MORPHOPHONOLOGY

Yea, you're getting a section like this. Sorry. There are a few allophonic rules that can obfuscate certain morphemes and it would be unfair not to tell you these rules.

1) Mesak has ATR harmony. The vowels e o are neutral. For all other vowels, there is a +ATR and a -ATR form, which cannot co-occur within a word. The harmony is determined by the vowel of the root. If it's written with an acutel, the word is +ATR, otherwise it's -ATR. The effects this has on vowels are not orthographically marked. However, the plosive rows <b d g> and <mb nd ñg> are in complementary distribution prevocally: Implosives (b d g) can only occur before -ATR vowels, Prenasalized stops only before +ATR ones. Both series can occur before neutral vowels e o as well as in non-prevocal positions.

The implosive in ga- turns into a homorganic prenasalized stop ñg- due to it preceding a +ATR vowel.

2) If any two plosives cluster (for example at a morpheme boundary), the first plosive fully assimilates to the second, forming a geminate. The resulting sound may be subject to the harmony rule above. This process is indicated in orthography and thus relevant to you.

The final k in ȿyk turned into a p due to the following p.

3) Dental and Retroflex sounds cannot co-occur in the same syllable. If any retroflex sounds <ȿ ɀ> occur in a syllable, all dental sounds in that syllable also become retroflex. This is orthographically only indicated on those sounds that have a retroflex counterpart: s becomes ȿ, z and r both become ɀ. The same change also occurs in clusters across syllable boundaries, but this second change doesn't happen anywhere in the text.

GRAMMAR

Mesak is almost exclusively ERG/ABS. The only exception to this are the first person agreement affixes, which are NOM/ACC instead. Nouns are a bit like simple verbs, adjectives are like simple nouns and relative clauses are adjectives too, so verbs are adjectives? idfk. Anyway. Mesak is very agglutinating, with the same affixes being used on all parts of speech with slightly different meanings. This is not stolen from Greenlandic and anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar.

Word order in affirmative clauses is APXV. Subordinate clauses always follow the main clause however.
Noun phrase word order is

• Possessor - Adjective - Noun - Relative clause

VERBS

Verbs are rather complex. The order of morphemes in the verbal complex is fixed:

• Ergative - ROOT - Incorporation - Derivations - Absolutive (1st & 2nd person) - Tense/Mood - Number - Absolutive (3rd person)

At a minimum, the root, number and one of the absolutive slots (but obviously never both) must be filled.

Verbs come in three aspects: Gnomic, Continuous and Momentane. These are inherent to the root, but derivational affixes may change them. Aspect is indicated in the lexicon, so you don't need to guess. There are three sets of agreement affixes, depending on the aspect.

*These are nom/acc with the nominative being put in the Erg column.

Number is agreed for separately, with the following affixes:

The following Tense/Mood affixes appear in the text:

NOUNS

Nouns are subdivided into count nouns and mass nouns.
Nouns take the following form:

• Possessor - STEM - Number - Case

Number marking is indentical on count nouns and verbs. The ergative part of number marking (the consonant) refers to the possessor, the absolutive part (the vowel) to the noun itself. On mass nouns, only number of the possessor is marked for, -n- if it's singular and -k- if it's plural.

Possessor is marked for with the same affixes as the ergative affixes for Momentane aspect (ga-/te-/i-).

Case is marked with a suffix that differs for count and mass nouns:

ADJECTIVES

Adjectives agree in case and number with their head noun, taking the same affixes.

DEFINITENESS

Nouns are marked for definiteness in rather subtle ways:

• Indefinite patients are incorporated into the verb, definite ones cannot be.
• With prepositions, indefinites appear in the essive, definites in either dative or absolutive (depending on preposition).
• Possessed nouns are always definite.

INCORPORATION

Incorporated nouns land in the "Incorporation" slot in verbs, losing all affixes and subjecting themselves to the vowel harmony of the verb. The verb becomes intransitive (if it wasn't already).

RELATIVE CLAUSES

Relative clauses follow the noun they modify. They are marked on the verb by a clitic -ner, which turns the entire relative clause into an adjective, which then agrees via the usual means with its head noun.