Standard Ukitii

Authiik language has been reduced to a handful of dialects of one common lingua franca, spoken by the small number of individuals that escaped the first destruction of Udyana and those who lived after it. This language, which came to be known as shamanii authiik Ukitii, or "standard authiik speech" was taught to children in schools, and later to those born aboard the extragalactic expeditions. It phonetically resembles Sanskrit and is believed to have influenced the indo-iranian branch of the indo-european language family. The greatest evidence of this comes in the form of the name of both humans and yemun, whose names both come from the word used to describe intelligent, but primitive aliens, "yumaneh", pronounced /jumanə/.

The language was invented as a lingua franca on Udyana many thousands of years ago, and grew to be a language one was required to learn before schooling was considered finished. Its print script was adopted from the most commonly used across Udyana, descended from that used by The Domain for its written language. It also later served as the native tongue over 29000 years ago by the authiik on their colonies of Pritashaya and Vrina.

After the second collapse of authiik society, the same language was taught on Mabatsar and on the extragalactic fleets until their first reunion over 11600 years later when it was found that, while vernacular speech had diverged, the two dialects were still mutually intelligible for the most part, and Standard Authiik was still considered the "proper" way to speak. This made integration of the two groups quite easy, as a waste not, want not mindset had been developing in both communities.

When the authiik occupied on Earth , whose name comes from "yeriti" (/jəɾiti/), between 25450 and 25400 BCE, they introduced the language to the human and yemun species. After abandoning them to flee from the neyanta, the language spread and developed for millenia unimpeded until it was reintroduced to Earth around 3000 BCE, when the second of four fleets returned to the milky way and began searching for survivors.

This caused another split in the development of human language and the shapes present in their written language would go on to inspire the creation of various scripts, including sumerian cuneiform in the immediate future, and later legend of "godly language" would influence the evolution of numerous south asian alphasyllabary writing systems.

Millennia later, the language would be reintroduced to humans again as they settled on Temno, though it was far more likely for authiik to learn human languages instead.

As it is of a fairly standard form as an alphasyllabary, similar input devices to those used by humans were created, first to write on papyri and parchments, later to stamp letters on the page, and finally to input text and information into computers. For information about authiik input devices, see "Authiik Input Technology".

## Phonology

### Vowel Tables

 ɪ
 a
 ə
 ɜ
 u
 o

### Phonological Rules

 o becomes u
 a becomes o
 b becomes m
 l becomes ɬ
 d, t, and m become aspirated

## Script

Authiik standard script is a pseudo-alphasyllabary. Each syllable is represented by groups of characters, either pairs or single characters, representing a single syllable.

Early authiik calligraphic script was written boustrophedonically, a word originating from Greek that translates to "ox-turning" or "as the ox plows", or alternating the direction of both reading and writing by mirroring the text every other line, resulting in a right-to-left read line at the beginning of an inscription, such as a wall or page of parchment, and the second line would start at the left and be read towards the right side of the paper to repeat again from the right on the third line. This was often maintained in formal scenarios, but was phased out in printed text and casual handwriting in favor of right-to-left text.

In calligraphic ukitii, the consonant characters are quite complex and much larger than the vowel marks, which lie above the horizontal line inherent to all characters. In more contemporary scripts, the size difference between vowels and consonants is maintained, however they occupy separate characters. The vowel /a/ always follows a consonant by default. A hush or slide is used to modify consonants to either have the following vowel come before it, or to have no vowel at all.

   The word udyana is composed of four composite column-characters representing three syllables. /ud • ja • na/
With the calligraphic script, the first column, farthest to the left, represents the sound "/u/". The tall lambda-like, or inverted "V" character is a consonant hushmark, used to signify that there is no consonant in the syllable. The second use the hushmark above the character for the sound "/d/". This vowel hushmark indicates that there is no vowel after that consonant. The third character represents the sound "/ja/". The lack of a vowel mark indicates that the consonant is followed by the default vowel, or "/a/". The fourth represents "/na/".

In modern contemporary script, the first three characters, a slide, da, and un, represent the sound /ud/. The slide alters the following syllable to force the vowel to be spoken before its consonant. The latter half of the word follows as normal, with the sounds /ja/ and /na/ each represented by the characters ya and na.

   A more complex word, for example, is the word for their language. The romanized spelling of the word is "ShamaniiauthiikUkitii". This is actually a compound word, made from "Shamanii", meaning "normal", "Authiik", and "Ukitii", which means "talk" or "speech". While long ago, this phrase was spoken as a single word, contemporary Standard Ukitii has parsed this out into its component parts.

The first word is spelled with the letters sha - ma - na - ix, for Shamanii. The second is spelled with vowels ak and ud with a bridge symbol to form the diphthong /au/, and preventing them from being read as /aʔu/, ta - ix - ka, and a hush to form the word authiik. The third is spelled ud - ka - in - ta - ix, to spell the word Ukitii.

## Counting

Authiik numerals are in base-8 as a result of having only 8 digits on their hands. In calligraphic form, marks are used to denote the place of the numeral, with marks for the 8th place, the 64th place, the 512th place, and a mark that multiplies any number by 64, applicable to the fourth places and above. These correspond to the 10th, 100th, 1000th, and 10000th places in a base-10 counting system.

    They have been vastly simplified to a more standard system of eight digits instead in contemporary print scripts. The eight modern numerals descended from ancient depictions of numerals, which resembled hands making the signs for various integers. These ancient authiik counted in a base-12 system, with each finger representing one through four, an outstretched thumb with all three fingers erect representing a five, and all fingers curled in a circle with the thumb touching the other fingers representing a six. With their two hands, they could reach a maximum value of twelve. These systems fell out of use in favor of base-8 as time went on, but the symbols for the numerals remained in use after a symbol for the number 7 was created, as well as a new symbol to represent the null position, a zero.