Rówok: Difference between revisions

Nominal/verbal roots in Rowok are overwhelmingly triglyphs, with /a/ being the only vowel that can occur either initially in a root, or medially.

All roots have an underlying "theme vowel" for lack of a better term in my attempt at vowel harmony, either /a/ or /o/, which shift to /e/ and /u/ in perfect verbal stems and many nouns derived from verbal stems. Additionally words with /w/ in any position have some stems where /w/ is reduced to [u]. The rules are simple for the majority of stems, and are as follows:

If /a/ appears in the root (by law only initially or medially), the theme vowel is automatically /a/. If the root is tri-consonantal and does not contain /w/, the theme vowel is also /a/. As a note, roots with medial /a/ are almost exclusively (specific) plants, and thus lack verbal roots, and thus have only two principal parts: nom/erg/voc, and oblique.

If /w/ appears medially or finally in a root, the theme vowel is /o/.

Exceptions:

There are some rare, quad-consonantal roots. These are always of the the form C*XCC, where C* can only be /b/, /p/, /d/, /t/, /g/, /k/, /z/ and /s/, and X can be /w/, /l/, or /r/; ones with /w/ have /o/ as the theme vowel, and those with /l/ or /r/ have /a/.

Roots with initial /w/ are very old stems and anything goes as far as theme vowels; this is the only word type whose vowel structure isn’t deducible from the form of the root and just need to be learned.

Which brings us to what I guess we could call principal parts; roots are listed in order of:

Verbal stems tend to group in (C)VCC and participial stems in (C)V(C)C; nominative/ergative stems tend to be CVCVC, and oblique nominal stems CCVC if allowed by phonotactics (which I will have to elaborate on in a new post as a supplement to the first post on phonology). Unstressed epenthetics are inserted where needed, giving possible ^VCC(C/V) instead of expected CC(C/V), or CVCVC instead of expected CCVC.

Examples, starting with theme vowel [a]:

medial /a/:  

pan - moss; pan, pna-

Triconsonantal roots with no /w/ and those with medial /w/ are the easiest. Both are very regular in their pattern.

With medial liquid:  

non-liquid medial:

*if the reduplicated consonant cannot fricativize, it reduces so ppas=>pas (since /f/ is lacking in the inventory).

There are variations if the initial or medial consonant is /y/, where /y/=>/i/:

Roots with initial /a/:  

Now examples where /o/ is the theme vowel, starting with medial /w/:

final /w/:

A similar variation as above when a final /w/ root begins with /y/:

Cw/r/lCC:

The occasional initial /w/, some a-stems, some o-stems, lots of /u/ even in imperfect stems and even in words that otherwise have /a/ as their theme vowel:

====Diminutives and augmentatives====

Diminutives are formed by changing the root’s rightmost possible consonant into its corresponding fricative or affricate according to the chart below. X indicates that the phoneme does not have a possible fricativized variant, e.g. p=>X, since <f> is lacking in Rówok. In this event the next rightmost consonant is fricativized.  

=====Augmentatives=====

The most common are:

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==Syntax==

===Constituent order===

===Noun phrase===

===Verb phrase===