Verse:Mwail/Irenesian languages

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The Irenesian languages are a large language family mainly spoken in Angai Asia. The Irenesian urheimat is thought to have been Taiwan. The family is inspired by Austronesian and Semitic.

Todo

Family tree

Phonology

p p' b t t' d k k' g m n ŋ l r w y s ă a e i o u

s is retracted

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: marking 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: marking the most significant argument that is not the subject (the non-subject agent or the non-subject patient).
  3. genitive case

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 Uralic-style case system is an exception.)

Nouns and adjectives

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

Declension

Possessive suffixes

Verbs

Triggers

Derivation