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Sanila Documentation

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Introduction

Sanila is a personal constructed language I created, beginning development on January 11, 2018. The language employs a relatively simple grammar lacking any inflections and, along with the general semantics of words, was largely inspired by the conlangs of Jack Eisenmann. The vocabulary is mostly a priori (not based on any existing language).

This document describes Sanila phonology, orthography, and grammar. The official Sanila dictionary may be found here.

Takito seri

Sanila ba sani čunare nesenu ku la jema me, ku seli me loda kiki ofe11 to tolava ofe1 to rasona ofe2018. Sani li ura zegara beno hova se utare hino, e sani ti to Jack Eisenmann lecabu zegara e se konogu to hatese ni sani li. Masi hatese ba eča sa va sani iši.

Rosuvi di arisi hino e kaniru e zegara to Sanila. Rosuvi hatese agobi to Sanila ba seba.

Phonology & Orthography

Sanila is written entirely phonemically: one sound per letter, and one letter per sound. Sanila has 22 consonants and 5 vowels, yielding 27 phonemes in total. The language's orthography thus uses 27 letters to write these phonemes.

The consonants in Sanila are:

• Bb: /b/ as in bat
• Cc: /ts/ as in cats
• Čč: /tʃ/ as in chair
• Dd: /d/ as in dot
• Ff: /f/ as in fan
• Gg: /g/ as in get
• Hh: /h/ as in hat
• Jj: /j/ as in yes
• Kk: /k/ as in cat
• Ll: /l/ as in let
• Mm: /m/ as in mat
• Nn: /n/ as in net
• Pp: /p/ as in pet
• Rr: /ɾ/ as in Spanish pero; alternatives such as [ɹ], [r], [ʀ] are acceptible
• Ss: /s/ as in set
• Šš: /ʃ/ as in ship
• Tt: /t/ as in top
• Vv: /v/ as in vat
• Ww: /w/ as in wet
• Zz: /z/ as in zap
• Žž: /ʒ/ as in measure
• Þþ: /θ/ as in thin

Sanila uses the same five vowels as in languages such as Spanish, Esperanto, and Toki Pona, which are not as easy to approximate in English:

• Aa: /a/, similar to father or bat
• Ee: /e/, similar to pay or bet
• Ii: /i/, similar to seem
• Oo: /o/, similar to boat
• Uu: /u/, similar to oops

Phoneme Chart for the Linguistically Inclined

Symbols in parentheses indicate how the phoneme preceding it is written, if it differs from the IPA.

Consonants:

Vowels:

Phonotactics

All Sanila words are formed according to the following rules:

• Syllables are of the structure CV; ie. one consonant followed by one vowel.
• For the first syllable of a word, the initial consonant is optional.

Words in Sanila's basic vocabulary contain anywhere from 1 to 3 syllables.

Stress

The stressed syllable of a word is always the second-to-last syllable. For example, "sipu" is pronounced "SI-pu", and "konogu" is pronounced "ko-NO-gu".

Alternative Orthography

Sanila uses 4 letters which are outside of the ASCII character set: 'č', 'š', 'ž', 'þ'. If the writer is either unable or unwilling to use these characters, they may be substituted with the digraphs 'ch', 'sh', 'zh', and 'th' respectively.

Letter Names

Letters in Sanila may be given names (usually in speech) via the following scheme: For vowel letters, the name is simply the vowel sound. For consonant letters, the name is the consonant sound followed by 'a'.

Sanila Alphabet

Sanila also has its own original alphabet, shown below. Note that this chart was created before the phoneme /ð/ (Ðð) was removed from the language and merged with /θ/, and I don't feel like updating it. Consider it a neat historical perspective, or something.

Grammar

Words in Sanila may belong to the following parts of speech: noun, verb, modifier, preposition, particle, conjunction, and interjection. Most Sanila words belong to exactly one part of speech, however a few special words are able to act as more than one part of speech.

Nouns in Sanila also include what are pronouns in English, such as "I" and "you".

Modifiers are words which describe other words. They are equivalent to what are adjectives, adverbs, determiners, and intransitive verbs in English. They may modify nouns, verbs, other modifiers, prepositions, or interjections.

Sentence Structure

A sentence in Sanila may consist of a single verb phrase, without specifying any subject, object, or other information:

The subject of a verb may be specified by placing a noun phrase before the verb:

The object of a verb may be specified by placing a noun phrase after the verb:

If a sentence contains an object but no subject, the resulting sentence functions much like a passive construction:

The word 'ba' (to be) is a special verb which may be followed by a bare modifier phrase or prepositional phrase (or a noun phrase as usual):

The particle 've' may precede a verb to reverse the roles of its subject and object, similar to the passive voice:

It is also acceptible for a sentence to consist of an interjection or a bare phrase on its own, especially in informal speech or as the answer to a question:

Modifiers

A modifier may follow a word to describe it:

Multiple modifiers may stack onto the same word:

In this case, the multiple modifers could be interpreted either as each modifying the word separately, or as modifying the other modifers in the phrase. For instance, the above phrase could also be interpreted as "a dress which is big in a beautiful way". If you want to specify that the modifers each modify the same word individually, you can optionally use the particle 'ri' to separate them:

Causatives

The particle 'je' may precede a modifer or verb to convert it into a causative verb; that is, a verb which means "to cause something to [orignal word]".

