Secret Language of Grandmothers

The Secret Language of Grandmothers (SLOG, Wâmêg Pâpâm ['wæ,mɛg'pæ,pæm]) is a language created by EmPtA pOmPtA.

SLOG is the first language of most people in the city of Mudgement. It is spoken to a lesser extent on Earth, but mostly by nuns. In Mudgement, the Archmadams are the arbiters of the language, and attempt to regulate it much in the same way the Académie Française does for the French language. In the schools where the Archmadams rule, the Official Dialect of SLOG is spoken on pain of death, but most students and faculty speak other dialects outside of the schools and the Frectrum. The Archmadams' authority of the language extends only to Mudgement, although they hate that other communities of speakers allow the language to evolve.

Communities of nuns on Earth and elsewhere outside of Mudgement acquired the language when one of their number awakened feverishly in the night and could suddenly only speak SLOG. The other sisters were tasked with interpreting and learning her language until they could understand it and speak it themselves. Outside of Mudgement, the language is only spoken in abbeys; outsiders are actively discouraged from learning and speaking it. Across cultures, children are chastised and told myths about what will happen if they say words from the language. For example, in much of Europe, children are told that if they use SLOG, the nuns will take them "where the horses roam."

Despite this air of secrecy, in 1994, a pair of linguists, Perribel Lunchthrust and Elengeamoan Peacebasket, were able to infiltrate a covey of ngungs and document some of the features of the language. The following is a brief account of the grammar and vocabulary the researchers were able to put together shortly before they were found dead, encased together in a cocoon of dried camel's milk and fur, with looks of absolute peace on their faces.

Phonology
SLOG has 17 consonant phonemes. Romanizations are in parentheses where appropriate. The first of a pair represents an unvoiced consonant, the second represents a fully voiced consonant: The consonants l and r may be occasionally used as syllabic resonants, but when they occur together, they are pronounced [ɾl] and any stress shifts to the preceding syllable. Voiceless stops are never aspirated, and voiced stops are fully voiced. The consonant cluster /ng/ is always pronounced [ŋg], and never [ŋ] alone. Before a back vowel at the beginning of a word, /r/ and /l/ are voiceless [r̥] and [l̥], romanized as hr and hl, respectively. Fricatives are voiced when followed by a voiced obstruent.

SLOG has 9-11 vowel phonemes: While the phoneme is /ɔ/, the vowel ô may be realized as [ɒ] or [ɔ], depending on the surrounding consonants.

Two consecutive vowels are always separate syllable nuclei; there are no diphthong phonemes.

The vowel pairs e and ê and u and ù are typically considered separate phonemes, but in modern speech e and u are commonly mutated into ê and ù respectively, except when stressed. For the purposes of syllable structure, vowels may be classified into “strong” (â, ê, î, ô, ù, û) and “weak” categories (a, e, i, o). Strong vowels are never found word-finally. Weak vowels are less common in syllable nuclei, as any strong vowels in the word historically triggered strengthening harmony in the following syllables with weak nuclei. The vowel /u/ is neither weak nor strong, since it can be stressed like a strong vowel but may also appear in a word-final position like a weak vowel (though it tends to drop off, as in Japanese), and is otherwise restricted in its environments like the weak vowels.

Stress
SLOG has a few basic stress rules, although the patterns aren’t super consistent. Stress tends not to be a contrastive feature, and homophones are usually different parts of speech that are easily distinguished from context, or clarified periphrastically. Properly, all stressed vowels and sonorants are phonated with harsh voice:

yalrgux norùmpùk pôgrara! [j a ɾlguχ nər ʊ mpʊk p ɔ grrə] “you must eat the bone!”

