Verse:Mwail/Irenesian languages

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Verse:

Mwail/Irenesian languages

• Mwail/Irenesian languages/Lexicon

Verse talk:

The Irenesian languages are a large language family mainly spoken in Mwail Asia. It includes some of the largest languages,such as Ernish.

The Irenesian urheimat is thought to have been Taiwan. The family is inspired by Austronesian and Semitic.

Family tree

• Irenesian
  • Erno-Kawenic
  • Dhasrawitic
    • Lhabhdweni
    • Dhasrawita
  • Hirbic
    • Len!ir
  • Irenic
    • Dosubian
  • West Sadhcevan
  • East Sadhcevan
  • Antipodean

Phonology

Consonants

		Labial	Coronal	Palatal	Velar
Nasal		m /m/	n /n/		ŋ /ŋ/
Stop	plain	p /p/	t /t/		k /k/
	voiced	b /b/	d /d/		g /g/
	ejective	pʼ /pʼ/	tʼ /tʼ/		kʼ /kʼ/
Fricative			s /s̠/
Resonant			r /r/, l /l/	y /j/	w /w/

Vowels

ă a e i o u

No diphthongs; hiatus is permitted

Aim for Semito-Tagalog aesthetic words

Grammar

Typological overview

Syntactically "Arabic but Austronesian"

Proto-Irenesian had a system of symmetrical voice ("Austronesian alignment") with three cases:

1. direct case: the syntactic subject. The verb's voice may promote the direct object to the syntactic subject, or it may promote the indirect object.
2. indirect case: the most significant argument that is not the subject (the non-subject agent or the non-subject patient).
3. genitive case: possessors and prepositional complements.

Proto-Irenesian syntax is VSO and head-initial, but with some tendency to be topic-prominent (unlike Goidelic). Here S is the syntactic subject marked with the direct case.

(Many daughter languages are SVO and head-initial-ish. Kawenic which has a Finnic-like grammar is an exception.)

Nouns and adjectives

Nouns inflect for case and number, and adjectives agree with nouns in case and number.

Declension

• direct: -0
• indirect: -ăl
• genitive: -ăm

Classifiers

Classifiers are morphologically nouns, but a few have suppletive plural forms.

There could be some dialectal variation in classifiers

• nawil, pl. ike: generic things
• soŋi, pl. oru: people
• p'asur: big animals
• wipi: small animals
• mosat: flat sheets
• keron: trees and bushes
• yuŋos: herbaceous plants
• bawăd: flowers, bunches of fruit
• tiŋa: long thin rigid objects, paths, ways things are done (e.g. languages)
• wasik: long thin flexible objects
• ut’uop: fruits, roughly spherical things
• tul: circles, rings
• ŋes: buildings
• p'odal: vehicles
• lăep: marks, like written characters, wounds, …
• rukir: places
• uta: events; verbal nouns tend to take this classifier

Ideophones

• ŋubeŋube ‘sluggish’