Mutesz

Updated 17:00 27-06-2026

Mutesz is a language spoken by people in a land self declared Maat, Maat became a center of trade between different peoples and spread some influence across the area.

The language was spoken for a very long time, the version shown here is an earlier moment of the language and focuses on the East dialect that retains more conservative features, while the West dialect had more influence in other languages.

Mutesz invented the first writing system in Evea, and that is the main reason the conlang exist.

Maat is in a savanna besides a small mountain range, the people developed into large areas of agriculture and formation of cities, the place is also a good source of copper and copper mining made it very influential in the economy of nearby peoples.

The major cities developed along a river called Ekil, and other cities around a large bay called the Kumura sea. The river contours the mountain range called Puksesıt (lit. "head mountains").

Phonology

Phoneme inventory

Some dialects have /r/ as an approximant instead of a tap.

West Dialect

The West dialect is a less conservative dialect of Mutesz, it the only other major dialects with several smaller ones in between, the Kumura sea is the main divide between the two.

In the West the /ŋ/ consonant merged with /n/ and also nasals assimilate to the next consonant. The /r/ consonant turned into an approximant and was velarized.

All instances of /l/ were deleted and the hiatus vowels assimilated to each other sporadically.

The /ʈ/ consonant is notably affricated before hiɡh vowels [t̠ʃɨ t̠ʃi] and the /r/ is fully velarized to [ɰo̞] before /ɔ/.

Syllables

The maximal syllable is CVC with the following restrictions:

• /r/ is not allowed on codas
• /r/ /l/ are not allowed to cluster with other consonants
• /θ/ can cluster, but not on coda position: ak3a OK, *a3ka NO
• the consonant pairs /s t/ and /ʃ ʈ/ agree with each other in clusters: asta OK, asztza OK, *astza NO
• nasals assimilate before fricatives becoming geminates: an + sa = assa
  • except 3 where the nasal is deleted: an + 3a = a3a
• only low vowels /a ɛ ɔ/ form hiatus, the high vowels colapse in unpredictable ways
• the consonant /t/ on the coda assimilates with the next consonant as long as it can be doubled

In the West dialect nasals always assimilate their place of articulation with the following consonant. Other than that and the morphological differences it caused, the two dialects are pretty much the same.

Prosody

Mutesz prosody has very weak or absent stress, other than that the last vowel may be pronounced longer at the end of a phrase.

Questions have a high boundary tone and statements a low boundary tone. Another function of intonation is to divide speech into chunks, those might not be notated in the orthography (perhaps by some accentuation and such).

Phrases that are the focus of the sentence have a sharp rising pitch in the middle, and all phrases end in a lower pitch. The focus element in content questions is marked by this change in pitch with ¿ together with the high boundary pitch with ?

Relative clauses and subordinates have a lower pitch than regular clauses.

Romanization

Some consonants may appear geminated when they agree on the coda and onset, then the digraphs tz sz are written ttz ssz but their sounds are /ʈʈ ʃʃ/ respectively. This kind of orthographical elision is not allowed on the clusters tzsz and sztz.

Vowels can use some special diacritics for easing the comprehension of morphophonological processes, but they are only extras to the romanization and I often don't use them.

⟨ė ȧ ȯ⟩ marks a low vowel that resulted from the assimilation of a high vowel.

A breve ⟨ĕ ă ŏ ŭ ĭ⟩ marks a vowel that can be elided when close to another vowel.

These diacritics will help with comprehension of some word formations.

Writing System

Mutesz writing system is mostly a logosyllabary, because its the first writing system in the world it is completely not standardized in any way, so it is in fact very hard to read.

The script was used at first for ritual reasons and was restricted to powerful people who wanted to write words, because people could not read or write these symbols they were mainly seen as magic spells, a way to make words stay for much longer than simple prayer.

This picture changed when the advantage of writing for keeping track of governmental things it kicked of as a more general use writing system.

Because making a logosyllabary is hard I don't have glyphs enough to use it extensively in this document, so i may use them sporadically. They are also very subject to changes, so thats why I'll not explain them much.

Here are some examples:

Some logograms can have multiple word readings, and most of them will have one or two syllable readings, some can even be read as a single consonant.

