Da Mätz se Basa: A Lost Germanic Language (S9)
Introduction
Da Mätz se Basa is a constructed human language. It is an isolating, germanic language derived from High German with heavy influence of a lot of other language.
Classification |
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Da Mätz se Basa is an artificial human language with the following properties:
- a-posteriory: derived from High German
- lostlang: lost in space and time
- almost totally regular
- nominative/accusative case system
- Germanic word order: V2, SOV (aux), VSO (yn-question)
- mostly isolating
History and Overview |
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Da Mätz se Basa is strange: when it was found a few years ago, linguists had the impression that it was a future blend of several languages from all over the world, with the main influence from German, Low German (probably East Westphalian), Dutch, and Afrikaans, but with a lot of loans, and even grammar influence from Mandarin Chinese, Bahasa Indonesia, Japanese, and others. However, it cannot be from the future, as it was found here and now. Or can it?
No explanation was found for the obvious language development.
The German case system has greatly collapsed, but leaving direct (collapsed from nominative and accusative) and dative case. So accusative has merged with nominative, and genitive was totally lost and is now expressed by analytic constructions.
Prepositions have fused with articles, the article itself has become mandatory in many more positions, e.g. in front of all names (a bit like in Ancient Greek).
Mandarin Chinese seems to have contributed a prefixed relative clause.
Probably it was Afrikaans that contributed a negative truth complement. Several other complements developed in Da Mätz se Basa. Further, from colloquial suffixes, a speech act complement developed accordingly, e.g. from German 'hä?' for questions (more precisely [hɵ], not [hɛ]), and from colloquial German 'Du!' [dɔ].
