Hagt

Hagt is a Hagt-Laa language of the Taot language family spoken in and around the city of Kint from the 11th century onwards. It serves as the lingua franca of a vast area in Central Noco, known as the Kint area of influence. Hagt is the language of culture and high literature within this region and has had an extensive influence on all the languages spoken within this area.

Etymology


The name Hagt evolved from earlier Taot, which was in turn derived from the Ninkerk substrate word *taut-, meaning "fish". Before the migration westwards and the adoption of the name, the Taot peoples lacked a word to denote their people. Instead, they simply called themselves "the people" (Classical Taot: seez za) and their language "the language" (Classical Taot: lawa). The name spread among the western Hagt and Sōt-speaking dialects, but did not reach the eastern dialects, where the people still call their language "Lawa" or "Laa".

Consonants
The consonant phonemes of Hagt are as follows:


 * {| class="wikitable" style=text-align:center

! colspan=2 | ! Bilabial ! Dental/ Alveolar ! Palatal ! Velar ! Glottal ! colspan=2 | Nasal ! rowspan=3 | Plosive ! voiceless ! voiced ! aspirated ! rowspan=2 | Fricative ! voiceless ! voiced ! colspan=2 | Lateral ! colspan=2 | Tap ! colspan=2 | Trill
 * + Consonant phonemes of Hagt
 * m || n || || ||
 * p || t ⟨t⟩ || c ⟨k⟩ || k ||
 * b || d ⟨d⟩ || || g ||
 * pʰ ⟨ph⟩ || tʰ ⟨th⟩ || || kʰ ⟨kh⟩ ||
 * || s || || || h
 * || z || || ||
 * || l || || ||
 * || ɾ ⟨r⟩ || || ||
 * || r ⟨rr⟩ || || ||
 * }

The phonemes /t, d, tʰ, s, z/ are dental [t̪, d̪, t̪ʰ, s̪, z̪].

The aspirated stops /pʰ, tʰ, kʰ/ and the palatal stop /c/ are considered marginal phonemes. Aspirated stops are only used in learned borrowings and are usually pronounced as a series of a voiceless stop followed by /h/ by lower class people. Hypercorrection may lead some to pronounce words that originally contained the sequence /Th/ as [Tʰ]. /c/ is an expressive variant of /k/ that is used to create diminutives.

Voiceless consonants except /h/ are voiced before another voiced consonant. Voiced plosives and fricatives are devoiced at the end of a word or before another voiceless consonant. The voiced phonemes /m, n, l/ become voiceless [m̥, n̥, l̥] word-finally after a stop or fricative. /n/ becomes [m, n̪, ŋ] before the respective stops.

Vowels
Hagt has seven vowel phonemes forming three pairs of corresponding short and long vowels (/i, iː, u, uː, a, aː/) and the schwa (/ə/). The schwa never appears in stressed position.


 * {| class="wikitable" style=text-align:center

! rowspan="2"| ! colspan="2"| Front ! colspan="2"| Central ! colspan="2"| Back ! short ! long ! short ! long ! short ! long ! Close ! Mid ! Open
 * + Vowel phonemes of Hagt
 * i || iː ⟨ī⟩ || || || u || uː ⟨ū⟩
 * || || ə ⟨e⟩ || || ||
 * || || a || aː ⟨ā⟩ || ||
 * }

Writing system
Hagt is written using the Hagt script, derived from the Taot abjad, which was in turn derived from Koolpallalian hieroglyphs. The script contains 13 letters and is written in boustrophedon. It does not contain sentence punctuation, letter case or interword spacing.

Grammar
Hagt is a head-initial, highly agglutinative language compared to Classical Taot. Nouns, pronouns, adjectives and verbs are inflected for various grammatical functions. The basic word order is verb–subject–object (VSO).

Gender
Nouns in Hagt belong to one of either two genders: animate or inanimate. As there is no noun agreement, the gender of a noun is only relevant as the number of cases a noun may take.