In a di- or trisyllabic word, primary stress falls on the penultimate syllable, unless it contains a weak vowel, l, or r. For example:

krîčunka /krɪ 'ʧun ka/ “escape”

nùmùxsâč /nʊ 'mʊχ sæʧ/ “baker”

mîčùč /'mɪ ʧʊʧ/ “jar”

pênxwûn / 'pɛn χwʌn/ “martyr”

wôyo /'wɔ jo/ “snag”

solîbkle /so 'lɪb kle/ “crater field”

ùyôt /'ʊ jɔt/ “shield”

If, however, the penultimate syllable contains a weak vowel, l, or r, there are three possibilities. First, the word may be trisyllabic with a strong vowel in the antepenultimate syllable. If this is the case, that syllable is stressed:

nùmyaxon /'nʊm ja χon/ “philosopher”

nùmrgùx /'nʊm r gʊχ/ “nomad”

nùmbasgîk /'nʊm bas gɪk/ “donor”

pânorun /'pæ no run/ “food”

ùyewêj /'ʊ je wɛʤ/ “lever”

kêblkle /'kɛb l kle/ “aviary”

Second, the word may contain a strong vowel only in the ultimate syllable. If this is the case, that syllable is stressed:

solîbč /so 'lɪbʧ/ “earthworm”

krisolîb /kri so 'lɪb/ “suction”

klearâg /kle a 'ɹæg/ “road”

karyûnč /kar 'jʌnʧ/ “shame”

arâgx /a 'rægχ/ “snake, eel”

Finally, the word may contain no strong vowels or in which case the penultimate syllable is once again stressed:

šiluk /'ʃi luk/ “cat”

kriwa /'kri wa/ “construction”

klwa /'kl wa/ “bank account”

Polysyllabic words receive their primary stress on the penultimate syllable, and secondary stresses on every other syllable to the left, assuming both of those have strong vowels or /u/ as their nuclei, or contain no strong vowels at all (rare):

sùčwêčùnka /ˌsʊʧ wɛ 'ʧʊn ka/ “had one done x?”

sùkwûnôgûx /ˌsʊk wʌn 'ɔ gʌχ/ “did one start x?”

nônôrûnûk /ˌnɔ nɔ 'rʌn ʌk/ “it is eating itself”

Polysyllabic words that do not have strong vowels in these positions cause stress to move outward until it finds a strong vowel:

sùčayaxônčùspùk /ˌsʊʧ a ja χɔn 'ʧʊs ˌpʊk/ “aren’t you thinking about them?”

sùčayaxômpùk /ˌsʊʧ a ja 'χɔm ˌpʊk / “are you thinking about them?”

Nouns
Nouns are hardly inflected at all, aside from being marked for plurality, alienable possession (as we’ll see below) and, in the case of mass nouns, for discreteness/partitivity. In the protolanguage, the plural form of a noun was marked by reduplicating the nucleus and coda of the last syllable, and this remains the default form of pluralization for newer words and loanwords.

mîčùyùk, mîčùyùkùk “pebble, pebbles”

ùyômi, ùyômîmi “knife, knives”

hrôka, hrôkâka “star, stars”

kriweyîm, kriweyîmîm “glance, glances”

pânorun, pânorùnùn “food, foods ”

pâbâsgîk, pâbâsgîkîk “gift, gifts”

Other older nouns, thanks to diachronic quirks, are irregular in their pluralization. For instance, some are identical in the plural and singular:

kle “place, places”

mênt “city, cities”

šaxônkle “brain, brains”

mîbyûm “penis, penises”

Still other nouns are slightly different in the plural, even though they still derive from a reduplicated suffix:

uxsâč, uxsayâč “cake, cakes”

kôč, kôčùč “tree, trees”

xûng, xûnxûg “flower, flowers”

ùtmûj, ùtmûdyûj “fool, fools”

nùnč, nùnsùč “goblin, goblins”

nùnč, nùmnùyùx “coward, cowards”

Note that in the last two examples, the words are indistinguishable in the singular, but have distinct plural forms. In a few rare cases (mostly paired body parts), the singular and plural forms are unrelated:

ùč, ùyôkle “eye, eyes”

pîm, ùyôdyîm “hand, hands”

pâm, mîtùča “ear, ears”

The suffix -sa can be affixed to a noun as a form of partitive article, meaning either an individual unit of a collective noun, or “some of” a mass noun. For example:

êj “water” vs. êdyûsa “drop of water”

dûki “flesh” vs. dûksa “some flesh”

SLOG has no explicit distinction between definite and indefinite nouns, but where the distinction is important, definiteness can be indicated by referring to the noun in the fourth person (obviation). This removes the noun in question from focus, assuming we already know about it. See below.

