Taki Itza language
The city for conlangs
| Taki Itza Itza, Ticyate h'Itza | ||
|---|---|---|
| Spoken in: | Qajhitza | |
| Total speakers: | ||
| Language family: | Itzan Yixil-Taki Taki Itza | |
| Official status | ||
| Official language of: | Qajhitza | |
| Regulated by: | Huecticyate h'Itza | |
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | tk | |
| ISO 639-2: | tki | |
| ISO 639-3: | tki | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-based pronunciation key. | ||
Taki Itza (also known simply as Itza among speakers and Ticyate h'Itza in the Latin alphabet) is a Western Vendan language, closely related to Yixil, and is the official language of Qajhitza.
[edit] Characteristics
A characteristic feature of Taki Itza (and all Itzan languages) is the use of ejective consonants - /p'/, /k'/, /t'/. Often referred to as glottalized consonants, they are pronounced more or less like their non-ejective counterparts, though the pronunciation is briefly halted and then released with a characteristic popping sound. These sounds are written using an apostrophe after the letter to distinguish them from the plain consonants. The apostrophes indicating these sounds were not common in written Itzan until the late 15th century, but are now becoming more common.
Like almost all Itzan languages, Taki Itza is verb-initial (VOA). Many sentences may appear to be AVO, but this is a derived order due to a topic-comment system similar to that of Japanese. Taki is also agglutinative, and ergative.
[edit] Orthography
Itza is mostly written in the Latin script (however, it is a matter of preference, especially in the countryside; the government, however, officially adopted Romanised Itza in CE 998, and has continued to use it), which was introduced during the colonial rule of the area by Valania, but was previously written in hieroglyphs. The language's line can be traced back to Proto-Taki, Yixil, and ultimately Proto-Itza, which both branches stemmed from.
