Râştulan

**[WIP] Râştulan** (rt. *Tongue of the Warden*) or **Râş Enear** (rt. *Classical Tongue*) is a language natively spoken by the western Syèram, the *lingua franca* of Tèneva and the literary language used by the Vetregetheistic Church east of the Dryheights. It belongs to the Duranian branch of the Tweytusumic Languages, which are a group in the Sunscythian Family.

## Related Languages

*Râştulan* comes from Middle Tweytusumic, which makes it related the closest to *Ròşè Koçè*, a language of the Teńǵo living close to the Teńku-Tèneva border and *Tûmaru*, spoken in the north of the Great Grasslands, mostly by the nomadic tribes of Saberwolf Riders. It is further related to *Ràl*, *Kasdior*, *Lashe Felse* and other descendants of Sunscythian. Although no direct ancestorial connection between *Râştulan* and native Southeastern languages is present, some Syèram can still speak *Syerakë* - a language unrelated to Sunscythian, which shares a lot of similarities with *Lhóss* and other tongues spoken deep in the dense rainforests.

## Phonology

### Vowels

 Close
 Mid
 Open

### Spelling Rules & Allophones

The romanization of *Râştulan* is mostly phonetic. The letters for sounds that differ from their representation in the IPA are as follows:

Additionally, /ə/ is written as <e> at the end of words, because it merged with /ɛ/ in this environment. The romanization does not differentiate between allophones, which vary from dialect to dialect. The ones appearing most often and most consistently are: [ɜ] for /ə/, [ʍ] for /h/ before /ɑ/, [ɾ] for /r/, [ŋ] for /n/ before velar consonants, [β,ð,ʝ,ɣ] for /b,d,ɟ,g/ intervocally.

### Vowel Harmony

Vowels are divided into three groups: light (ì,è,e,à,a), weak (i,ê) and dark (u,o,â). Furthermore, the open vowels (à,a,â) are categorized as opaque. Every word follows vowel harmony progressively, starting with the first vowel - if it is weak, the next vowel begins the harmonization. Weak vowels do not interact with the harmony, while opaque vowels end the previous chain and force their own harmony type on following vowels. The process of harmonization is mostly apparent in loanwords, compound nouns and suffixes of declination.

 u
 è
 e
 o

### Word Stress

In *Râştulan*, stress always falls on the penultimate syllable of a given word's stem, e.g. ***gvu**tin* "fish', ***è**nyar* "new", *hè**ne**haş* "tapoto", ***zâ**dul* "to hear", even when the word acquires suffixes. It is worth noting that declined words can be lexicalized and become new stems, thus changing the stress pattern - *Tè**ne**va* "Tèneva" is derived from the inflected word ***tè**neva*, which itself comes from the word *tèn* with the dual absolutive suffix *-eva* attached.

## Grammar & Syntax

*Râştulan*, just like most of the Sunscythian Languages, follows ergative–absolutive alignment (except in transitive sentences where the direct object is in the first or second person - there the accusative, rather than the absolutive, is applied to the object) and uses SVO word order. It makes use of a complex case system, does not distinguish grammatical gender nor does it have a morphological future tense.

### Nouns

Nouns in *Râştulan* decline for case and number. In addition, every noun is either weak or strong, which changes the suffixes used in its plural form and may require a special defining construcion to be used. Grammatical cases present in *Râştulan* are:

* Ergative - marks the agent of transitive verbs.
* Accusative - marks the first or second person patient of transitive verbs.
* Absolutive - marks the third person patient of transitive verbs and the subject of intransitive verbs, e.g. *Rì**min** feşân* - We are sitting.
* Comparative - marks the standard of comparison in a comparative construction.
* Superlative - marks the noun as of absolute highest quality of the adjective attached to the noun.
* Ablative - marks the motion away from something or denotes a point of origin.
* Vocative - marks a direct expression addressed to the recipient of a sentence.
* Oblique - marks the indirect object of a sentence or motion towards something.
* Genitive - marks a modifier of a different noun, serving a purpose similar to an adjective.
* Possessive - marks the possession of a noun by something.
* Postpositional - marks the noun as a location or a means for achieving a goal by the subject. It is used when combined with most postpositions.

The table below includes the most common, regular inflections used for the majority of nouns, with two variants of the suffixes required by the word's final vowel's harmony group. Note that the ablaut-descended infixes of Sunscythian are not present in the table. Instead, the cases are put in an order following their *types* - the ergative and accusative cases are of the *Y-type* and thus their stressed vowel is changed to a /Vj/ diphthong when declined. The cases from absolutive to vocative (called *0-type*) do not take an infix, while the remaining ones (*L-type*) gain an /l/ after the stressed vowel, which can shift into /r/ or /ɬ/ based on its environment. The symbol <ø> denotes a zero-suffix. Parts of the suffixes written in brackets can be ommited - a vowel if the word ends in one, same with consonants.