Pronouns
SLOG has seven personal pronouns, plus an eighth indefinite pronoun meaning “someone” or “something” (Table 1). A few things are notable about this system. First, number is only encoded in the first and second person. Second, there is a clusivity distinction in the first person plural. Finally, SLOG contains a distinction between proximate (3rd person) nouns and obviate (4th person) nouns, which is used in part for anaphoric distinction. Less interesting but still noteworthy is that there is no distinction between animate and inanimate or masculine and feminine in the 3rd or 4th person; everyone and everything is either kâk or yox. As will become clearer below, these pronouns are typically dropped as the subject and object of a sentence unless used for emphasis…

wawêčkâk “we build them”

wawêčkâk kyrer “we build temples”

wawêčkâk wêč kyrer “it is we who build the temples”

…or to remove ambiguity.

šwôgûx kâkârîtčùskyûl kâk noruntč nùndûki “they didn’t discourage eating the soul”

šwôgûx kâkârîtčùskyûl noruntč nùndûki “eating didn’t discourage the soul”

Inalienable possession
Like some other languages, SLOG has two forms of possession: alienable and inalienable. Inalienable possession is used to refer to body parts, family members, thoughts, and actions, and is marked either using a possessive pronoun that precedes the possessee (when the possessor is a pronoun; Table 2) or affixing the prefix gu- or gw- to the possessor. For example:

gwùč ùyôčùnkâka “our legs”

gupu ùyôkle “your eyes”

gunùmyaxon šaxônôn “the philosopher’s thoughts”

Alienable possession
Alienable possession refers to anything else being possessed. This kind of possession is formed using a particle yîm and a prefix (or occasionally infix) on the possessee (Table 3) when the possessor is a pronoun. Otherwise, the possessor and the yîm particle are separate from the possessee. For example:

yîm trùyôt “someone’s shield”

yîm ônyîdnûn “my personal failings”

yîm nùmyaxon ùyoxwûn “the philosopher’s book”

The second person plural, third person proximate, and indefinite forms of possessed nouns can include an infix if they start with a fricative:

šiluk “cat”

yîm škiluk “her cat”

yîm štiluk “someone’s cat”

yîm špilukuk “y’all’s cats”

Nouns starting with a š or x in the second person singular possessive, or with r in the first person singular possessive are modified with the prefixes puy- and ôd- that replace the first consonant of the noun:

hrôka “star”

yîm ôdôka “my star”

xûnxûg “flowers”

yîm puyûnxûg “your flowers”

Verbs and verb phrases can also be possessed alienably:

yîm ônkâkârîtleônk “my discouragement of it”

yîm puyîmpuk karyùyo “your witnessing the murder”

Verbs
In SLOG, a basic verb may be composed of one word in the present tense, inflected for negation, subject, and object agreement; or an obligatory auxiliary in the past indicative, future indicative, and present imperative mood, along with aspects and modalities derived from those in the protolanguage.

The verb stem
The perfective and imperfective aspects are distinguished in the verb stem. Ancestrally, the imperfective was expressed by reduplicating the verb, but after thousands of years of sound changes, the differences are mostly irregular. For example, in the perfective, the verb stem meaning “see” is yîm-, while in the imperfective, it is weyîm-. Occasionally, the imperfective and perfective forms of the verb stem are identical. To avoid confusion, the particles ùgra and arâg are used to express the perfective and imperfective aspects, respectively.

ùgra mi-/y- carve.PERF vs. arâg mi- carve.IMPF

Polypersonal agreement
All verbs are required to agree with both their subject and object (and perhaps direct object) by attaching the appropriate suffixes. The most basic forms of these suffixes are shown in Table 4, although they may undergo changes depending on the environment imposed by the verb stem. Suffixes in bold are reserved for intransitive verbs, those in italics are reflexive.

