Adwan

Adwan, which shares the same name with its older predecessor, is the revival and renewal of a rediscovered conlang project that began somewhere around 2011.

Adwan has a highly inflectional morphology, falling somewhere between synthetic and agglutinative. Moreover, Adwan is particularly motivated by algebra and further intersections of linguistics and other formalized studies of structure. Adwan's syntax and morphology is motivated by categorial grammar theory and the theory of freely generated modules. One goal in Adwan is to develope a system for linguistic representation structurally similar to that of many natural languages, but with fundamentally different expressions.

Adwan exhibits large amounts of symmetry in seemingly unrelated aspects. Key features of Adwan include morphism-generated synthetic fusional inflection, the impersonal 4th person, satellite markers, a wide inventory of fricatives, and the complete lack of some verbs such as "to be", "to have", "to want/to want to", and "to go", instead expressed using compound forms and morphims on endings to express equivalent meanings. The existence of special morphisms aid in the formalisms behind the grammar, and are theoretically what students would be taught in schools when learning grammar.

Phonology

Adwan has C consonants and V vowels, along with U diphthongs including vowel nasalization in the form of concatenating a vowel with /ɰ̃/.

Orthography

Clearly there are more consonants than graphemes available from the alphabet, and so therefore the Adwan alphabet is defined as the set of graphemes from which any other sound can be written. As such, the alphabet is essentially the basis for the graphemes used to describe phonemes, and therefore shorter than the actual sound inventory of the language.

Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv Ww Yy

Consonants

The consonants 'g', 'h', and 'm' are used with other a finite amount of other consonants to form further graphemes that represent distinct sounds. Moreover, consonant sound realizations change based on position in the syllable. Therefore, a consonant typically varies depending on whether it lies in the onset of a syllable or the coda. Moreover, for the semivowel consonants representing the sounds /j/ and /w/ are represented by their vowel forms 'i' and 'w' when preceding a vowel and after a consonant, and by 'gh' and 'mh' otherwise, respectively. Consonants in the onset of a syllable are also denoted by the term 'initial' state, while those in the coda are said to be in the 'final' state.

grapheme	b	bh	c	ch	d	dg	dh	f	g	gh	h	hg	l	lh	m	mh	n	p	ph	r	rg	s	sg	t	tg	th	v
initial	b	β	k	x	d	dʒ	ð	f	g	j	h	ç	l	ɬ	m	w	n	p	φ	ɾ	ʐ	s	ʃ	t	tʃ	θ	v
final	--	β	k	x	d̪	dʒ	ð	f	γ	j	--	ç	l	ɬ	m	w	n	p	φ	ɾ	ʐ	s	ʃ	t̪	tʃ	θ	v

Notice that 'd', 'g', and 't' are the only consonants for which the pronunciation varies.

Vowels

There are a number of 7 non-nasal, non-diphthong vowels in Adwan.

Vowel	a	e	i	o	u	w	y
IPA	a	e	i	o	ø	u	ɪ

Furthermore, the following vowels can be "nasalized", in which a diphothong involving a nasal consonant is introduced. On introducing the nasal consonant, notice that the vowel pronunciation is also slightly changed.

Vowel	amg	emg	omg	umg	wmg	ymg
IPA	ɐɰ̃	ɛɰ̃	oɰ̃	œɰ̃	uɰ̃	ɨɰ̃

Morphology

Lexemes are given types, and are further distinguished amongst other lexeme types via different inflection paradigms. A lexeme typically consists of a root and an ending. A great deal of Adwan grammar may effectively be described using the correct operations of concatenation of strings (i.e., adding strings of letters to words) and vowel and consonant morphisms, in which parts of current endings are changed rather than having any new endings appended). Nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and determiners are declined according to four morphological cases and two numbers, while verbs are conjugated for person, number, tense, mood, aspect, and follow a pattern of conjugating pronouns in compound constructions. Nouns follow a relatively simple declension paradigm, while verb conjugations follow a more complex pattern of use. Adjectives have two separate declension paradigms and the distinction between the two paradigms plays a large role in further compound verb constructions. Furthermore, determiners share the same declension paradigm as verb participles used in certain constructions.

Nouns

While many roots themselves may seemingly describe nouns alone, there is no empty nominative case in Adwan, and therefore all dictionary form nouns end in 'a'. In particular, all nouns adhere to the same following paradigm.

Case	Singular	Plural
Nominative	-a	-amg
Accusative	-w	-y
Dative	-u	-omh
Genitive	-yn	-ynna

Other resources

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