Note that causative verbs, like any other verb, can only have one direct object. Thus, you cannot use 'je' to say "I cause you to write a book"; "*La je roču ru oliba" is not a valid translation of this sentence. You would instead use nominalization to express this, which is described later.

Prepositions

A preposition phrase consists of a preposition followed by a noun phrase:

A preposition phrase may be placed after a noun to modify it:

Or after a verb and its object, to modify the sentence as a whole:

Or at the beginning of a sentence, to the same effect:

A preposition phrase may also have its following noun excluded:

Noun Grouping

Two nouns may be placed adjacent to each other, forming a construction which indicates that the first noun pertains to the second noun in some way.

Verb Grouping

Two verbs may be placed adjacent to each other, in which each verb has the same subject. This forms a construction which is often translated using infinitives or auxilliary verbs in English.

Relative Clauses

A relative clause is a clause which acts as a modifer, within which the relative pronoun 'me' refers to whatever the relative clause is modifying. A relative clause is initiated with the particle 'ku':

'ku' may be excluded when immediately preceding 'me':

Nominalization

Sanila has a variety of different particles which nominalize words or clauses (ie. causes them to behave as nouns).

The particle 'se' may be placed before a single word to nominalize it:

The particle 'so' is the abstract nominalizer: it nominalizes an entire clause following it, while indicating that the clause abstractly represents a hypothetical situation that is not necessarily true in the current moment:

The particle 'ka' is the factual nominalizer: it nominalizes an entire clause, while indicating that the clause does in fact describe a currently true situation:

The particle 'ika' is the truth nominalizer: it converts a clause into a noun meaning "whether the clause is true":

There is also a completely optional particle 'ze' which may indicate the end of a sequence of words nominalized by 'so', 'ka' or 'ika' to reduce ambiguity, although it is rarely if ever used.

The particle 'mo' may precede a single verb or modifier to convert it into a noun which is the subject of the verb's action/relationship or has the modifier's quality:

Similarly, the particle 'ko' may precede a verb to convert it into a noun which is the object of the verb's action/relationship:

Conjunctions

Conjunctions may conjoin words, phrases, or entire clauses together.

Verbal Adjuncts

'lo' and 'no' are words which introduce a verbal adjunct into a sentence. A verbal adjunct is a word, phrase, or sentence which provides context, topic, or perspective to the sentence as a whole. Verbal adjuncts may be used in a wide variety of ways; if you are familiar with Toki Pona, they function similarly to 'la'. These two particles are distinguished by their positioning: with 'lo', the structure is "(sentence) lo (adjunct)", whereas with 'no', the structure is "(adjunct) no (sentence)".

A common use of 'lo' is with preposition phrases to reduce ambugity as to whether the preposition is modifying the direct object or the sentence as a whole:

Questions

A question with a yes/no answer is formed by placing the particle 'do' at the beginning of a sentence.

Other questions use the word 'du' (what/which), which can either be a standalone noun or a modifier:

Imperatives

An imperative sentence (a sentence expressing a command, demand, or request) is formed with the particle 'te' at the beginning of a sentence.

If a subject in an imperative sentence is unspecified, it is usually implied to be the listener:

Numbers

Number words in Sanila behave as modifiers and use base 10. Numbers are expressed by saying the digits of a number in sequence, from most to least significant. The following words are used for numbers:

• he: 0
• da: 1
• tu: 2
• þi: 3
• ro: 4
• pi: 5
• lu: 6
• ki: 7
• ta: 8
• si: 9
• fa: 000; a group of three zeroes
• ca: decimal point

The modifier 'ofe' converts a number into an ordinal number:

There is another more commonly used way to express numbers in Sanila, which is to concatenate all the digits into a single word prefixed with 'ju-', or 'ofe-' for ordinal numbers:

In writing, digit words/syllables may be substituted with the standard numeral symbols [0123456789]:

Sanila has several particles which behave as arithmetic operators, and may be placed in between numerical words. These are:

• pa: addition (+)
• re: subtraction (-)
• ša: multiplication (*)
• gu: division (/)
• čo: exponentiation (^)
• žu: times ten to the power of (e)

're' can also be placed before a number to express negative values:

'žu' can also be incorporated into 'ju-' and 'ofe-' number words:

If no digits precede 'žu' in this case, a value of 1 is implied:

Proper Names

There is no single standard way to handle foreign names in Sanila, but generally there are 3 ways they can be handled that the speaker/writer can freely decide between.

The first way is to simply loan the name directly with no alteration to spelling or pronunciation:

The second way is to adapt the name to Sanila's phonology, but without any regard for Sanila's phonotactics:

The third way is to adapt the name to comform both to Sanila's phonology as well as its phonotactics:

Personally I rarely transcribe names this way, as it may often render them unrecognizable, so I usually tend to use the first two methods. I think it makes sense to embrace the foreignness of foreign words rather than try to adapt them into something that may end up less intellegible; if the speaker uses a phonotactically conformant loanword and the listener is unable to discern what the loadword is meant to refer to, the speaker may end up having to clarify by just directly spelling out the name anyways.

Names of places and languages should ideally be derived from endonyms, ie. what the inhabitants of a place call their own place, or what the speakers of a language call their own language. Names of natural languages are often prefixed with the word 'sani' (language).