Despotanmagi

The Massenpreost Despotanfras language was originally the langauge of the Massenpreost Despotanfras people. It went extinct as a spoken language together with the race of the same name, but remained used as a literary and religious language by the Ancient Lizardman Empire, and also as a language of magic.

Consonants

 * The language used to have a corresponding voiced stop for all the voiceless stops save for  - that is, for . However, with the exception of, all of them turned into fricatives  at one point - possibly before the Massenpreost Despotanfras people's arrival to the planet.
 * This is relevant when it comes to phonotactics, because coda-position voiceless stops became voiced before syllables that began with vowels.
 * The phoneme used to be two separate phonemes at one point:  and . Despite having merged in actual realization, the there continued to be two separate letters for the sound, representing historical pre-merger phonemes. This is also relevant when it comes to phonotactics, as the language tolerates syllable-initial consonant clusters like, , , , , , etc. specifically because those consonant clusters used to end with  before the merger.

Vowels
The Massenpreost Despotanfras language was simplistic in its lack of vowel length distinction and intolerance for vowel clusters. All diphthongs consist of vowels of the same height.


 * The diphthongs could have been  at one point, but got height-harmonized before the Massenpreost Despotanfras people's arrival to the planet. They never monophthongized, remaining diphthongs through the language's entire lifespan.

Phonotactics
While the language had an inventory of vowels and consonants that could be certainly considered exotic by many, it actually had several constraints that drastically limited the number of valid syllables:
 * Pretty much the only consonant clusters that were enabled syllable-initially were ones where the second element was, or , the latter of which used to be  at one point.
 * However,, , , , , , , , , , , and , , , and were all illegal consonant clusters syllable-initially.
 * Each syllable could consist of only one vowel or diphthong, and there were only as many valid diphthongs as monophthongs. Additionally, vowel-clusters were not tolerated and had to be split up with a prosthetic consonant like, or.
 * The only valid syllable-final consonants and consonant-clusters were, , , , , , , , , , , ,  and.
 * Based off some written sources, Massenpreost Despotanfras had assimilation, in which syllable-final consonants interacted with the initial consonants of the following syllable's initial consonant:
 * Intersyllabic clusters like and  simply simplified into  and . Clusters like,  and  simplifeid into ,  and.
 * In the case of, became
 * In the case of the clusters, , , and , the original nasal was replaced with one with the same place of articulation as the consonant that followed it.
 * Syllables ending with had their final stop replaced by the corresponding voiced equivalent  if the next syllable started with a vowel. This wasn't always expressed in writing, especially early on.
 * Diphthongs are treated like single vowels. Vowel clusters are otherwise not tolerated, and thus must be either replaced by diphthongs, or by putting a prosthetic consonant to separate the vowels - usually.

Grammar
The Massenpreost Despotanfras language was ergative–absolutive, SVO agglutinative language - or more precisely, agent–verb–object (AVO).

Cases
Due to the fact that Massenpreost Despotanfras was an agglutinative language that built words by combining morphemes into words like building blocks, it is up for debate whether the language had an actual case system, or if the case-endings were more like helper-words attached to root words to put them into grammatical context.

As Massenpreost Despotanfras was an ergative–absolutive language, it lacked nominative and accusative cases, instead having an ergative and an absolutive case. In a nominative-accusative language, the agent of a transitive verb and the core argument of an intransitive verb both warrant the usage of the nominative case, while object of a transitive verb warrants the usage of the accusative case - in contrast with this, in an ergative-absolutive language like Massenpreost Despotanfras, only the agent of a transitive verb is marked by an ergative case, while both the object of a transitive verb and the core argument of an intransitive verb warrant being marked by the absolutive case.

Thus, the list of cases:
 * Ergative: Indicates the agent of transitive verb
 * Absolutive/Dative: Indicates the object of transitive verb or core argument of intransitive verb (absolutive), as well as the indirect object of any verb (dative)
 * Ablative: Indicates movement away from
 * Genitive: Indicates possessor of another noun
 * Vocative: Addresses a noun
 * Locative: Roughly corresponds to English prepositions in, on, at, and by and other less common locational prepositions.
 * Instrumental: Roughly corresponds to English prepositions by, with and via as well as synonymous constructions such as using, by use of and through.

There was no distinct dative case - it instead has merged with the absolutive case.

Pronouns
Unlike in other languages that typically had distinct pronouns often completely independent from the markers of the various grammatical cases, Massenpreost Despotanfras only had three basic words that could be used as pronouns when combined with a grammatical case:
 * being the core first-person proto-pronoun, meaning "I" or "me" when combined with a singular case-marker, "we" or "us" when combined with a plural case-marker.
 * being the core second-person proto-pronoun, meaning "you"
 * being the core third-person proto-pronoun, meaning "he/she/it" or "him/her/it" when combined with a singular case-marker, "they" or "them" when combined with a plural case-marker.

As such, the full list of pronouns in their grammatical cases:

Numbers
Massenpreost Despotanfras language employed Base 8, or Octal. Ordinal numbers were used for counting, cardinal numbers were used for position or rank in a sequential order. Large numbers are made by taking cardinal numbers and having them in an order of A-B-C for $$(A*8^B)+C$$, such as $$(3*8^2)+4$$ being ȟos-ňot-qap. To turn it into an ordinal number, only the last one needs to be made ordinal - for example ȟos-ňot-qaveo. In theory, the largest number that can be represented in the language would be feti-redevot-feti - in other words $$(7*8^6)+7=1835015$$.

Ordinal numbers can also be treated (and thus conjugated/cased) like nouns, such as saying "kät-ȟoseo-yä" for $$2/3$$ (two thirds). To further help with representing non-integer numbers in the language, a radix point can also be used - the word for it is "vosp", such as saying ye-vosp-ye for $$(1*8^0)+(1*8^{-1})=1.125$$

Adjectives and adverbs
Adjectives are marked this way:
 * to mark regular adjectives
 * to mark comparative adjectives
 * to mark superlative adjectives

Adverbs are formed from adjecitves by adding to its end.

Vocabulary
Important words in the Massenpreost Despotanmagi language include:
 * Basic words: (life),  (death),  (magic),  (magic)
 * Colours: (light),  (dark),  (red),  (blue),  (green),  (yellow),  (brown)