Hagt

Hagt (Hagt: [hakt̪]) is the language natively spoken in the city of Kint and the areas around it. As a result of the strategic position of this city, it also serves as the lingua franca of a vast area in Western Noco, known as the Kint area of influence, has become the language of culture and high literature within this region and has had an extensive influence on all the languages spoken within this area.

Consonants
Consonants between parentheses are allophones.

Aspirated stops are only used in learned borrowings and are usually pronounced as a series of a voiceless stop plus /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/ used to create diminutives.

Vowels
/ə/ never appears in stressed position.

Phonotactics

 * Hagt’s syllable structure is (s/z)(S){[(S)(L)]/N/h}V(R)(N)(C)(C)(C/N/l).
 * Voiced stops and fricatives are devoiced at the end of a word or before another voiceless consonant.
 * Voiceless consonants other than /h/ are voiced before another voiced consonant.
 * /m, n, l/ are [m̥, n̥, l̥] word finally after a stop or fricative.
 * /n/ becomes [m, n̪, ŋ] before the respective stops.

Grammar
The grammar of Hagt is extremely agglutinative compared to that of Classical Taot, with nouns, pronouns, adjectives and verbs inflecting for a wide diversity of grammatical properties.

Nouns
All nouns belong to either of two genders: animate or inanimate; these are only relevant when declining words, there is no agreement. They inflect for five (animate) or nine (inanimate) cases and for two or three numbers (some words retain a dual number).

Inanimate declension
The genitive and dative cases are also used as ablative or partitive and allative, respectively.

All the endings are attached to the last integrant of a syntagm, not necessarily to the head, i.e., 'in the house' is higdek, but 'in the big house' is higd anek, not *higdek an. The only exception is the dual marker, which always stays attached to the noun, i.e 'in the two houses' is gdegīhtek, and 'in the two big houses' is gdegīht anek.

The initial schwa of the singular ending is dropped if the word ends in a vowel, for example, dā ('frog'), dāl ('of the frog').

Number
The plural is indicated by appending the suffix -s to the last component of a phrase without any further change except for words ending in -t or -h, where 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')

Adjectives
All adjectives always come after the noun and take all of the endings if there isn’t any other component after them and within the same phrase, with the exception of the dual marker.

Additionally, adjectives inflect for three comparison degrees: comparative, superlative and excessive.

The comparative is easily formed by simply appending -s to the end of the adjective, which comes before any other suffix, e.g. mū 'bad'→mūs 'worse', inseng 'to the good ones'→insseng ‘to the better ones'.

The superlative can be formed either by attaching the last consonant of the word to the start or irregularly, e.g. in 'good'→nin 'best' (regular), mū 'bad'→emgehmū 'worst' (irregular), iplek 'full'→kiplek 'fullest' (regular), līs 'smart, intelligent'→slīs 'smartest, most intelligent' (regular), alhek 'bitter'→elgalhek 'bitterest' (irregular).

The excessive is formed by attaching the comparative suffix -s to the superlative, e.g. nins 'too god', emgehmūs 'too bad', kipleks 'too full', slīss 'too intelligent'.