Obviation is used to distinguish subjects and objects that have already appeared in discourse:

yînkyûl see-3.4 “they see that” or yîmyûlk see-4.3 “those see it”

It is most commonly used to distinguish third person subjects and objects; the subject will usually be proximate, and the object will be obviative.

Negation
Verbs may also take an optional negative suffix -čùs-, infixed before the subject and object suffixes. In general, the suffixes are pretty much the same with the addition, with some exceptions. The exact interpretation of the negation is context-dependent, but typically refers to the action of the main verb in the sentence. Other parts of the sentence may be negated in other ways, but most typically by stressing the negated word. The negative polypersonal suffixes are laid out in Table 5. šayaxônčùsônk think.IMPF-NEG-1s.3 “I’m not thinking about it”

weyînčùskûk see.IMPF-NEG-3.REFL “they can’t see themselves”

Reflexive and reciprocal construction
The reflexive form of a verb is derived from the same pronoun as subject and object.

Reflexive: yîmômôm “I see myself”

Reciprocal phrases are created using the auxiliary verb nêtêr “share”, conjugated reflexively.

ùgra nêtkûk yâyîter PERF share-3.REFL kill-INF “they kill each other”

Infinitives and antipassives
The infinitive and antipassive forms of the verb both use an indefinite pronoun suffix meaning “someone” or “something.” Depending on which of the original indefinite pronouns this was (*ter “someone”, *cu “something animate”, or *hāġ “something inanimate”), the modern morphology of the infinitive and antipassive forms differs from verb to verb (Table 6). Paradigm 1 includes verbs with historically human subjects, sometimes with human objects. Most verbs fall under this paradigm, and this is where most new verbs fall. Paradigm 2 includes transitive (or formerly transitive) verbs with historically human subjects and non-human animate objects. This is a closed class, and includes the fewest modern verbs. Paradigm 3 includes transitive and intransitive verbs with historically animate subjects (human or non-) and inanimate objects.

Infinitive/gerundive:

rguxter “to walk; walking”

šaxônčâg “to think (about something); thinking (about something)”

kâkârîtleônk pwâčâg discourage.IMPF-1s.3 stack-INF “I discourage stacking”

A fourth class of verbs exists entirely in the infinitive with an inanimate subject and no object, and exist as complete verb phrases in this form. These are stative verbs like “rain”, “be dark,” “be cold” and are mostly related to weather or other environmental conditions:

yukyâg “it’s raining”

tyûyâg “the moon is out”

yùtyâg “it’s sunny”

gùčoyâg “it’s dark out/in here”

dwûnyâg “it’s hot out/in here”

wôgwayâg “it’s cold out/in here”

Antipassive/detransitive: yîmômpter “I see something”

TAM auxiliary verbs
These words do not behave like verbs in the sense that they are not inflected for subject, object, and negativity, and in fact are only able to take a single prefix (sùt) for questions. They are used to convey only a specific set of tense, aspect, and mood combinations. In the protolanguage, the past and future tenses were conveyed using words related to “predict” and “memory”, and were used with prepositions meaning “beside,” “ahead,” “away,” and “far away” to convey where in time relative to the present they occurred. These prepositions were used the same in both the past and future tense, which is thought to reflect ancestral ideas about the circularity of time. Today, these verbs and prepositions have become agglutinated into fixed combinations with specific modal and aspectual information (labeled I, II, or III according to their prepositional ancestry), depending on whether they precede verbs in their perfective or imperfective forms. Table 7 shows the auxiliaries in their declarative forms. šwôgûx nônôrunônk yuxsâč PAST.I eat.PERF-1s.3 cookie “I ate the cookie”

gwûnôgûx nônôrunônk yuxsâč FUT.I eat.PERF-1s.3 cookie “I’m about to eat the cookie”

yalôgux norumpuk yuxsâč IMPR.I eat.PERF-2s.3 cookie “eat the cookie”

