Mukako Buzo

Mukako Buzo is a language spoken by Merfolk in a group called Mukako which translated literally means "Red People" with buzo translating to tongue or speak. It is spoken in areas the Sea of Pearls, the Atsyllean Sea and other surrounding large bodies of water. While other languages spoken by Merfolk certainly exist, Mukako Buzo is currently the only known one. There is no evidence to support the hypothesis that these languages are somehow related.

The alphabet and phonetics shares a distinct similarity to that of the Traveler's Tongue with the omission of the letters , ,, and  along with the inclusion of distinct symbols for .

Mukako Buzo is a subject–object–verb language with adjectives following after the word they are attached to. The language lacks terms for "the", "am", and "are" merely implying their existence. For example a sentence such as "the red frog jumped over the blue toad while a green newt watched" would realign to "frog red toad blue jumped over while watched newt green" in the rules of Mukako Buzo.

Verbs and suffixes
All verbs in Mukako Buzo end in a vowel which allows for a system of suffixes to denote variations on the base verb where it only needs to include a single new letter.

Numbers
Opposed to the more common decimal system of Traveler's Tongue, Mukako Buzo uses a ocal system. Numeral adverbs are formed by adding an "A" to the start of a numerical adjective. For example, Chaso means "one" while Achaso means "once".

Pronouns
Most pronouns and honorifics derive from the word Mu which translates to "people". And one thing to keep in mind for he grammar specifically referring to pronouns is the use of the word for He/Her in it's use in Traveler's Tongue and in the role as the noun boy/girl, as well as the distinction of they/them as a pronoun from they/them when referring to a group of people.

Loanwords
Because Mukako Buzo is a language spoken by Merfolk, it does not have native words for most things above the water. In the past, speakers described literally what they see. Boats, for example, were referred to as "Bako Wosat", literally translating to "black moving (thing)". In modern times, the increasing exposure to languages such as Traveler's Tongue lead to the importation of multiple loanwords.

There are two main steps in the process of importing words from Traveler's Tongue to Mukako Buzo. First is the substitution or exclusion of any /l/ phonemes. If the /l/ is located at the start of a word, it is replaced with /t/. Otherwise, the /l/ phoneme is an /r/, except if the /l/ is part of a consonant cluster. If the /l/ is part of a consonant cluster, it is simply excluded.

The second step is changing the lettering of a word to be in line with Mukako Buzo which entails spelling it as it sounds. For example, the Traveler's Tongue word "leopard" is adapted to "teperd". The spelling of verbs is adjusted to end with a vowel. If a vowel is only one letter away from the end, the ending consonant is excluded as seen with "run" becoming "ru". Should there be two or more consonants at the end of a verb, the first vowel in the word is affixed to the end of the word. Thereby, the Traveler's Tongue word "jump" becomes "jumpu".

Naming system
In Mukako culture each person has a first name and a last name, the first name is commonly created by combining an adjective or a verb with a noun then using the first syllable of a word, but in the case that the first word ends in a vowel and the second word starts with one the first word shortening will also include the next consonant so something like "Shiny Apple" would become "Shina", for an example with Mukako Buzo words a common name is "Kewi" which is composed of the words "Keno" which is a noun meaning warrior or fighter and "Wiche" which is an adjective which means talented or gifted thus Kewi translates to "Gifted warrior". The last name is commonly comprised of the word for family "Samo" and a profession title after it, so for example "Samotichek" would translate to "Artist family",