For example itto  "fish" could mean "fish" or the syllable it or to. The logogram lesz  "tongue" started being used mainly for the ending -esz found in the third person singular verbs, in a way that the "tongue" meaning was abandoned, but to write "tongue" now lesz  (tongue lesz + mouth es) is used.

The syllable readings do not spell full syllables but only parts, such that writing ma-at  can be read either as mat, maat or even, if the first glyph is taken as a logogram, maaat. Sometimes coda consonants may be removed completely, may it be for lack of space, forgetfulness or simply laziness of the writer. An example is writing kıtta "male fox" as SSS or SSS.

Rules like that are very hard to determine when the system is still under development, if there is enough time I will try my best to translate the relay torch to the Mutesz writing system.

Parts of Speech

The lexical words of Mutesz are divided by nouns and verbs. Only verbs are predicable, nouns may modify other nouns directly while verbs are modified by postpositional phrases.

While verbs display agglutinative morphology, nouns phrases are formed analytically terminated in a sequence of clitics.

The verbs of Mutesz form a closed class, that means that new verbs cannot be derived from other words, derivational morphology is very limited in Mutesz and is made mostly by compounding.

Nouns may be derived from verbs with the nominalizing suffix -a, that is frequently used to derive new nouns and adjectives. Some nouns are formed by nominalizing small sentences, one example of such is the word aakoopesza meaning "heron", that can be broken down as:

All the grammatical words are enclitics that attach to the previous words, despite that I will still refer to them as suffixes.

Verb morphology

Verbs inflect for polarity, mood, tense, person and number, and can index pronominal, locative and dative objects. Using the following template:

Here is a very complex verb as an exemple, but they don't get so big very often.

This example also show some morphophonemic interactions, in particular the locative is metathesized with the mood and the final n of the object is assimilated to the s in the root, these interactions can make the Mutesz verb hard to segment, good luck.

Tense

There are only two tenses: the non-future that is unmarked and the future that is marked with -s(i)-. The tense is the closest to the verb stem, and may be rarely subject to suppletive forms.

The choice of -si- or -s- depends on the stem ending, if it ends with a consonant -si- is used, otherwise -s-. Because of the phonotactic rules the final form of the verb might be obscured, the examples below illustrate such cases.

After the subject inflection is added, the vowel i might also be obscured, so in the end the presence of -s- is the best marker of future tense.

The full conjugation will be shown in the next topics.

Subject

Subject marking is very regular, all of them start with a vowel ĕ that can be elided in the presence of another vowel, with the exception of the second person singular, that must always remain e, in that case it may overwrite a high vowel in its place, the table below has two verb examples.

The ending -ut in the plural conjugation is the same as the plural clitic =ut used on nouns, making the conjugation pattern very transparent.

To illustrate the effects of tense marking in conjunction with person marking the table below shows the full inflection of two verbs.

The third person singular conjugation is used for impersonal clauses too, like the following sentences. Its function is like the dummy "it" subject in English.

The water here is not an object but a preverb.

In this one szip is a complement.

Objects

The verb can be indexed for the object that may be dative or not. The table below shows the prefixes for each person and number.

The object prefixes show a lot of allomorphy, the dative marker is characterized by the n. The V in the first person singular copies the initial vowel of the stem, the vowel of another prefix or defaults to being the indicative vowel ı-.

† Before a fricative the prefix im- becomes me-

Some example sentences:

Dative objects are indexed with the other set of prefixes.

Some example sentences:

In Mutesz the verb agrees with objects that are possessors of inalienable things, this makes a construction below like “You looked at me my hand”

This construction is normally not used for alienable possessions as the sentence below, but its use is not prohibited, so its marked as questionable (?).

Locative

The locative indexing prefix is the consonant s-, it can be used together with the object indexing, it can be roughly translated as there and is always used when the verb has a location. The locative marker will metathesize with the mood vowel i or a forming the prefix si- or sa- before a consonant.

It may be used in non-motion verbs as well.

The locative marker may be used without an explicit locative argument, in that case it is roughly translatable as "there".

Preverbs

Many verbs can take a noun complement that is not an object, but instead form a light verb where the noun contributes with meaning. These are a very productive way of deriving more verbs from the closed class in Mutesz.

