Hwnic

Todo: Structure the page appropriately, make an infobox and add categories. See Balkan as an example.

Hwnic
isloxvn
Created by	SN2rname
Date	2024
Language family	language isolate Hwnic

Hwnic is an a priori semi-naturalistic agglutinative language. It attempts to broadly delineate what natural languages might look like in the future, influenced by sources as diverse as Internet slang, mathematical notations, and programming languages.

Overview

The phonology of Hwnic is mostly unremarkable. Hwnic is a pitch-accent language, and it has 5 vowels, 3 nasals, 7 plosives, 6 fricatives, 1 phonemic affricate, and 3 liquids. The continuants may be syllabic. Syllable structure is (C)(C)V(C)(C), with most word roots taking the form of C(C)V. Connected speech is subject to a set of more complex rules involving use of non-modal phonation.

Hwnic is written with the Latin alphabet. For most consonants, there is a one-to-one correspondence of sound to spelling. For vowels, however, spelling rules are more varied. Some particles also have unexpected pronunciations. Therefore Hwnic orthography is not entirely phonetic. The first letter of the first word in a sentence is capitalized, but native Hwnic names of people and places are not capitalized. Unfamiliar loanwords and technical jargon are in title case. Acronyms and proper nouns retain their capitalization as in the source language. Hwnic can be written with no punctuations other than spaces, where particles and capitalization are employed to denote quotation, change of topic, intonation, and so on; however, an English-like pattern of punctuation is also possible.

The grammar of Hwnic is mostly simple and straightforward. Word order is SOV, but sentences may show up as OV due to pro-drop. Nouns are not declined, but may take affixes that denote number, negation, state, or property. Verbs are conjugated to person, number, and sometimes mood; an auxiliary verb can show tense, aspect, and animacy/volition.

The lexicon of Hwnic is based on concrete concepts. Simple concepts like body parts are covered in a single word, while complex concepts like types of animals may have a two-name system. The lexicon is currently incomplete.

Morphology

Numerals

Hwnic uses Arabic numerals. Previously the numbers 5, 6, 7 and 9 were made up by other numbers, but their names were shortened as inspired by East Asian counting systems.

The basic numerals are:

Number        0   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9
Pronunciation kul xa  vu  bim ces gis os  it  cu  den

Higher numerals are compound words, formed with a special prefix at the beginning, followed by an enumeration of the digits. Which prefix to use depends on how many digits the number has:

Number of digits 2     3     4     5     6     7     8     9
Prefix           xoq   xem   rea   ran   osugo itugo cuugo denugo

For numbers between 6 and 9 digits, the prefix may be replaced with pon, from English "phone", indicating the number is similar in form to a phone number.

For numbers with 10 digits or more, a scientific-notation-like system is used.

577 014, osugogisititleikulxaces

As a suffix, 0 is reduced to -ul before a consonant, 2 is reduced to -u, 3 and 9 display nasal concord.

1/2 leci OR xalecipu; 3/4 binlecipces; where leci means "part" and the word means "three out of four parts", and thus both are cardinals.

Expressing grouping with to "multiplied by": xoqavu means 12 in no particular arrangement, bintoces means 3x4 arrangement, vutoos means 2x6 arrangement. The smaller number goes first.

To say 1x12 or 12 objects filed in one row, it would not be *xatoxoqavu, but rather with a collective suffix. A row of 12 apples (oqul) would be xoqavu oqulil. To say 12 rows each with 12 apples, it would be xoqavutoxoqavu oqulix ("12-by-12 apple matrix")!

Example text

Rpadpa eqo seiqomiis nr eudnox nr cnosulil ln Qs u kiniup rambor ust velo qanan qamif fisnur lui Andacikat rt u Telvisn mxar ust u mncibok bimir

[My] grandfather has a farm in the countryside near a river. He grows vegetables and keeps geese and ducks. In [his] spare time, he watches the television and chats with [his] neighbors.

Glossing

Rpadpa eqo seiqomiis nr eudnox nr cnosulil ln
grandfather DAT-PRON.3SG farm.SING LOC countryside LOC vicinity-river be.3N

Qs u kiniup rambor ust velo qanan qamif fisnur lui
[-] ACC category-vegetables grow.3SG and ACC-and geese duck herd.3SG PRES.CONT

Andacikat rt u Telvisn mxar ust u mncibok bimir
time-leisure TEM ACC television watch.3SG and ACC neighbors chat_with.3SG

Notes

• LOC, ACC, DAT all refer to particles.
• Hwnic is head-final. The broadest category comes first and the most specific comes last. This order applies to qualifier sequences, compound words, and more.
• Nouns are not declined, but a particle may fuse with certain pronouns and other particles.
• Most nouns are by default plural, and the suffix -is makes a noun singular.
• There is only one locative particle, nr. To express "near somewhere", for instance, it would be nr cnos[somewhere], where cnos means "vicinity" by itself. Similarly, there is only one temporal particle, rt.
  • Justification for this design choice (and others below) will be presented later.
• Qs is a particle that only indicates the start of a sentence where the subject pronoun is dropped.
• The "and ACC-and": the former is a conjunction that forms the parallel structure; the latter marks a list of items, in the form of "and X Y Z ..." until the next verb or particle.
  • The latter "and", elo, is further fused with the accusative particle u, and here it means the accusative particle applies to each item in the list.
• The tense-aspect auxiliary verb is flexible: it can govern a full sentence, as shown here, or apply only to the one verb before it.
• A single concept corresponds to a single word, which is common in agglutinative languages. In this example, "chat with" corresponds to bimi and "spare time" corresponds to andacikat, both single words.