Late Ma'nijr

Background

Late Ma'nijr is a highly endangered language spoken by the people of the Laechijmán region. It is a descendant of a dialect of Ancient American, called Ancient Appalachian American, aka Ancient Appalachian. "Laechijmán" comes from the Ancient Appalachian toponym, "Platchee Mou'inz" (Appalachian Mountains), and "Ma'nijr" from "Mou'neer" (Mountaineer). Prospects for the language's survival are dim, as the Ma'nijr are the only Terrran humans (approx. 900) who have survived the cataclysmic wars and ecological disasters of the 21st and 22nd Centuries, the "Rajwiw'", which means "The Great Disaster". Based on the last census data, the population will continue to decline without intervention, unless Her Majesty confers authority upon Her Viceroyalty Rimmūš aplu Tayyāhari to do so.

Based on surviving inscriptions and textual material uncovered by archaeological excavations, studies indicate that Late Ma'nijr has retained 60-70% of the lexicon of Ancient American. However, radical sound changes and syllable reductions have created words that are unrecognizable from their ancestral forms. Numerous homophones emerged in Middle Ma'nijr, which exerted pressure on the language to disambiguate these homophones. For example, through different processes the original Ancient American words big, fruit, and visit merged in Middle Ma'nijr into /vɪʔ/, represented orthographically in the Reformed Ma'nijr transcription system as <vih'>. In Late Ma'nijr, compounding and other derivational processes were applied to <vih'> to reduce the number of homophones, yielding <vimvih'> (big-and-big), <vi'aew>, <vyaew> (fruit-apple), and <givih'> (go-visit).

Phonology

Consonants

	Bilabial	Labio-dental	Dental	Alveolar	Post-alveolar	Retroflex	Palatal	Velar	Uvular	Pharyngeal	Epiglottal	Glottal
Nasal
Plosive
Fricative
Affricate
Approximant
Trill
Flap or tap
Lateral fric.
Lateral app.
Lateral flap

Vowels

	Front	Near-front	Central	Near-back	Back
Close
Near-close
Close-mid
Mid
Open-mid
Near-open
Open

Grammar

Syntax

Canonical word order in Ma'nijr is VSO. SVO word order is also common. The general order of constituents are as follows:

[NEG] [WH-word] Subject - Verb - Object - Indirect Object - Oblique [NEG] [INTERROG]

Modifiers precede their heads.