Kattan

The original craddle or mother language of the feline Manimal sub-group.

Writing System

Kattan has its own script and font. The script is useful for representing Kattan's large number of phonemes. The alphabet consists of 24 vowels, 23 consonants, and one punctuation mark.

Geographical Distribution

Kattan is spoken minorly throughout The AEON almost exclusively by feline Manimals who live as or amongst primal NuHumans.

Phonology

An example: "I can speak Kattan fairly well," would be pronounced "wee lur-ma-mee wih k'at'tan".

Vocabulary

Kattan is a rich, detailed language. With around 3000 words (mostly nouns), it is an analytic (syntax-based) language in subject-verb-object order with no grammatical gender. In this sense, its grammar is very similar to Chinese. Kattan's grammatical structure and its use of general-purpose affixes as modifiers and linguistic markers allows very complicated concepts to be expressed succinctly and unambiguously.

Phonetics

Kattan is nearly invariantly phonetic, with contextually predictable substitutions occurring for only one letter of its alphabet. Kattan is spoken slowly, and all of its letters are English familiar, so the spoken language sounds similar to English.