Mutli
| Mutli | |
|---|---|
| K'altan | |
| Native to | Mutul |
Native speakers | c. 120,000,000 (2016) |
| Glyphic Chin'iin | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | – |
| Glottolog | None |
The Mutli, contraction between "Mutul" and "Li", an archaic classifier for languages, is the name given internationaly to the national language of the Mutul, officially known as K'altan, lit. "Biding Language". It's a standard variety of Mutulese used by the Divine Throne in all of its official documents, but also by all newspapers, publications, radio or television shows targeting a national demographic rather than one of the sixty officialy recognized ethnies of the Mutul. It started as an attempt to recreate Classic Chʼoltiʼan, the prestige language of the Chaan Dynasty and the ancestor of many of the most common modern languages spoken in the Mutul. It's pronounciation is based on the K'alak Muul speech, its vocabulary on Chʼolan languages, and its grammar on Glyphic.
It must not be mistaken for another, now extinct, language that was known as Mutli. This previous attempt at a lingua franca was a simplified version of Yokot'an taught thourough Mutulese Ochran to simplify communication between the diverse ethnicities, both Oxidentaleses, Ochraneses, and Malaio-Scipians, under the Nuk Nahob employment. It fell in use after the end of the Mutulese presence in the Vespanian Ocean, but had nonetheless left an impact on the development of many other languages, notably heavily inspiring the modern K'altan.
Phonology
Almost all of Mutli is built around monosyllabic "root words", with a few disyllabic exceptions, a trait inspired by Classical Ch'oltian not shared by many other Mutulese languages, who now show complex consonant clusters at both ends of syllables due to vowel loss.
| Labial | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stops | Voiced | b | ||||
| Voiceless | p | tʲ | k | ʔ | ||
| Ejective | pʼ | tʲʼ | kʼ | |||
| Fricative | s | ʃ | x | |||
| Affricates | Voiceless | ts | tʃ | |||
| Ejective | tsʼ | tʃʼ | ||||
| Nasals | m | ɲ | ||||
| Laterals | l | |||||
| Trills | r | |||||
| Glides | w | j | ||||
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| High | i | ɨ | u |
| Mid | e | o | |
| Low | a |
Grammar
Mutli's morphology is both agglutinative and polysynthetic. Verbs are marked for aspect or tense, the person of the subject, the person of the object in the case of transitive verbs, and for plurality of person. Possessed nouns are marked for person of possessor. Nouns are not marked for case and gender is not explicitly marked.
Word order
The basic word order is VOS. However, factors including animacy, definiteness, topicalization and focus contribute to determining which word order is appropriate and VOS may not always be grammaticaly correct.
Contrary to most Mutuleses dialects and inspired by Quichean languages, Mutli does not require the use of numerical classifiers. This simplification, meant to facilitate the universal aspirations of the language, is often criticized as a form of un-necessary vulgarization.
Nouns
Noun morphology is fairly simple: they inflect for number (plural or singular), and, when possessed, for person and number of their possessor. Pronominal possession is expressed by a set of possessive prefixes attached to the noun. Nouns may furthermore adopt a special form marking them as possessed. For nominal possessors, the possessed noun is inflected as possessed by a third-person possessor, and followed by the possessor noun.
A contrast is made between alienable and inalienable possession by varying the way the noun is (or is not) marked as possessed.
To express location and other relations between entities, use is made of a special class of "relational nouns". Most of them are metaphorically derived from body parts so that "on top of", for example, is expressed by the word for head
Subjects and Objects
Mutli is ergative in its alignment. This means that the subject of an intransitive verb is treated similarly to the object of a transitive verb, but differently from the subject of a transitive verb.
Two set of affixes attached to a verb serve to indicate the person of its arguments. One set, "Set B", indicates the person of subjects of intransitive verbs, and of objects of transitive verbs. They can also be used with adjective or noun predicates to indicate the subject. "Set A" is used to indicate the person of subjects of transitive verbs and also the possessors of nouns (including relational nouns).
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