Guess the Language, anyone?

[Tropylium]

Hm… Seereer?

[Birdlang]

No. Sereer has no tones. And the alphabet is pseudo IPA. So, macron is mid tone, acute it high, grave is low, and there are contour tones on long vowels which are written double. And a hint, it's from Chad.

[Birdlang]

Another hint, a language its related to starts its name with Ng (actually a few languages).

[kuroda]

Dang, Birdlang. I'm stumped. Yes, well, I have a vague sense of areal and maybe even 'genetic' being; but I just don't have the brain-stuff nor the personal library to track it down.

The text itself is pretty clear, which makes the temptation to begoogle it up quite strong. One of the weird things I love about this forum is the strict ethics of its members

Give us more time? I mean to go across to the uni library and dig around; but can't for a few days yet.

[Pogostick Man]

Cebaara?

[Birdlang]

No. The language is Related to Ngambay.

[ObsequiousNewt]

Mbay?

[Birdlang]

No. It is similar though.

[Birdlang]

The language is also spoken in Chad, like I said before, and it is spoken by a lot of people.

[ObsequiousNewt]

Uh, Dagba? and where the heck did you get any information on a Sara language?

[kuroda]

The current puzzle is just shy of two weeks old, and until Birdlang offered another hint today, had gone without any new proposals for nearly a week. I'm going to propose that:

1) in (let's say) another 24 hours, Birdlang reveals the answer,
2) hopefully, gives us some bibliography on this mystery so we can rush off to expunge the shame of our ignorance,
3) gets to propose another puzzle language, as he 'beat the field' in this round.

Otherwise, I worry that the thread will die out again as people, having exhausted their knowledge/enthusiasm, drift away; or, Birdlang keeps offering more hints until the thread devolves into a dull game of eliminating remaining possibilities by rote and rather by any actual recognition.

[Xephyr]

I agree with all but #3. The goal of the game isn't to find something nobody can guess-- if that were the case, it would be utterly trivial for those of us with extensive PDF libraries to find an example in a language which nobody would ever guess, ever. But sometimes deadlocks just happen, unfortunately.

[kuroda]

As a newcomer to this thread, I defer to Xephyr In any case, I'd just like to see this deadlock broken before the whole game/thread withers away.

Birdlang, are you willing to put us out of our misery yet?

[ObsequiousNewt]

It's Sar. I gave up and Googled the text.

[Birdlang]

You are right. It has one of my favorite orthographies.

[Nortaneous]

No one is going, so:

Zärm zunjl bolzg, xavrin ödr sö xoir teñshärlhnä ödrin kondllhn üzsn bolv. XVI arvjd ter teñshärlhn 10 xongar Moha sarin 21 deer irlä. Tegäd tana züülin bichg seksn teegt orultn. Züül kücäd, "Xadhlx" darcig shavdltn.

[Porphyrogenitos]

Tatar?

[Nortaneous]

no

[Xephyr]

Oirat?

[hwhatting]

Is that in the original orthography or is that a transcription / transliteration? If the latter, is it yours or is that a standard romanization?
And it definitely looks like some form of Mongolian. Don't know any variant but Khalkha, so I'm not able to guess which of the Mongolian languages / dialects this is. If the orthography renders the vowels correctly, it looks like it reduced unstressed syllables in comparison to Classical even more than Khalkha did.

[gach]

Based on how the vowel reduction in treated I'll go for Kalmyk specifically.

[Nortaneous]

Kalmyk.

[gach]

Great. Here's next:

Erek kuukekińun ịakkana ọŋalčan omettu, omettu degenniken gịa bọkaatụ tawnịkan dʒebedniken binni, gịa bimi tarda ereger degen daalịlịn degenniken nọŋan irew taraw bakčawan tawịńasnịkan binni.

[Dezinaa]

I'm going to make a crazy guess, based on the vowels with dots: Igbo?

[gach]

Not Igbo.