Leuma is spoken by a small dispersed community of speakers in the area of eastern Turkey and southern Georgia. It has superficial resemblances to both languages, and many loanwords from Georgian, but seems to be unrelated to either.
Leuma was originally written with a modified form of the Arabic alphabet, as were many languages in the area. Subsequently, under the influence of French linguists, especially one Jean-Pierre La Roche, an orthography in the Latin alphabet came to be used. This orthography is still popular in Georgia, and will be used in this document.
The speakers of Leuma in Turkey use a different orthography heavily influenced by Atatürk's spelling reforms for Turkish.
Length of consonants is not distinguished except with nasals and liquids. Sometimes, other consonants will be written doubly, but this will only be for reasons of explicating the morphology. Leuma has the following consonants (first in the La Roche orthography, then in the IPA):
In addition, four voiced stops occur after nasals (most frequently), r, and l, distinct from the unvoiced stops:
Vowels in Leuma obey roundedness harmony very strictly. Only in loanwords and compound words will a single word have both rounded and unrounded vowels. Here is where the La Roche orthography diverges most from French, and also proves more useful to the beginner than the Turkish orthography (which also diverges here from Turkish vowels), which is again also shown for reference.
There are no diphthongs as such in Leuma, adjacent vowels being pronounced distinctly.
There are quite a few ways to write Leuma. Initially, it was written with a modification of the Arabic script, which remained in use in Turkey until Atatürk's changes, when a Latin-alphabet system for writing it was developed, based on that used for Turkish and ignoring the somewhat ungainly system developed by La Roche.
In Georgia, however, a Cyrillic alphabet was designed for writing Leuma. This was still in use until 1994, when a convocation was held that decided to use a Latin transcription of the language. Peculiarly, they decided to use the La Roche system, distinguishing themselves from those speakers of Leuma who live in Turkey, and further hampering the small nationalist movement among the Leum by maintaining this division in the written word.
Stress in Leuma is regularly on the penultimate syllable of a word, with few exceptions occurring mainly in loanwords. Irregular stress is rarely marked, but in this document, it will be shown with the irregularly stressed vowel underlined.
Pitch plays a small part in Leuma, distinguishing a few archaic words.
Leuma is not a tonal language, and has inflectional patterns similar enough to English that no comment need be made.
The most obvious allophonic phenomenon in Leuma is vowel harmony, but that has been treated above. Since there are three unrounded vowels and three corresponding rounded vowels, no special explanation will be given here.
Consonants will be treated individually:
Leuma distinguishes two tenses morphologically, Past and Present (Nonpast). Present is also used for future when combined with adverbs of time, or simply indicated by context.
The indicative mood is, of course, shown. Also distinguished are the Subjunctive, Imperative and Jussive.
Perfective, Imperfective, and Unrealized.
Four voices are distinguished on the verb in Leuma:
Like Georgian, Leuma can change the meaning of a verb by a set of prepositional prefixes. Unlike Georgian, though, basically any preposition and many adverbs can be simply prefixed to the verb to change its meaning.
Leuma makes distinct quite a number of cases, but, like Basque, it works on an Ergative/Absolutive system. The terms "Subject" and "Object" are not terribly useful for describing an Erg/Abs language, the terms "Marked" and "Unmarked" being more useful for our purposes. One case, the Absolutive, is the "unmarked" and is used for direct objects of transitive verbs and subjects of intransitive verbs. The other case, the "marked" Ergative, is used almost exclusively for the subjects of transitive verbs. Indirect objects of all kinds are put in the Dative case. The cases are listed below:
Unlike its two largest neighbors, Turkish and Georgian, Leuma distinguishes four genders, which are, unlike gender in Indo-European languages, have nothing to do with "gender" as such, and are more akin to abstract noun classes.
The first is for things generally solid in nature, material nouns. The second is for abstract nouns, such as ideas or actions or emotions. The third is for for nouns that are material, but don't exist. The fourth is for anything else, and, as one might imagine, is a very small category.
Leuma distinguishes number only on pronouns, where singular, dual and plural are distinguished.
Leuma rarely compounds words. When it does, however, the modifier precedes the head, as in Japanese or English. So a "kangaroo-mouse" is a kind of mouse, not kangaroo.
Likewise, a noun compounded with a nominalized verb is considered to be the object of the verb, so a "frog-catcher" isn't a kind of frog, but a kind of catcher, namely, one of frogs. Were you to have a "catcher-frog," though, that would be a frog who happens to catch things.
Leuma distinguishes first, second and third person as normal.
Number is distinguished on personal pronouns.
Leuma lacks reflexive pronouns, using the normal personal pronouns instead. For example, "John read to himself" would literally be "John read to him." This does occasionally cause ambiguity that must be resolved by context.
Possessive pronouns are always a little strange, existing somewhere between adjectives or determiners and genitive phrases. In Leuma, they act essentially as determiners, replacing any other specifier such as "this" or "that."
Leuma uses no relative pronouns as such, instead using resumptive pronouns. These occur in non-standard English: "I am missing two lyrics that I can't figure out what they are." Essentially, in Leuma, to say "the man who came to dinner," one would say "the man he-resumptive came to dinner." The resumptive pronoun takes its case from the clause it is in, not from any sort of agreement with its head (that is, "man.")
Adjectives match their noun in case and gender only, not in number or declension.
They regularly precede their noun, and cannot take complements directly. Some sort of periphrasis must be used, such as "..who is...," except using a resumptive pronoun.
An adverb, mosou, translatable as "more" is used for the comparative, with complete regularity. The phrase being compared to precedes, and is followed by the adposition chin. Related, there is an adverb palmas which is used for expressions of "less than."
Equative constructions are periphrastic, using chin after both elements being equated, and using the adjective in the basic form.
The suffix -atch is used, usually along with the adverb mosou, to indicate the superlative. This is a remnant of the suffix's historical meaning as a definite article.
Cardinal numbers and ordinal numbers both function as adjectives, but are distinct in form and meaning.
Leuma is a postpositional language. Other than that, adpositions are unremarkable.
There are a few complex ones involving adverbs or abstract nouns of place.
Adverbs regularly precede their head, be it a noun, adjective, or anything else.
Leuma has no articles. "The" and "a" are understood from the context. Historically it had one, but it has devolved into the modern honorific suffix, -atch.
Subclauses in Leuma precede that which they modify, and use no special word order or Relative pronouns, considering that they use the resumptive pronoun system outlined above.
Queries use the relevant Interrogative pronoun, left in the sentence where it would go in the equivalent positive statement. Yes/No questions use the particle vout at the end of the sentence, or rather after the main verb.
Negation is expressed by a negative adverb, pal, which can also be used to modify other words, or be inflected as an adjective and act similarly to "no" or "non-" in English.
Nominalized verbs are somewhat common, occasionally being used rather than relative clauses, especially among the population in Turkey. The subject of a nominalized verb goes into the Genitive, as in English: "The man's feeding the dog."
Leuma is a very conservative language, and texts from a thousand years ago can be read by modern speakers with little difficulty. The only significant sound change in that time was the loss of [ts] as a phoneme, replaced under most circumstances with [ʧ].