Zjazzle: Old Tongue

Zjazzle is considered by most language experts as the worst functional language, perhaps the worst conceivable language. The intricacies are nearly impossible to describe to an outsider, and the differences in pronunciation are unnoticeable to an untrained ear but could mean the difference between "life" and "death," quite literarily. The term "Zjazzle" itself is not a native word (well, it is independently, but its meaning, "centerpiece decoration," has no relevance to the origin of the word as defined by outsiders.). Rather, people interacting with the language gave it that name as a mockery of how many and how often alveolar and alveolar-like fricatives are used in the language.

Nobody quite knows the origins of Zjazzle. Ancient species like the Werai used Wokaiya and similar languages. The Keyrit-Welokyi, originating from the other side of the map, used Wokaiya and similar languages. Tuhra, yet another side, followed the same pattern. Zjazzle has nearly no connection to Traveller's Tongue or other languages outside the Wokaiya language tree. There seems to be no possible place from which Zjazzle could have spread. Yet, for all its mystery, Zjazzle was the language, or rather, the family of languages, that dominated the precursor tribes of Yatkaugo, Retrougo, and surprisingly a few remote villages in southern Wlitowa.

It is at least theorized that Zjazzle derived from a singular language, one that derived from even fewer sounds than those which compose the Wokaiyan phonetic alphabet. Due to the lack of a written language, and perhaps tribal migration, Zjazzle split up into uncountably many variants. These variants warped the phonetics just slightly before smashing themselves into each other in new languages. Linguists believe that there was once a singular alveolar fricative in the language, but during this diaspora the single "zj" became legally distinct from the other "zj's" in one tribe over. Both were incorporated in the hybrid language, and the problems compiled exponentially until only a few languages were left, with nearly a dozen distinct pseudo-alveolar fricatives.

Some historians blame the fall of the tribes of Yatkaugo and Retrougo on the failure of the language which they spoke. Most of the continent of Yatkaugo was already unified under a common language by the time the Wokaiya-speaking Ugo-yt began their unification of the continent. However, because the average Ugo-yt could not understand Zjazzle, this only further cemented in their mind what an indescribably fractured place Yatkaugo truly was. So, instead of using the most common tongue to unite the tribes, the Ugo-yt imposed their language on the tribes of Yatkaugo in the name of unification. The Ugo-yt oddly legitimized their viewpoint from how easy it was for the tribesmen to convert to speaking the Ugo-yt variant of Wokaiya. A generation later, the people of Yatkaugo had an easier time conversing with their Ugo-yt overlords than with their own parents, such a failure was Zjazzle.

With the fall of Yatkaugo and Retrougo to the Ugo-yt Empire and immediate conversion of the speakers therein, the only remnant speakers of the Zjazzle family of languages lay in southern Wlitowa. The king didn't particularly bother to reach out to those sects of people; they paid their taxes and caused no trouble. However, the difficulty of their language forced them to become a very insular community, even though they were established upon some of the wealthiest trade routes in all of Wouraiya. This led them to become poorer, which convinced them to look inward for strength, which repeated the cycle again. When the monarchy eventually created a transport system that led travelers through southern Wlitowa into Tuhra, the economic and cultural shock to the region could not be overstated. The guardians of Zjazzle were some of the poorest groups of people in an nation that was already well behind the average economic standard. The king showed indifference, but residents began learning outside languages in order to keep up the pace. As the last of the Zjazzle languages fizzled out into oblivion, some Keyrit linguists started a movement to record and document the language as best they could. While Zjazzle speakers themselves tried preservation efforts, most linguists turned a blind eye to Zjazzle and abandoned it to its fate. Zjazzle was a terrible language, most said. That's all it could have taught us, anyways.

Phonology

One of the major problems with Zjazzle was the overabundance and over-reliance on alveolar and alveolar-like fricatives. Because there was no internally written standard for any of the dialects, outsiders tried to compile the language into a series of words. Zjazzle was given the so-called letters "z," "zh," "zj," "j," and "zs" to incorporate into their alphabet. This was their first mistake. In transcribing the language, they had paired two separate voiced alveolar-like fricatives for each letter. For example, the words for "life" and "death" were spelled identically, which in certain circumstances was a grave insult to the tribes of Yatkaugo and Retrougo. The speakers of Zjazzle found this to be completely unworkable, and their own personal rework of the written language had over twice as many voiced alveolar fricatives catalogued in their writing system.

The problem was further compounded when most inhabitants of Wouraiya could not physically say some of the fricatives. The Werai's fixed jaw prevented them from making any sort of fricative, to be sure, but people who grew up speaking Wokaiya or even Traveler's Tongue did not have experience forming specific phonemes in childhood and so could not express them in adulthood. While this gave native Zjazzle speakers an almost exclusive monopoly in translation, most nations didn't bother.

Morphology

One of Zjazzle's primary flaws was that it consistently tried to make certain words as distinct as possible from other words, while keeping dichotomies the same. For example, the words "life" and "death" were supposed to rhyme, even though outsiders could not comprehend the rhyming mechanism. On the other hand, the word for diplomat, "zequim," sounded much to similar to the word for fork, "sequim." Zjazzle speakers differentiated the two by changing the word for diplomat to "zequoim." This interfered with a local fauna species called "zj'quom," and the word for diplomat was commonly changed to "zevoquoim." By the time that the diplomat was generally declared to be in its own league, the term for diplomat had doubled in length and syllables.

When words get longer, the information in those words stay the same. Speakers of that word have to speak the word in the same amount of time in order to maintain a steady flow of information. Wokaiya tends to have a low syllables-over-time rating, alongside Traveller's Tongue. Zjazzle's pursuit of originality forced them into the extremely high end of the syllables-over-time spectrum. This leads most passive observers to confusion in a conversation with those who speak Zjazzle. At times, the speaker doesn't even seem to be speaking words, more a loose collection of buzzing imitations.

Syntax

Most languages either arrange parts of a sentence in a particular order so as to strictly define subject, verb, and object, or place suffixes at the end of words to indicate which parts of a sentence they are supposed to be. Zjazzle has neither of these. It's not exactly set in stone how those who speak Zjazzle order their words, but