They are very arbitrary and sometimes might not be on the dictionary. Here is some of them:

The preverb is always and always is just before the verb, the verb can still be marked by prefixes.

Dependent "Tenses"

There are two other suffixes that have the same slot as tense, but in reality they are not real tenses, their function will be further discussed in Clause Chaining. Here their conjugation patterns will be explored.

The sequential suffix -k works similarly to the future tense -s and most of the time end up with similar forms. But the simultaneous -tzo can have two effects when after a consonant:

• replaces s by sz, then geminates the consonant
• replaces 3 by t
• replaces r and l by tz

After a vowel it continues as normal, but the o vowel at the end of the suffix blocks the second person conjugation.

Mood

There are two base moods: the indicative marked by the vowel i- and the irrealis marked by a-, but the i- is often elided unless needed for keeping syllable structure, on the other hand the irrealis a- continues there unless in the imperative mood, where it is preceded by p- and is reduced in case it has assimilated a high vowel.

A better overview of the irrealis mood is in Irrealis.

Imperative

The imperative form is uninflected for subject.

The imperative does not take the locative marker too.

Prohibitives do not use the imperative mood, but use either a bare negative or a negative jussive.

Jussive

The jussive mood tĕ- has a similar function to the imperative, but it can be conjugated by tense, person and number, its function is to make an appeal to the addressee. When its used with the first person it expresses the wishes of the speaker.

The negative jussive is a way to express prohibition.

Polarity

A clause is negated with the negative prefix ka-.

Bare negatives are also another way to make prohibitions, and often more informal, they do not inflect for tense and person.

There is also an affirmative prefix tza- it works as an emphasis marker, it can be used to confirm something that was said, the same way the negative marker can be used to negate something that was said. It can be used to declare the speaker is sure of what they are talking.

The polarity prefixes are used for answering Questions.

Noun Phrase

The noun phrase starts with the head noun and ends at a head postposition, some modifiers are clitics that all attach to the last word in the noun phrase.

Adjectives

Mutesz doesn't have a class of adjective words, instead nouns modify other nouns directly, so some nouns can be read in a adjectival form.

These nouns indicate properties as size, age, shape, color and material. Other kinds of adjective meaning are made with genitive or relative phrases, they will be detailed later.

Here are some example phrases, there is no preferred order of adjectives in Mutesz.

Nominalized verbs can also be used as adjectives.

Adjectival predication in Mutesz is not made with the general copula verb at (there are exceptions) as this would convey different meanings, more information is in the Copula section.

Demonstratives

Demonstratives, possessives and the obviate marker share the same slot in the verb phrase and then cannot cooccur. All of these words are clitics, so they attach to the closest left word like a suffix.

The demonstratives do not encode a distance distinction like in most languages, but the possessive =sza implies the possessed is not present or visible and can be used as a demonstrative as well.

The examples below shows some uses of the demonstratives.

The demonstrative =sza is specially used for making Questions.

Possessives and Obviate

The possessives don't have number except for the first person, possession affects obviation, as possessed nouns are always obviate and obviates can never be possessors.

The obviate demonstrative marks a third person that is less important to the discourse than another third person, called the proximate. The obviate marker is a means to distinguishing multiple third persons in a sentence or discourse.

The example below illustrates the usage in discourse.

Inanimate things are always obviate, therefore they can not possess things, they also can't be agents. Possessed things are also always obviate and so the marker is not necessary for them.

Plural

The plural of nouns is marked with the clitic =ŭt, this clitic might be far away from the noun if there are many modifiers. The plural marker may imply multiple possession when used with possessors, the interpretation depends on context.

Numeral nouns are not marked with the plural. Examples below:

Some words that are singular in English are collective in Mutesz.

A complex noun phrase can have the plural far away.

Adpositions

Mutesz only has three adpositions: locative =a, ablative =ŏ3, and genitive =kı. This section will cover some usages of the locative and ablative, other uses are explained in adverbial phrases.

An overview of the functions of the adpositions for different types of nouns is given below:

The place meaning of the adpositions is reinforced with the locative marker in verbs.

For expressions of time the verb does not take a locative.

The locative postposition is also used to denote things that are the recipient or destination of an action, like the verb szom "to give" and nee "to see"

The locative =a is not used so much with objects, objects with the ablative =ŏ3 have an instrumental meaning.

