek
• Érfiro

Roots in -o Original root: "pérho" (dog)

• Perhoí: the word gets stressed at the final -i in order to break a non-existing diphthong in Cukish.
• Pérhok
• Pérheo (pérho + -o)
• Pérhekri: a supportive -k- is placed before the plural mark (-r-) to avoid the union of two syllables beginning with trills.
• Pérhekrek
• Pérhekro

Personal suffixes are only added to singular words. In the case of plural words, possession and relation are marked by the genitive case of personal pronouns (érfir véli, érfir vélek, érfir vélo, etc.).

Pronouns

Pure case (nominative-accusative):

• 1st sing: Véi/Yo
• 2nd sing: Vek/Tu
• 3rd sing: Véo
• 1st plur: Véri
• 2nd plur: Vérek
• 3rd plur: Véreo

Genitive case:

• 1st sing: Véli
• 2nd sing: Vélek
• 3rd sing: Vélo
• 1st plur: Veléri
• 2nd plur: Velérek
• 3rd plur: Veléreo

Dative case:

• 1st sing: Védi
• 2nd sing: Védek
• 3rd sing: Védo
• 1st plur: Vedéri
• 2nd plur: Vedérek
• 3rd plur: Vedéreo

Accompanying case:

• 1st sing: Véni
• 2nd sing: Vének
• 3rd sing: Véno
• 1st plur: Venéri
• 2nd plur: Venérek
• 3rd plur: Venéreo

Verbs

The Cukish verbal system is based mostly on prefixation and suffixation to indicate all the elements the verbal action refers to: tense, mood, aspect, voice and person. This can lead to verbs with multiple morphemes that make Cukish to be classified in this regard as a fusional language. The infinitive, this meaning the form in which the verb is referred as, does not show any of these morphemes, not even personal suffixes as it is an impersonal form.

Tense is indicated by prefixes. Current day Cukish has three tenses: present, past and future, with the last two marked by their respective prefixes (do- and ka-). They contrast with the present form which doesn't use any prefix, hence being the basic verbal form. The past and future prefixes were in old Cukish marked by the auxiliar forms "dau" and "kad", but progressively they got integrated as prefixes due to their natural use together with the verb in all contexts.

Cukish shows four different moods: stative, indicative, imperative and subjunctive. There is no verb as the Staynish "to be" in Cukish: for describing states, location in space or time, or conditions, Cukish verbs use the stative mood, which is the main verb mood and is not marked by any suffix. The other moods are marked by the first suffix of the verbal system. The indicative mood implies that the action described by the verb is, was or will undoubtedly be real, and it uses the suffix "-sti-". Imperative indicates that the action expressed is an order or a prohibition, being marked by the suffix "-ça-". The last mood is subjunctive, the one that marks an unreal action, indicated by the suffix "-azhi-" and usually accompanied by different auxiliar adverbs to indicate the character of this unreal action, such as possibility or impossibility (ego), desire (anéra), etc.

After the mood suffixes the next are the aspect ones. Hence Cukish has perfective, imperfective and resultative aspects. Perfective marks the verbal action as punctual in time or finished, and does not have any suffix. Imperfective indicates the opposite: an unfinished or continued action in time, with the suffix "-no-". Resultative, as the name shows, describes a result: an action that was, is or will be in process but has a determined or undetermined end, using the suffix "-ka-".

The next suffix in the verbal paradigm would be the proper personal suffix, which refers to the subject of the action. However, the personal suffixes along indicate only an active voice, meaning the action is performed by the subject with a different direct object that gets affected by the action; there is another voice in Cukish, the middle-passive voice. This voice is indicated by adding an additional "-fi" to the personal suffix, hence having "-ifi" for the first person singular, "-(e)kfi" for the second singular, "-ofi" for the third singular, etc. The middle-passive voice shows a subject being affected by the verbal action, either due to the subject performing it on itself (middle or reflexive, "I am having a bath", the subject gets the action done on itself) or being object of the action of a different agent ("I am being bathed by someone", the subject receives the action of a different person or entity). In the second case, the agent must be indicated by an auxiliary postposition "hwái" after the agent.

To show how the whole verbal system works, an example sentence will now be presented:

Tamési hwái anéra kadanazhífi, "I hope I will be thanked by my friend".

• Tamés-i, personal suffix of first person singular applied to the word tamés, "friend".
• hwái, auxiliary postposition indicating tamési as an agent ("by").
• anéra, auxiliary adverb marking desire.
• kadanazhífi
  • "ka-", future tense prefix.
  • "-dan-", verbal root ("to thank").
  • "-azhi-", subjunctive mood suffix, desirable action as anéra already indicates.
  • "-fi" is a contract form of the middle-passive first person singular suffix "-ifi", contracted with the final "i" of "-azhi-". The subject is the object of the verbal action.

Invariable words

Cukish describes different types of invariable words. The most used is the copulative suffix -ka, equivalent to the Staynish "and", used to indicate that two different words or phrases perform the same function in the syntactic context. In enumeration contexts, formal Staynish and Impelanzan use commas to indicate the different elements of the aformentioned enumeration, with the last term being preceded by "and" ("New Leganés, the Oblivion Islands and Shoneria"). There are two possibilities in Cukish: the first one is, essentially, the same structuring Staynish uses ("Livá Leganéasle, Etomúrni Çéqirle Shonerialéka"), but there is a second possibility, which is indicating every term with a -ka ("Livá Leganeasléka Etomúrni Çeqirléka Shonerialéka"). This proceeding has been falling in disuse during the last centuries: it was the original way to enumerate, but it has been progressively assimilated by the Staynish influence following the Morstaybishlian rule of most Cukish-speaking areas. It is still used in very formal contexts, but is rarely attested.

Syntax

Cukish follows a SOV (subject-object-verb) syntax. That way, with time, Cukish got rid of the nominative-accusative case, which left the original roots without suffix when accomplishing the function of subject or direct object, hence receiving the name of "pure case". The Cukish syntax is very regular regarding its word order, as sentences must be ordered in the right way to be properly understood. Aside from the SOV order, genitive must go before the complement they are refering to, and adjectives must go in the same way with their noun correlatives.

Vocabulary

Word creation

The suffix -ma indicates a projection of a certain concept into another concept, most usually abstract. In this sense, the suffix -ma is found in the word "istárema", meaning "group of loved ones" or "family" from the original word "istáre", "love".

Numerals

The Cukish numeral for "one", éhwi, shows the original root, unlike the rest of numerals, which have the plural suffix -r. The first ten are the following:

1. Éhwi
2. Yónar
3. Untár
4. Armár
5. Hwánsir
6. Loíter
7. Ménir
8. Ertár
9. Zhasér
10. Indóvir

Animals

• Pérho (dog)
• Imáni (cat)
• Óntu (fish)
• Qáhwi (bird)
• Váke (cow)
• Hwérko (pig)
• Vími (mouse)
• Váyo (horse)
• Érfi (wing)
• Etomúrde (animal, "non-speaker")

Common expressions

Hello: Námi (I salute)

Good morning: Ryés háni védek/vedérek ("good morning to you", singular/plural)

Good afternoon: Ryés gafé védek/vedérek ("good afternoon/evening to you", singular /plural)

Good night: Ryés nátu védek/vedérek ("good night to you", singular/plural)

Thanks: Dáni ("I am thankful")

Thank you: Dánidek/danidérek ("I am thankful to you", singular/plural)

Thank you so much: Káler dánidek/danidérek ("I am very thankful to you", singular/plural)

Please: Si rádek/radérek ("if it's possible for you" singular/plural)