About the language

This is a sort of hideous monster. Dunamy is a lightly munged version of Mwashnylish, which is itself a sort of lightly mutated version of English as spoken by Martian colonists in yon Nightwatch world. (Mutations add up, so don't expect it to be very comprehensible.)

For those paying attention, Dunamy would be yon language Maxim and Jason speak natively.

Pronunciation

Dunamy spelling is basically phonetic. The consonants have their general English values, with these exceptions:

• Y is for /Z/, the sound usually in "Asia".
• SY is for /S/ as in "shoe".
• G is normally hard /g/ as in "gaggle", not soft /dZ/ as in "germ"
• R is a trilled /r/ as in Spanish <perro>
• H is silent.

Voiceless stops also shouldn't be aspirated, but if you don't know what that means, it's not terribly important, and probably nobody'll notice anyway.

Vowels are thus:

• a is /@/, or the "a" in "about".
• au is /A/, or the "a" in "father".
• ä (or ae) is /{/, or the "eah" in "yeah".
• Short e is /E/, or the "e" in "bed".
• Long e is /e/, something like the "e" in "padre".
• Short i is /I/, or the "i" in "bit".
• Long i is /i/, or the "i" in "machine".
• Short o is /O/, something like the "o" in "for"
• Long o is /o/, something like the "o" in "bow"
• Short u is /U/, or the "u" in "put"
• Long u is /u/, or the "oo" in "moon".

You can tell whether it's a short or long vowel depending on two things. A short vowel will be in a closed syllable (what ends in a consonant). A long vowel will be in an open syllable (what doesn't end in a consonant).

If a vowel's supposed to be long in a closed syllable, it will have an acute accent mark on it. If a vowel's supposed to be short in an open syllable, the next letter will be doubled or a silent <h> is added afterwards.

Count to ten!

This is one of the first things people ask for, so hey.

1. van
2. do
3. fa
4. fo
5. fauv
6. six
7. sefa
8. ih
9. naun
10. dén

Word order

The verb goes at the beginning of the sentence, and the subject before the object (VSO) unless you want to emphasize something strongly, in which case that can go first.

Verbs

A verb has two forms in Dunamy, which are something like active and passive. Generally the one ends in -i and the other begins with pa-. They're called "direct" and "inverse", respectively.

Dyesi gaes ara tak.
"The cat chases the dog."

Padyés taks ara gae.
"The dog is chased by the cat."

Dyesi gaes.
"The cat chases."

Padyés taks.
"The dog is chased."

Nouns

The subject noun of a sentence is marked for tense and number. (Yes, tense is not marked on the verb.) The object is always preceded by the markerword ara.

The tenses are past, present, and future. The number is either singular or plural.

tak	Sing	Pl
Pres	taks	taksa
Past	takuz	taksa
Fut	takapa	taksapa