The ablative can be used to indicate causer of a non-finite verb phrase. This is frequently used to make passive-like constructions.

Genitive

The genitive phrase is marked by the postposition =kı, the genitives are found before relative clauses and there may be multiple of them.

The genitive is used to express not only possession but also composition, description, purpose and specifying location or time.

The complement of the genitive is a full noun phrase that can have its own postpositions, this results on some stacking of them as shown next:

Sentence Structure

The basic word order of Mutesz is SOV, the verb and object are always close of each other and the verb might optionally have a preverb. The morphosyntactic alignment is nominative-accusative, there are no case markers.

Adverbial phrases precede the object in any position, usually the subject comes first so they go in between the S and O.

Pronouns, both subject and object are often dropped in favor of verb indexing and possessive marking.

Animacy

In Mutesz inanimate nouns are prohibited from being the agent of a verb, instead the verb is nominalized without subject. Note that this does not prevent it from being the patient of certain intransitive verbs.

The examples below have sentences where an inanimate is the subject but not the agent, that being it doesn't cause the action but only is affected by it.

Noun Coordination

The clitic =pu "and" is used to coordinate noun phrases, the clitics at the end of the noun phrase cannot be coordinated so they belong to the whole phrase.

This next example is not grammatical, because the demonstrative clitic is being coordinated there.

Every medial noun in the coordination is marked with =pu. Here is a very large sentence that also shows adjectives and relative clauses.

There is no different conjunction for "or" the same clitic =pu is used for that, and it is implied when asking questions as a list of options.

Clause Chaining

Mutesz does not have words for coordinating clauses like English "and", instead clauses can be juxtaposed one after the other.

Clauses may be coordinated in another way, using the simultaneous -tzo- or sequential -k- markers, they take the same place as tense in the verb, and can only be used in verbs that depend on a main verb.

Numerals

Numerals are base 24 with a subbase of 4.

After 24 the numbers can be added by concatenation. A multiple of 24 is represented by szu X=ŭt Y = 24×X + Y.

The demonstrative 3u and the noun uttzu "all" uses numerals with genitives.

The word lu "time" can be compounded with numerals and they can be used to form ordinals or multiplicatively as adverbials.

Partitive

Numerals can be the head noun as long as they are possessed by a pronoun or have a genitive phrase, in that case they have a partitive meaning. These do not take the plural marker.

Relative clauses

Relative clauses are last before the nominal clitics, the relative clauses can embed a verb phrase in a noun phrase and are used for more complex descriptions similar to adjectives.

The relative clauses are formed by nominalized verb phrases, a verb can be nominalized by the suffix -a at the very end, check the next examples.

The relative clause is gapped, so there is no complementizer or relative pronoun.

Relative clauses don't like to go too deep, the following sentence is considered bad:

This other one is acceptable but a bit hard.

Pronouns

Personal pronouns are rarely used in Mutesz due to the great preference to pro-dropping. The oblique set of pronouns is used for both accusative or dative pronouns.

Demonstrative

Mutesz has a single demonstrative pronoun 3u that has no distance distinction like most most languages. In that case 3u is used to refer to something that is known in the discourse.

Here are some examples showing its anaphoric function:

Copula

The general copula verb at is used to perform nominal predication and locative predication. The first one is used for definite complements and social roles, indefinite complements and adjectival meaning are made by other verbs.

Locative predication uses the locative prefix on the copula. The same is used for existential predication that lacks a location complement.

Adjective predication

Adjectival predication is done with verbs other than the copula (with some exceptions), this part of the language isn't fully developed by now.

The following examples show the difference of using the copula and the correct predicative verb.

Here is a small list of verbs and the kinds of predications they do, with some more examples below.

The verb eek is used for words conveying emotions or some kind of value.

par is used for size and shape.

Materials uses the ablative postposition =o3 and verb pa.

Questions

Mutesz has no particular morphology for questions, they depend only on intonation, that being rising pitch at the end of the sentence. The writing system has no way of indicating that so its completely ambiguous, but the presence of -sza in content questions is usually a tell.

Polar Questions

Polar questions simply change the intonation of a regular assertive sentence.

The language lacks any speech acts at the moment, those would be sentence initial words that shows speaker attitude, hopefully that wont be a problem.