šwêčunka nônôrunônk yuxsâč PAST.II eat.PERF-1s.3 cookie “I had eaten the cookie”

gwûnčûnka nônôrunônk yuxsâč FUT.II eat.PERF-1s.3 cookie “I will have eaten the cookie”

yalrgux norumpuk yuxsâč IMPR.II eat.PERF-2s.3 cookie “you must eat the cookie”

šwêkêb norunkyûl yuxsâč PAST.III eat.PERF-3.3 cookie “long ago, they ate the cookie”

gwûnkêb nônôrunônk yuxsâč FUT.III eat.PERF-1s.3 cookie “eventually, I’ll eat the cookie”

yâlkêb norumpuk yuxsâč IMPR.III eat.PERF-2s.3 cookie “you should eat the cookie”

šwôgûx nônôrunônk yuxsâč PAST.I eat.IMPF-1s.3 cookie “I was eating the cookie”

gwûnôgûx nônôrunônk yuxsâč FUT.I eat.IMPF-1s.3 cookie “I start to eat the cookie”

šwêčunka nônôrunônk yuxsâč PAST.II eat.IMPF-1s.3 cookie “I habitually ate cookies ”

gwûnčûnka nônôrunônk yuxsâč FUT.II eat.IMPF-1s.3 cookie “I eat cookies more and more”

šwêkêb nônôrunônk yuxsâč PAST.III eat.IMPF-1s.3 cookie “I no longer eat cookies”

gwûnkêb nônôrûnkyûl arâgxùx kêblb FUT.III eat.IMPF-3.3 snakes birds “snakes eat birds”

Interrogatives
Any sentence can be made into a question by adding the sùt- prefix to the main verb in the sentence:

sùčayaxônčùspùk čùyùkùk QUESTION.think.about.IMPF-NEG-2s.3 planets “aren’t you thinking about planets?

TAM auxiliaries also take the sùt- prefix (Table 8):

Passive voice
Take for, for example, this active sentence: nônôrûnkyûl yâmok uxsâč eat.IMPF-3.3 human cake “the human is eating the cake”

In the passive, SLOG uses the passive phrase yrk uxsâč. It is useful to know that the word yrk is derived from a verb meaning “obey”, so we can think of the patient in the passive sentence as obeying a command from the agent. In this case, the “command” is the phrase nônôrûnkyûl yâmôk “the human eats it,” referring to the cake.

yryûlk uxsâč nônôrûnkyûl (yâmôk) PASSIVE-4 cake eat.IMPF-3.4 human “the cake is being eaten (by the human)”

The passive particle no longer carries any specific semantic weight other than conveying the passive voice, but is still inflected for the number and person of the patient. In passive construction, a would-be third person patient is always obviative.

Causative sentences
Causation is accomplished in a manner similar to the passive voice, and can be analyzed diachronically from the perspective of a command; the causative particle yal- is derived from the old verb meaning “command”. Take the following sentence:

norunkyûl yâmôkôk uxsâč eat-3.4 humans cake “the humans eat the cake”

We can take the subject of the original sentence, yâmôkôk, and have it obey the command norunkyûl uxsâč:

yâltk norunkyûl yâmôkôk uxsâč CAUS-indef eat-3.4 humans cake “The humans are made to eat the cake” (lit. “someone makes the humans eat the cake”)

The causative particles are inflected in pretty much the exact same way as the passive particles (Table 10), and also have lost semantic weight other than implying causality. However, unlike with passive construction, there is a third person form of the causative particle, chiefly used for non-pronominal “commanders”. Compare:

yâlk nùmxwûn xùpwêkyâg paxwûnûn CAUS-3 teacher read-3.indef students “the teacher has the students read something”

vs.

yalyûlk xùpwêkyâg paxwûnûn CAUS-4 read-3.indef students “they have the students read something”

or

yalyûlk xùpwêkyâg CAUS-4 read-3.indef “they have them read something”