Mamutok Language

The spoken language of the Mamutok people predates its written language by several centuries. The phonology consists of fourteen vowel phonemes and twenty-five consonant phonemes. Phoneme length is distinctive and many consonants can occur as geminates.
Mamutok is an agglutinative language, meaning the word uses various affixes to change its meaning rather than the context of the surrounding words. This works well with the written language, which adds morphemes to the symbol for a word in order to change its grammatical structure. Word case, tense, person, number, modality, valency, and neutrality are all expressed with different prefixes and suffixes. This can make conjugation difficult for someone first learning the language.
The word order works its way from general to specific. The neutral word order is subject-verb-object. However, Mamutok is a topic-prominent language, which means that word order does not only depend on syntax, but also on the topic-comment structure of the sentence.
This is a spoken language only. The Mamutok written language does not express this vocabulary in a phonetic sense, but rather uses a system of hieroglyphs.
Category:Mammoth Tribes
Category:Culture
Category:Language