These questions are answered by echoing the verb with the appropriate polarity marker, so answering the last question would be:

Content Questions

Mutesz doesn't have question words, instead it will nouns with the sza demonstrative to ask questions. The word raa "thing" is often used for inanimate and the partitive te=kı "one of" for animates.

The focused element of a question carries a higher tone than the rest of the sentence, this is represented in the orthography by an upside-down question mark (¿) before it.

The demonstrative with locative 3ȧa is used to ask for place.

The word itz is used for quantity.

The expression szaaksza3 "with what heart/mind" is used for reason.

The same expression can be also used for the following question:

Other examples:

Modality

These are verbs used to express what English call modal verbs. These verbs can have a nominalized clause as their object.

Some of these overlap with modality, the Jussive can also be used to express wishes and permission.

Permission

Permissions can be expressed with Jussive. In the next example, unlike the previous one, it does not say that the speaker is the one allowing the event.

Necessity or Desire

The verb mook "to lack" is used to express necessity.

The semantic line between what is necessary or wanted is very thin, as such the previous sentences with mook also can just mean the speaker wants said things, but it implies it's more urgent than using kem.

kem requires the a nominalized sentence to be in the irrealis mood.

Ability

Ability is expressed with the verb e that is irregular, more information it in e "to be able". To express ability it is always used with a genitive object.

When the object is an inflected verb it will be inflected two times.

Irrealis

The irrealis mood is used to express possibility and counterfactuality.

In the basic sense, the irrealis represents something that can or cannot be real.

Another use of the irrealis is for counterfactuality, that represents something that is not real in the current world but would be in another.

The irrealis used with the future tense can be used for frustrated or failed actions.

Subordinate Clauses

Subordinate clauses are all made by nominalization in similar fashion to the relative clauses, the subordinates may then be marked by a postposition to make adverbial clauses.

Time adverbials

The locative =a is used to make several kinds of adverbials. Many of them used for telling time, they can be translated as "while" but can have various meanings.

Manner adverbials

The ablative =o3 is used to make adverbs of manner or cause.

Causative Constructions

Causative constructions are made by using the verb mo "to place" and a subordinate clause.

Passive Constructions

Passive constructions allow the omission of the subject of a verb, they are formed by a nominalized clause as the complement of the copula, the copula takes a 3sg marking by default in that case, even thought it has no real subject.

Other constructions

Adverbial phrases are usually formed by an abstract noun with the locative or ablative postpositions. They have functions similar to conjunctions or some modality, they are also used to make some constructions.

Reciprocal Construction

Reciprocity is made with the noun nos "mutual" as an adjective or with the locative noso3 "mutually".

Comparative Construction

Comparisons are made using the comparative verb lun roughly translatable as "to exceed", its nominalized form luna is used adjectively to form superlatives.

A construction like "X Ykı Z lunesz" can be translated as "Y is Xer than Z", see the examples below:

The sentence below illustrates a superlative construction of the form "Y Xa Z lun-" translatable as "Y is the Xest of Z".

This one shows an adjectival use of luna.

Motion verbs

Different from English where motion verbs show the manner of motion and particles show the path, in Mutesz verbs show the path of motion and adverbial phrases the manner.

Compare the difference with the sentences below:

Irregular verbs

Verbs in Mutesz are very regular, there is a very small class of irregular verbs, and they don't change their conjugation that much, instead being only defective, that is they have less inflectional forms than regular verbs

e "to be able"

The verb e is the weirdest verb, its form changes to se in most conjugations. It means a couple different things, "to own a house • to sell • to be able (with genitive)"

The verb cannot be marked by object, lacks imperative and jussive conjugations and does not take the locative marker.

The other inflectional forms use the future inflection as the base and the non-future is discarded, for example the negative 3sg series is kasesz, kasesz, kasetzosz, kasekesz, other prefixes have the same pattern.

at (copula)

The copula cannot be marked by object or mood, cannot take the dependent tenses and cannot be nominalized.

The copula takes all its person suffixes as normal but the base can have small variation, the table below lists the third person singular of each one.

isz "to return"

This verb loses the i with prefixes, except for the locative and simple future that keep it. Due to being a motion verb it most likely has the locative.

Reference

Verb Reference Table

Noun Reference Table