Ash

Ahgo
ahgoa
Pronunciation	[[Help:IPA|ˈʔɑħˌk̠ɔ̯ɑː]]
Created by	Ava Skoog
Language family	? Ahgo

Introduction

Ahgo (ahgoa, lit. "seaspeak", pronounced [ˈʔɑħˌk̠ɔ̯ɑː]) is the anglicised name of a language mostly spoken around coastal areas, notably the town of Ahba. Its speakers are familiar with technological advancements such as nautical vessels and steam locomotives.

The language is mildly synthetic to polysynthetic, largely based around agglutination with fusional elements. There is a great focus on verbs, nominals being mostly uninflected, and significant pro-drop tendencies and a general focus around deixis rather than pronominal distinctions. The word order is heavily SOV.

Phonology

Phonemes

The underlying sounds of Ahgo are few enough that a simple listing is preferable to a traditional table:

Vocalic	/a~Ø i~j~Ø u~w~Ø/
Plosive	/p~β t~ð k~ɣ/
Affricate	/t͡ɬ~ɬ t͡s~s/
Fricative	/h~ʔ/
Nasal	/m~˜ n~˜ ŋ~˜/

The reasoning for this rather unusual classification is down to phonotactic patterning: these five groups all behave somewhat differently and serve as a more useful distinction than point of articulation when describing the phonology of Ahgo. The pair or triplet given for each phoneme refers an important feature of the language which is the alternation between various allophonic realisations despite the relatively low number of underlying sounds, making the variation richer on the surface.

Romanisation

The romanisation strikes a balance between representing phonemes versus surface realisations and uses the following seventeen letters:

a

ã

e

ẽ

y

o

õ

w

b

d

g

s

l

h

m

n

ŋ

An example of a word with its archiphonemic, phonemic and surface transcriptions as well as romansiation:

//ˈwat.ha.ku//

→ /ˈwah.taˌku/

→ [ˈʔɔ̯ɑħ.t̠ɐˌɣʊ]

→ oahdago "during the day"

Morphology

With regards to syntactic patterning, only three significant word classes can be posited: verbs, nominals and adverbials. Nonetheless there is a degree of mobility between the three.

Verbs

The bulk of all inflection goes on verbs, making them morphemic anchors fundamental to almost any utterance in the language. The general verb template looks as follows:

				Stem
Deixis	Trans./Poss.	Preverb	Incorp.	Class.	Root	Der.	State	Mood/Nom.	Adv.	Enclitics

The nominalisation slot creates a deverbal nominal and the adverbialisation slot creates and adverbial and so serve to change the class of the word; the possession slot is only used on deverbal nouns and not on regular verbs.

Nominals

Nominals are mostly unmarked and the main kind of affixation, while resembling case marking, results in adverbialisation, thus changing the class of the word. Nominals can also be marked for possession.

Adverbials

Adverbials are used to denote a place, time or manner. They sometimes resemble case marking or conjunctions more than traditional adverbs, but serve that role as well.