Uonare

Uonare is a language spoken in much of the former territory claimed by the Godtamers. It was in fact created by the Godtamers, and began as a constructed language that took words and grammatical elements from many divine and ceremonial languages; the Godtamers crafted it as an intentional insult to the gods, to belittle them by appropriating what they considered sacred. Indeed, the name "Uonare" meant "god-mocking" in the language itself. The Godtamers then took various measures to induce their subjects to adopt the language, including issuing official documents in Uonare. While most of the people of the Godtamers' empire at least initially kept their original languages, Uonare did of necessity become common as a second language.

The Godtamer officials who created the language, however, were not linguists, and the resultant language was full of inconsistencies and irregularities—not that natural languages are entirely regular, of course, but Uonare in its original form was atypically so. As its usage spread, however, its speakers began to sand off some of its rough edges, regularizing and simplifying its grammar and spelling. The elite, however, preferred to preserve the language in its original form, seeing it as something of a status symbol to be able to speak Uonare as it was designed. Over time, this led to its splitting into two related languages: High Uonare, the original version of the language with all the clumsy irregularities arising from its having been clumsily kludged together from multiple languages with little attempt to harmonize them; and Low Uonare, the language as it evolved in common usage into something somewhat more cohesive.

The heirs of the Godtamers hold much less territory than they once did, but Uonare remains the official language of Khedal, the land they still control. It also is still spoken in many lands once but no longer claimed by the Godtamers, a relic of their rule, its original intent to thumb the Godtamers' nose at the gods having been forgotten. High Uonare, however, is spoken only by the elite of Khedal—and even many of them use other languages among their intimates and only speak High Uonare with other elites to reflect their privileged status. Most of the population of Khedal, and the people of the former colonies, speak Low Uonare, and when "Uonare" is referred to without further specification it is almost always Low Uonare that is meant.

Phonology

In its attempt to reflect the multiple languages it borrowed from, High Uonare used (and still uses) a bewildering variety of different phonemes—two hundred and three, according to some estimates, including implosive and co-articulated consonants and phonational distinctions between breathy, creaky, and modal voices. There was also a tonal system applied to some—but only some—words. As with the grammar, the Low Uonare cut this phonological overabundance down to more manageable levels, dropping the inconsistent tonality and the phonational distinctions and leaving a total of ten vowel phonemes and thirty consonants. One of the factors that gives Low Uonare its distinctive sound is its heavy use of rounded vowels, especially close rounded vowels, which is unusual in languages of Jhembaz. Among consonants, some of its most distinctive sounds include bilabial trills, and the frequent sibilant fricatives that lead to its often being described as sounding like hissing.

Grammar

Uonare mostly uses a verb-subject-object sentence order, though there are many exceptions for certain kinds of sentences. (Low Uonare is much more regular than High Uonare, but not completely without its irregularities.) Nouns have different declensions in the singular and plural for the nominative, ergative, genitive, dative, ablative, and instrumental cases, and have ten different noun classes which all decline differently (although not entirely dissimilarly). Verbs have different forms for different tenses and voices and, again, many irregularities. They do ''not'' have different forms for first, second, and third person (unlike, for instance, Romance languages on Earth), but ''do'' conjugate differently depending on the noun class of the subject. Both adjectives and prepositions generally come after the noun they modify, though, again, there are exceptions which must typically be learned on a case-by-case basis.

Writing System

When Uonare was first devised, the Godtamers intended to borrow not only words and grammar from the divine languages, but characters and symbols as well. This, however, quickly proved to be completely unworkable; the language was already a mishmash of several other languages, but trying to toss together several writing systems was far too much to keep track of. Uonare was usually therefore written in the Mbosa script, the writing system of the languages that had been spoken in the area before the Godtamers arrived. The Godtamers didn't entirely give up on their desire to use borrowed characters from the divine languages, however, and while they did use the Mbosa script for inflectional endings, pronouns, and some other words, they still borrowed symbols from divine languages to stand in for certain concepts, especially but not exclusively concrete nouns.

Like the language itself, these symbols were somewhat altered and simplified in the transition from High Uonare to Low Uonare, but they were not completely abandoned. Even today, Low Uonare is written with a combination of the Mbosa script and logographs derived from divine alphabets. (The use of the logographic characters in Uonare is somewhat similar to how ''kanji'' are used in Japanese, but less extensive.) This combined writing system is known as the Yele.