Muipidan Conlangery Greeting

This greeting was featured on episode 143 of the Conlangery Podcast.

Kak’ada ü-k’esas ma-Kanlengeli, y-ungïsukuta nït-mo ü-niyta se-k’ata mï-kim ni-kingi k’as o-ndaphi.

[ˈka.kʼa.da yˈkʼe.zas maˈkan.lɛˌᵑge.li ˈju.ᵑgɨ.ˌzu.kʊ.ta nɨtˈmo yˈnɪj.ta sɛˈkʼa.ta mɨˈkɪm nɪˈki.ᵑgi kʼas o.ˈⁿda.pʰi]

ka-k'ada    ü-k'esas        ma-Kanlengeli   y-un-gïsu-kuta           
DES-2.GRPL  ACC-be.welcome  LOC-Conlangery  INSTR-speak-INTENS-3.PAUC

nït-mo    ü-niy-ta         se-k'a-ta         mï-kim    ni-kin-gi    
GEN-face  ACC-tongue-ABST  NMLZ-create-ABST  LOC-side  GEN-PERS-this

k'a-s     o-nda-phi    
build-3s  ACC-ABST-that

Welcome to Conlangery, the podcast about constructed languages and the people who create them.

The greeting shows off several interesting features of Muipidan.

Muipidan has several unusual series of consonants. In the greeting we can see examples of prenasalized stops and ejectives (though only the ejective k happens to appear). Muipidan also has voiceless nasals, which, sadly, do not occur at all in the greeting, despite one of my short test sentences managing to have three of themǃ (Kihnik’i hnas ne-kaslahn, meaning “Somebody cheered”)

Muipidan is picky about grammatical number, distinguishing up to five number categories, depending on the type of thing being counted. We can see two uses of this in the greeting. The first is the conjugation of the optative auxiliary kas, which is in the second-person greater plural to indicate that the podcast is welcoming “all of you”. The second is the use of the third-person paucal verb ending as a nominalizer in the word ungïsukuta, used to translate “podcast” — it converts the verb ungïsus “to discuss, to debate” into a noun meaning “an event where a few people discuss”.

Muipidan has twelve noun classes, which show up on adjectives, demonstratives, pronouns, and sometimes on the nouns themselves. Here we get to see two of them in action: the ndado class, used for abstractions (glossed ABST), and the kinde class, used for people (glossed PERS).