LANGUAGE
Since Kent is home to over five hundred nation-states, it is only natural that the planet has a large number of languages. As the history and the location of the nation-states stabilized, the language of that state tended to subvert whatever other languages were present within that state until it became dominant. States rarely had as their official language a language that was official somewhere else. Nevertheless, the Kentyans, even hundreds of years ago, started to evolve towards a common language understandable by all, not meant to replace the local languages, but to supplement them. Kentyan languages come in many different families, although linguists have in general been able to tie them down to single proto-families based on each continent. The languages of Uspats tended to be what Earth linguists would call "polysynthetic," and in such languages, the distinction between word and sentence could become a little blurred, as the words were put together and modified to create sentence-like constructions. In fact, more than half of all Kentyan languages are of this type. The most common second type is the isolating language, where the words stand alone and have no modifications to indicate grammatical functions. Language types that are common on Earth, such as agglutinative and inflecting, are rare on Kent, and most of those two types can be shown to have evolved from a polysynthetic base-which is also true of Earth languages of the type.
The most advanced area of Kent by the mid-5500's was the northern half of Uspats, as it was here that the technological innovations were being made, where the best universities were located, and where people from all over the planet came to learn. One of the leading nation-states in that region was Botsa, which by 5550 was classified as the state with the highest living standards on the planet. As a result of the influence of this small state, its language started to spread outwards. It became the language used in publications intended for a widespread audience, and people around the planet began to learn the language of that land, Botsak, so that they could read those works. When the Council of Ambassadors selected the city of Ksatala-close to Botsa but not in it-as their base of operations, in essence the capital city of all of Kent, that in essence solidified Botsak as the world's most dominant language. The council needed some standard language to converse in, and Botsak was the only choice. Kent lacked any other language in such wide use. By 6000, at least half of the population had some ability to read and write this language, and after first contact and the establishment of Kent as a charter member of the Federation, Botsak became the language by which Kentyans made their presence known to the rest of the country. To non-Kentyans, the language simply became known as "Kentyan," by which it will be referred to here.
One advantage of Botsak as the basis for Standard Kentyan is that it has a simple, easy-to-learn sound system. There are four vowels, a, e, o and u, and humans can pronounce these sounds with their standard English values and be understood. These vowels tend to be long in open syllables and short in closed ones, although some dialects use the same sounds for each type of syllable. In terms of consonants, the stops are all present, k, t and p for unvoiced sounds and g, d, and b for the voiced sounds. Fricative sounds do not stand alone in Kentyan, but can combine with the stop sounds. When they do, the combination is always unvoiced. Thus, ks, ts and ps are very common sounds in Kentyan, while ksh, tsh and psh are less common-although in some dialects, tsh is very much like English ch, psh has become similar to j and ksh has evolved towards kx (where x is the sound found in a German word like "ich"). These combination sounds are treated as independent sounds in Kentyan and not as combinations, and so have their own letters in the alphabet. The nasal consonants when initial and medial are like on Earth, namely m, n and ng, but when they become syllable or word-final, they combine with an unvoiced stop, so n becomes nt, m becomes mp and ng becomes ngk. This change is seen in speech but not in the writing system. However, the words are transliterated into other languages like English with the sound change made, hence the name of the planet in English is "Kent" and not "Ken," which is what the writing system would suggest. The nasal sounds can also combine with s, but this is rare and is usually seen in loanwords taken into Botsak. The sounds l (the clear-l sound of "light"), r (lightly trilled) and y are also possible in the language, but are less frequent.
The basic word order of Kentyan is said to be SOV, that is the subject comes first, followed by the object and finally, the verb. This can be compared to the SVO order of English or the OSV order of Odonien, for example. When the words are simple, they are prefixed onto the verb to form one long word, such as donotsapongongoksena, which means "the tall man tells an old story." The order of elements is modifer-subject-modifer-object-verb. The Kentyans write something like this as one long word, which in time can take on a meaning of its own. A slightly reduced form of this, donotsngoksen, is the Kentyan word for "story-teller." When transliterating Kentyan into the Roman alphabet, convention has been to break up the polysynthetic word into its components, so the example above becomes dono-tsa-pongo-ngo-ksena. What is important to note here is that Kentyan generally follows a simple syllable structure of consonant and vowel (CV syllable) with the option of a vowel-only initial syllable (V) or a consonant-closing final syllable (usually CVC). Medial clusters are not allowed (recall that ks and the like sounds are considered single sounds in Kentyan). When the words are combined into the polysynthetic words, their structures are altered to fit the scheme of a world. Thus, tsak, "man," becomes tsa in the polysynthetic word, and similarly, pongk, "old," becomes pongo. Which form the word takes is confusing because it is based on historical variations in the word. Pongk used to be a two-syllable word that lost its final syllable and become a single syllable (recall again that final nasals require the closing stop), but in the combinations, it reverts to its older form as a two-syllable world. On the other hand, tsak was always a monosyllable. In general, natural monosyllables lose their final consonant in the combinations, while non-natural or derived monosyllables regain their missing syllable.
