I stumbled earlier today upon Nessari's list of 218 example sentences you can use to help flesh out your conlang's morphosyntax and vocabulary. Great idea, I thought; let's try translating these into Classical Quazian.

This thread, resultingly, is a working grammar of Classical Quazian. After a sketch of the phonology, the sentences will be presented one by one, along with a translation and a gloss, and further elaboration of the construction used. Because it is a working grammar, a more usual grammar will not be written until it is completed and polished up a bit.

Phonology

We will begin with a treatment of Classical Quazian phonology. Classical Quazian has a relatively large inventory, with six vowels and thirty-six consonants (analyzing the prenasalized stops as clusters reduces this to twenty-six). It allows coda consonants only word-finally and permits no consonant clusters.

Here is a table of CQ's consonants:

	Labial	Dental/Alveolar	Retroflex	(Alveolo-)Palatal	Velar	Uvular
Stop	p b ᵐp ᵐb	t d ⁿt ⁿd	ʈ ɖ ᶯʈ ᶯɖ	tɕ dʑ ⁿtɕ ⁿdʑ	k g ᵑk ᵑg	q ɢ
Nasal	m	n		ɲ	ŋ
Fricative		s	ʂ	ɕ		χ~h
Lateral Fricative		ɬ
Approximant	w			j		ʀ
Lateral Approximant		l		ʎ

Since some of these are unwieldy to type on my keyboard, we'll use this working orthography instead. (Classical Quazian's native writing system is a logogram/syllabary mix like that of Japanese).

	Labial	Dental/Alveolar	Retroflex	(Alveolo-)Palatal	Velar	Uvular
Stop	p b mp mb	t d nt nd	ṭ ḍ nṭ nḍ	ć j nć nj	k g nk ng	q x
Nasal	m	n		ń	ŋ
Fricative		s	ṣ	ś		h
Lateral Fricative		ł
Approximant	w			y		r
Lateral Approximant		l		lh

Classical Quazian also has a six-vowel system /i e æ ɒ o u/. /æ/ will be written <æ> in our orthography, /ɒ/ <a>.

Syllable structure is CV...(t k q m n ń ŋ w y r l lh), with coda consonants permitted only word-finally. There are no consonant clusters.

A further phonological complication is that CQ is pitch-accent, with words having either a rising (acute) tone or a falling (circumflex) tone on their stressed syllable. This stressed syllable is generally the next-to-last in the word, though what counts as "next-to-last" is not always entirely obvious, and there are a number of exceptions to the rule.

Example words may be found in the Classical Quazian dictionary, which can and should be commented on.

From now on I'm going to try and write 10 some sentences from the list per day, more if I can find the gumption; by the time classes start a reasonable point in the nearish future I hope to have them all done.