Number
The plural is indicated by adding the suffix -s to the last component of a phrase. In words ending in -t or -h, in which the -t disappears and the -h becomes -k when the suffix is added, for example:


 * at ('mortar') → as ('mortars')
 * kāh ('egg') → kāks ('eggs')

Some words retain an otherwise archaic dual number formed by attaching the suffix -īht (which is identical in form to the numeral īht 'two') to an unpredictable form of the noun stem, which always remains attached to the noun and does not move to the last component of the phrase, for example:


 * gigk ('year') → ggekīht ('biennium')
 * ump ('foot') → engpīht ('two feet')
 * lut ('wheel') → eltīht ('two wheels')

Declension
Nouns inflect for five (animate) or nine (inanimate) cases. Cases suffixes are attached to whatever element (noun, adjective, determiner, etc.) comes last in the noun phrase, except for the dual marker, which is always added to the noun. For example, 'the big house' is higd anek, not *higdek an, and 'in the two big houses' is gdegīht anek. The genitive case is also used for ablative and the dative for partitive and allative.

The singular (e) is omitted when the stem ends in a vowel. For example, dā ('frog') becomes dāl ('of the frog'). When there is an inanimate subject and animate direct object, the object marked with the inanimate case. For example:


 * Nnerzī higm Hūlgemp. — The stone hits Hūlg.

Adjectives
Adjectives always come after the noun. They inflect for three comparison degrees: comparative, superlative and excessive.

The comparative is formed by adding -s to the end of the adjective, which comes before any other suffix, for example:


 * mū 'bad' → mūs 'worse'
 * inseng 'to the good ones' → insseng 'to the better ones'

The superlative is be formed by attaching the last consonant of the word to the start, however, there are some irregularities, for exampleː


 * in 'good' → nin 'best'
 * iplek 'full' → kiplek 'fullest'
 * līs 'smart; intelligent' → slīs 'smartest; most intelligent'


 * mū 'bad' → emgehmū 'worst'
 * alhek 'bitter' → elgalhek 'bitterest'

The excessive is formed by adding the comparative suffix -s to the superlative, for example:


 * nins — too good
 * emgehmūs — too bad
 * kipleks — too full
 * slīss — too intelligent

Pronouns
Personal pronouns differentiate three persons and three numbers and are inflected for five to nine cases.

Verbs
Verbs in Hagt are inflected for the person, number, tense, aspect, mood and, in the participle forms, voice. The affixes are attached in a fixed order. The mood prefix follows the subject prefixe, except for the conditional and imperative, which precede it. The tense suffixes precede the object suffixes. The general order is subject, mood, verb stem, tense, object.

Negation is expressed using the particle hu following the verb, which may be reduced to he. Additionally, the word gīzeng ('thing' in the accusative case) is used to emphasise a negation. For example, sūkn hu helm ('I don't know'), sūkn hu gīzeng helm ('I don't know nothing at all').

If the verb root starts with a consonant or e, the first-person singular subject prefix h- disappears. An epenthetic -e- infix is placed between the singular person affixes and the verb stem if the stem starts or ends with a consonant. If the stem starts with a velar or an alveolar consonant, the prefixes g- and d-, respectively, will also take the epenthetic infix, as well as if the stem starts with two or more consonants.

In colloquial Hagt, the second-person singular prefix n(e)- becomes nen- to distinguish it from the third-person singular prefix.

Irrealis mood
The realis mood is used when talking about specific events known to have happened or to be happened at the moment. In other words, the realis mood expresses that the speaker considers something to be certain, while the irrealis mood express less likelihood. When talking about general non-specific gnomic truths, the irrealis is often used, although both moods are correct.

In subordinate clauses with a verb that expresses uncertainty (e.g. "I think", "I believe", etc.), the irrelis mood is used in the subordinate clause.


 * Empū nnesklenhūmpegemp lilteng ak. — I think (realis) that will come (irrealis).
 * Nīld nnesklenrul hu anel ak. — I've heard (realis) that there isn't (irrealis) any han.

If the verb expresses certainty (e.g. "I know", "I am certain", "it is known", etc.), the realis mood is used insead.


 * Sūkn nnepsadegemp he ak. — I know (realis) that he won't do (realis) it.
 * Nnessūkn nnrul hāzk sīsmugn nnūl ak. — It is known (realis) that his friend is (realis) dumb.

Participles
A Hagt verb can have up to fifty different participle forms. One for each tense in both the active and the passive voice and in five moods: realis, irrealis, optative, potential and debitive. Participles are formed either with the first-person singular subject and third-person singular object form or adding sīs- (in the active voice) or -h(e)k (in the passive voice, the h is dropped according to the sandhi rules).