Hunger Games Simulator

A Sern-Cahilan conlang in the Dog Days Universe

Introduction and Phonology

Arodjun, or "Kat jArodjunx," is a Western Sern-Cahilan language spoken in the Fwonnel Peninsula on the west coast of what is today Mexico and some of the Pacific Ocean.

In a more meta sense, Arodjun/Ar̃ojun is an a priori artistic naturalistic constructed language. It follows a VOS word order, is mostly analytical, and features subject pronoun-tense combination "prowords."

Its phonology, shown in the tables below, shows a slightly asymmetrical set of consonants. Its biggest outliers are /dm/, /xw/, and /ql/. These have deep histories in the Sern-Cahilan language family.

	Labial		Dental/Alveolar		(Alveolo-)Palatal		Velar	Uvular	Glottal
Plosive/ Affricate	p [p, pʰ, p̚]	b [b, β]	t [t, tʰ, t̚]	d [ɖ, d, dʰ]	t͡s ⟨c⟩	d͡ʒ ⟨dj⟩	k [k, kʰ, g]	qχ [qχ, χ] ⟨kx⟩	ʔ [ʔ,’] ⟨’⟩
Fricative	f	v	s	z		ʒ ⟨g⟩	x
Lateral			ɬ ⟨sl⟩	ɮ ⟨zl⟩				qʟ ⟨ql⟩
Nasal		m		n
Other		w		r [r, ɾ]

Common Clusters:

mj [mʲ]

nj [nʲ, ɲ]

dm [ɾm]

xw [xw, ʍ]

Its vowels – /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/ – very recently converted from a seven-vowel system including a phonemic /ɛ/ (which merged with /e/) and /ə/ (which merged with phonemic /a/):

	Front	Central	Back
High	i [i, ɪ]	u [u, ʊ, ə]
Close-Mid	e [ɛ, ɜ]	r [ɚ]	o [o, ʌ]
Low	a [a, ɐ, ə]

Morphosyntax and Morphology

Case System

Past versions of Arodjun were fully synthetic, though as time went on word order stabilized and the case system began to fade away. However, a reduced form of the case system still exists. The Arodjun cases are Nominative, Accusative, Dative, Genitive, and Animate Genitive. As the subject proword usually suffices for a noun in the nominative case, when the proword cannot account for the identity of the subject, the nominative case will be present. As such, the Accusative case is typically only marked when a Nominative noun is also present in the sentence, mostly for clarification purposes.

Noun Cases	Regular Forms	Following Plosives
NOM	-ka	-a
ACC	-pe	-e
DAT	-mo	-mo
GEN	-bwa	-vwa
AGEN	-r	-r

Noun Classes

In Arodjun, nouns are either physical nouns or nonphysical nouns. Physical nouns are people, places, or things and are typically realized in the gender neutral form -au. There are masculine and feminine physical noun suffixes as well, though these do not qualify as “grammatical gender,” as they don’t alter verb conjugations or affect related adjectives, etc. Nonphysical nouns are not split into any subcategories.

Noun Classes	Singular	Plural
Nonphysical	-x, -∅	-x, -∅
Physical (Neutral/Neuter)	-au	-awa
Physical (masculine)	-aux	-auxo
Physical (feminine)	-aix	-aixe

Derivational Affixes

There are many prefixes and suffixes that can alter a noun or adjective to make it have various different meanings. Here are a few of them in their regular forms.

Noun Endings	Singular	Plural
Masuline	-aux	-auxo
Feminine	-aix	-aixe
Neuter/Physical	-au	-awa
Nonphysical	-x
Professional	-in	-ino
Instrumental	-it	-ito
Regnant	-uv	-ubuv
Commander/Honorific	-ib	-ivo
Nationality	-unk	-uno
City	-un/-n
Town	-ic
Area/Land	-sja
Ridge	-kojo
Lake	-dmair
strait/river	-wif
Hill	-anuin
Pass	-ijet
Canyon	-cijot

Noun Quantifiers
Neutral	Ø
Extra-Positive of	xw-
Opposite of	k'-
Lack of	t'-
Big/Many/Very	xu-/x-
Biggest/Collective	xju-/xj-
Small/Few	pe-/p-
Smallest/Piece of	p'sju-/p'sj-
Increment	dja-/dj-
Decrement	vja-/vj-
before/under	qlo-/qlow-
after/above	bo-/bow-

Articles	Suffix
This/These	-k
That/Those	-c
The Only	-m
The(Any)	Ø
A/Some	-g
None	-xi

Grammar

The grammar of Arodjun follows its VOS structure strictly, with several conjunctions and other features which allow for large varieties of sentence structures.

In general (though with several exceptions clarifies in the document and the book):

The classic sentence order is as follows: Verb, Object, Subject, Subject Proword
Adverbs and adverbial phrases that apply to verbs occur before the verb
Adjectives follow nouns
Adverbs that affect adjectives follow the adjective
The subject proword must be present in every independent clause
Indirect objects (Dative nouns) can be placed directly before or directly after the direct object (Accusative noun)
Genitive nouns are placed after the noun with which it is associated, acts as an adjective

Resources

The spreadsheet below shows the most recent publicly-available version of the Arodjun language, including its dictionary, calendar, naming conventions, and grammar tables. For a better-looking, well-arranged grammar, check out the full book A Grammar of the Arodjun Language!

The interactive Arodjun dictionary can be found here.