Panese

Panese is the human-given name of Ihnne'sha ("Worldspeech"), the long-dead universal lingua franca of the skgri'i. Once spoken across the Ophiuchus region of sky, the extinction of its speakers plunged the language itself into silence. However, the human inhabitants of Hemera and other formerly satyr-inhabited worlds have adopted it in the process of learning to work with relic satyr technology, though Human Panese is merely an adaptation of Old Panese due to interspecies pronunciation differences.

Structure

Morphology

Panese uses a set of suffixes and prefixes to signify certain additive aspects of nouns and verbs, such as plurality and tense.

• -'i denotes plurality
• -'rihn denotes past tense
• -'fihn denotes future tense
• uhl- is affirmative
• ni- is negative
• te'- is the approaching preposition (i.e. "to")
• sun'- is the originating preposition (i.e. "from")

Possession is denoted simply by prefixing the possessed noun with the appropriate pronoun root or proper noun.

Syntax

The language uses a loose SVO structure.

Composition

Pronouns

Panese does not pluralize pronouns, relying on context to distinguish singular and plural use (usually by the pluralization of the rest of the thought) as often the pronouns are only present as root prefixes and unable to be pluralized in standard fashion. Old Panese vowel roots, "yh" in particular, are difficult for the human mouth to accurately replicate; they have been humanized as vowel phonemes with a breathy mid-mouth voiceless "H" sound layered onto them. Additionally, the -nne pronoun affix is pronounced as a hard consonant n with a near-voiceless vowel "eh" at the end; a common phonetic quirk accounted for in the Panese alphabet but challenging to convey with Latin script.

• Ohnne (root o) = self (I / we)
• Yhnne (root yh) = direct other (you)
• Ahnne (root a) = indirect other (they)
• Sehnne (root se) = generic impersonal (it)
• Shehnne (root she) = proximal impersonal (this)
• Chehnne (root che) = distal impersonal (that)

The form of "to be" for pronouns is suffixed as -m.

• Ohm = I am / we are
• Yhm = you are
• Ahm = they are
• Sehm = it is
• Shehm = this is
• Chehm = that is

Essential Vocabulary

These are the most basic, vital words of Panese that are able to convey universal meanings; things like affirmative/negative, greeting, query, and frustration.

• Kezhe = hello
• Vahzhe = goodbye
• Uhl = yes
• Ni = no
• Chi? = general query (what/who/why/how/which)
• Vrilne = please
• Kahsi = thanks
• Pahksu = damn

History

Panese originated with its native speakers, the skgri’i, on their home planet of Hemera. According to surviving satyr records, the language was a group of dialects native to the rift valley region of the supercontinent (believed to be the cradle of civilization on the planet), thus making it one of the oldest known languages on the planet -and, after the various tribes coalesced under one civilization, a prime candidate for Hemera’s global auxiliary language. However, it was one of just under a thousand languages spoken by the people of Hemera before globalization brought the satyrs together under Ihnne’sha as the universal common tongue.
After the globalization era, Old Panese underwent millennia of mutation and dialect variation as new cultures of skgri’i sprouted on distant worlds. The most common iteration, of course, was the standardized version spoken in interstellar forums to ensure effective communication. The vast majority of surviving satyr documentation is recorded in this form, and indeed this version of Panese is what the modern humanized language is based upon.

Speakers

Skgri'i (origin)
Humans
Shyxaure
Rimor

Writing system

Ihnne'sev

Alphabet and numerics coming soon!