Eusai
Eusai is the parent language to all known and surviving eastern languages, and was spoken in the east before the dawn of the First Age. It was originally spoken by the oldest known ancestors to the myriad of eastern peoples evolved over time. No texts written in Eusai has been discovered, and the language's structure and features are mostly speculation.
Eusai was also called Old Eusai by the scholars of Nīwulā Valley, and elsewhere the two terms are often used interchangeably, especially in later texts. Rarely also the term the Old Word is used, mostly in non-scholarly circles.
Phonology
Old Eusai has an overall phonemic inventory of 11 consonants and five (short) vowels which may appear either alone or form several diphthongs with other vowels.
Maximum syllable structure was a minimal (C)V, with no coda consonants allowed at all (although it has been theorized that high vowels /i/ and /u/ may have been treated more akin to semivowels in some positions.)
Consonants
| Bilabial | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Plosive |
p | t | k | ʔ | |
Fricative |
s | h | |||
Nasal |
m | n | |||
Approximant |
w | l | j | ||
Trill |
r |
The glottal plosive /ʔ/ (romanized as ' ) seemed to have occurred in situations where two vowels in different syllables meet (for example, /koaka/ becomes /koʔaka/). This also happened across word boundaries (/ko aka/ => /ko ʔaka/).
Aside from the glottal plosive, every other consonant is romanized using their IPA symbols listed in the above table.
Vowels
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
High |
i | u | |
Mid |
e | o | |
Low |
a |
Diphthongs
Eusai had only short vowels and diphthongs, of which there were 14. None of the diphthongs contained more than one non-high (a, e, o) vowel, however two high vowels could appear together. In most of its descendants many of the diphthongs have either been lost or transformed in various ways.
| -a | -e | -i | -o | -u | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| a- | - | - | ai | - | au |
| e- | - | - | ei | - | eu |
| i- | ia | ie | - | io | iu |
| o- | - | - | oi | - | ou |
| u- | ua | ue | ui | uo | - |
Morphology
Eusai was largely an isolating and analytic, head-initial, language, using a mixture of pre- and postpositions to relay meaning over any kind of affixation. In verbs, it recognized three tenses (present, past and future) and a marked perfect aspect.
Nouns
Nouns seemed to have no concern for case, however they recognized four distinct numbers: singular, paucal, plural and collective. The paucal number was used when referring to a small number or group, akin to "couple of" or "a few of", while the collective number refers to complete, larger groups such as the collective of "human, person" meaning "humankind", or the collective number of "soldier" having the meaning of "army".
Number
While the paucal and plural were treated as plural, singular and collective were often seen treated as singular entities. While some descendant languages have preserved the four numbers, just as many others assimilated one or more to the rest.
The singular number was unmarked while the plural and collective used prepositions. The paucal instead used a postposition.
Definiteness
Eusai has a definite article "na" (from "it, this, that") which is used when used to a particular person or object.
nue, "(a) woman"
na nue, "the woman"
Possession & Locative
The possessor ("my", "his", "dog's", "of the sea") followed after the possessed and used the general locative/genitive preposition "a", which somewhat corresponds to "of" but also had the additional meaning of "in, on, at". This is a feature often seen in several of Eusai's descendants.
Additionally, the possessive/locative construction was sometimes used to derive adjectives and adverbs from other words in a similar fashion.
Adjectives & Comparison
Adjectives preceded the noun they modified, and showed no agreement. In plural and collective nouns they came after the number preposition. Comparative and superlative are formed using additional adpositions.
Verbs
Verbs in Eusai were marked for three tenses (present, past, future) and three aspects (perfective, imperfective, perfect), although the existence of a true imperfective aspect was somewhat arguable.
Passive
The passive voice was formed using an auxiliary verb pei, meaning "to get" followed by a past tense preposition. Optional oblique 'object' could follow the phrase with a preposition which likely came from the word for "through".
na tie pei ko hai wu na mau, "the mouse is hunted by the cat"
Syntax
The basic word order was a strict Subject-Verb-Object, with a nominative-accusative alignment, however the word order could be reversed in some situations.
Nonverbal phrases
Old Eusai did not use copulas, but word order and, at times, possessive/locative construction to differentiate between phrases such as "the red woman" and "the woman is red".
na tui nue, "the red woman"
na nue 'a tui, "the woman (is) in red"
Some descendants have assimilated one construction into the other and thus created some ambiguousness when forming such phrases.
Relative clauses
Eusai made use of the definite article "na" (it, this, that") to form relative clauses.
na nue na ko pia, "the woman who wove"
na mei na pei ko kue, "the house that was destroyed"
Pronunciation: /euˈsai/
Language Family: Eastern languages
Parent Language: Unknown
Era & Region: Silent Age East
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