Another aspect of Kentyan is that the reduced form of the word stands in for the pronoun as well. Kentyan has first and second person pronouns, but none in the third person. Identifiers, such as tsa for people, stand in for the pronouns when necessary. The first person pronoun is pa and the second person pronoun is unu. Kentyan has no intrinsic plural structure, but borrows from the number system to derive the plurals when they are necessary.
The number system of Kentyan is curious. It has been labelled as a base-eight system, but it is in fact a base-two system. All the number words are ultimately derived from just two words, tse and ka, which mean "zero" and "one" respectively. The original form for two was katse, which basically means the same as "one-zero" or "ten." This was shortened to kse. The other forms come from this, with the numbers upto seven neatly built up by the binary form of the number. The following table illustrates this
| Number | Binary | Old Form | Modern Form |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 | ka | ka |
| 2 | 10 | ka-tse | kse |
| 3 | 11 | ka-ka | ak |
| 4 | 100 | ka-tse-tse | ksets |
| 5 | 101 | ka-tse-ka | ksek |
| 6 | 110 | ka-ka-tse | akats |
| 7 | 111 | ka-ka-ka | akak |
| 8 | 1000 | ka-tse-tse-tse | - |
To form the plural in Kentyan, either a number is used, as in kse-tsak, "two men," if the number is known precisely, or else a modifier like deno can be used to indicate approximation and "about," as in akak-deno-tsak, "about seven men." The power multipliers can be used as even more generic plural markers, with lo meaning a small plural number while ta would be used for a large plural number, as in lo-tsak, "a few men" and ta-tsak, "many men."
Within the sentence are other possible structures, such as location and indirect object, which appear as separate words either before or after the SOV sentence core. The core itself can be broken up if the subject and direct object contain more complicated modifiers, especially relative clauses. As a general rule, if the relative clause is short, it can be added directly to the noun like an adjective, and otherwise it would come after the noun as a subordinate clause. The former is more unusual, and can be seen in something that would translate as "I visited the woman who tells stories." The part "who tells stories" is a relative clause, although the Kentyan version would be closer to "I visited the story-telling woman." Kentyan has no special participle form of the verb, but since it precedes the noun, it becomes an adjective. Because "story telling woman" is a core in its own right, it remains separate from the overall sentence. If the subject of the overall sentence is a pronoun, it becomes a suffix on the verb. Thus, the Kentyan expression would be ngo-ksens-keden deba-pa, or in a way more closely to what the Kentyans say, ngoksenskeden debapa. It is possible to actually say this as one big word, pa-ngo-ksens-kede-deba, literally "I-story-tell-woman-visit," but this usage tends to give ngo-ksens-kede the status of a word on its own right. In time it might be, but it is not always so.
Kentyan can also mark its verbs for time, using the prefixes ne for the present, do for the past and ge for the future. These drop their vowels if the verb starts with a vowel. The tense markers are used only when context does not make the tense of the verb clear, as the verb without the marker has the tense understood to be indefinite or it is known by context. Thus, pa-ne-deba means "I am visiting" or "I visit," while pa-do-deba means "I was visiting" or "I visited." Finally, pa-ge-deba means "I will visit" or "I will be visiting." Unlike many other languages, the verbal inflection system is very simple, as Kentyan does not have things like auxilliary verbs or a perfective aspect or similar structures. Nuances of meaning implied by those more advanced verbal modifiers tend to be handled by adverbs
The preceding was just an introduction to Standard Kentyan. A full treatment of the language would, of course, be an article by itself, and the grammar of the language with all the rules and interpretations could take up a small book. The language is relatively easy to learn how to pronounce and to learn the basics, but to master it would take some time and effort.
