Revision as of 11:29, 5 July 2014

!!- The "Mantis" and history thereof, the names of "Urggghtnag" and "KazaaakplethKilik", and FTL: Faster Than Light are properties of Subset Games. -!!

The Mantis are an insectoid alien race from a distant part of the galaxy. Known for their violence and disregard for individual lives, the Mantis regard themselves, entirely correctly, as the scourge of the universe, and are a terrifying foe whether hunting individual ships or entire planets. The Mantis attack on Earth remains a popular horror story for human children, and the Mantis themselves continue their glory-driven assault on all races of the galaxy.

The Mantis language is grating and nearly unpronounceable to the human ear more accustomed to English, although a handful of scholars and diplomats have managed it. It is highly agglutinating and combining, but is most phonologically interesting in its levels of distinctive length, consonant inventory, and nuclear fricatives.

Phonology

Consonants

• Click consonants are written with capital letters. This can sometimes be confusing when writing Mantis names that may begin with a click or else with a plosive corresponding to the lowercase letter.

Vowels

Phonotactics

• Open syllables may not be word-final.
• All consonants may be geminate across syllable boundaries.
• All fricatives have the potential to be nuclear.
• Vowels have three levels of phonemic length, ie zhiKik "you yell" - zhiiKik "you negotiate" - zhiiiKik "you run electricity through (something)"

Grammar

Nominal Morphology

Nouns are inflected for case (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, adessive, locative, ablative), number (singular, plural) definiteness, and possession, according to class (males [1], females [2], animals/other races [3-4], tools/ships [5-6], inanimate objects [7-8], groups [9-10], abstractions [11]) through suffixation.

Number

Case

Definiteness and Possession

Verbal Morphology

Verbs are inflected for person, tense (past, future), voice (passive) and mood (interrogative, conditional, imperative)

Voice

The passive voice is noted with the suffix -sth

Tense

Mood

• A third interrogative mood is formed with the particle zin immediately following the verb.

Person

Syntax

Regular word order is SVO, but is flexible. Compounds are head-final.

Lexicon

Numbers

Base-6

Open Class

Examples

Urggghtnag "The Great Thorax"

KazaaakplethKilik "You Will Resonate In Glory"