The BG Language Creation Guide

Grammar and Dictionary of Liqupa

Compiled by Captain P Q Stovepipe

Cultural Description

Since the Great Blue Falling Out, the Guardian Pines of the isle known locally as Kasinicinala have permitted no outsiders to set foot on shore. This means that no clear estimate of the number of speakers of Liqupa is available to linguists. However, aerial photography seems to indicate that the population of the island must be between 5,000 and 10,000. Liqupa legend holds that there are always 6,912 Liqupans, but this number cannot be varified, and the Liqupans themselves are notoriously difficult to count. as they do move about so..

Their island is located in the Caribbean, off the southern shore of Puerto Rico, does not appear on most commercially available maps.

The community was once very accepting of outsiders, but closed itself entirely away from Western influence in the fall of 2,000. The reasons are not entirely clear, but seemed to have involved a terrible cultural misunderstanding between the people of the island and a young, idealistic linguist with adorable children now living, for some mysterious reason, in Northwest Ohio. Working diligently and under incredibly difficult field conditions, previous attempts to document the language met with failure as the would-be documentarians always seemed to become confused and distracted and had difficulty organizing their thoughts, writing grammatically, and filing paperwork on time.

Liqupans are a pastural, communal, highly synesthetic people whose village life centers around pine tree worship, folk music and the telling of fanciful stories.

Phonetics and Phonology

Liqupa Segment Inventory

Consonants
This language has 10 consonants.
Vowels
This language has 3 vowels.
[i] high front tense vowel as in 'heat'
[u] high back tense rounded vowel as in 'hoot'
[a] low back unrounded vowel as in 'hot'

Notes

The system here is unusual in that it has so few consonants and so few vowels. It also lacks a /t/ phoneme: the most common consonant sound. the present of voiceless uvular stop /q/ is also unusual.

The vowel system is the smallest known to exist. Liqpupa vowels are not, in and of themselves unusual.

Allophonic variation

The following allophonic variation occurs in Luqupa.

For example:
ashes qa-qaqu is realized as ka-kaqu (end of)-wildfire
child miqi is realized as mici-ya person-small
cloud qa-susu-siqu is reealized as ka-susu-siqu end--water-snow (kasusu = sky) (na class)
snow siqu is realized as Siqu
day naqu-di is realized as naqu-di bright-continuous
good siq is realized as Siq adj
water susu is relized as Susu

Phonotactics and Prosodics