Aoma: Difference between revisions

'''Aoma''' (''Auma'' or ''Bowombor'' Speaking of Ours) is a priori language created for the fantasy world Grundet by [[User:Juhhmi|juhhmi]].  

'''Lore''': Aoma and [[Rinap]] form the main languages of South-West-Herookuan family deriving from the ancestral [[Rinapri]]. Aoma is the official spoken and governmental language of Eastern Sceptre with around 15 million speakers, but it has not much to do with the languages of Western Sceptre. Word ''Aoma'' seems to come from the name of eastern area with coast temples, Kaomaago (''Kaa Omaike Hakoror'', At the Coast of Temples). The language presented here has been stitched together from various very different dialects to unify peoples of the empire so no "true Aoma" has ever existed.

'''Actual''': After Rinap I wanted something with less k-letters and difficult diphthongs, and I had already set my old script originally for Finnish as the script of this future language. This gave birth to a project randomly named Aoma - the story came later.  

'''Problems''': According to my lore history, Aoma and Rinap must have begun their separation at least 3500 years ago. Since I weren't thorough enough to create Rinapri, there is some inconsistency between the languages, especially with phonetic change and vocabulary - I was unable to achieve a realistic linguistic relationship (very similar to Romance languages deriving from Latin and slightly to the history of Finnish and Sami languages), and hence coined up the facts that both languages were mere compilations of different dialects (inspired by the birth of standard Finnish here as well). And Rinapri probably never would have been truly consistent as a spoken language as it was spread to a vast region.

Aoma is a Verb-Subject-Object, agglutinative-fusional language with strong head-initiality (right-branching). The language has two numbers, three persons, four genders and five (or seven) cases with nominative-accusative alignment. Very important to the speakers and the society is the formal register with polite forms of second person pronouns, honorifics and anti-honorifics.

In spoken language, consonants (especially nasals) are somewhat liable to external sandhi between word boundaries so that they move towards the pronunciation of following consonant: ''Tolan kush'' [to'laŋ‿kʊʃ] (I see that). More formal registers require "clear sounds", which basically means adding stops in between words thus creating a special rhytm.

* Occurring at the end of words (DAT case) with varying pronounciation:  

There is a glottal stop grapheme (') used for separating vowels. It is used especially with /i/, /æ/ and /œ/ which are written over preceding graphemes in some of the older writing systems (perhaps deriving from front vowel distinction diacritics over /e/). It should be noted that allophones of ''i'' are consired rather weak and may or may not be included in written language, often as mere diacritic grapheme.

As an agglutinative language Aoma can have many morphemes per word, and its inflections are quite regular.

On top of the five basic [[Aoma#Cases|cases]], Aoma has got two partial cases, locative and temporal, often considered as clitics since they are used with verb infinites as well.

Most nouns of any of the four gender have regular plural forms. If a noun happens to be plurale tantum, gender-agreeing ''josh*'' (many) can be used to indicate a larger amount: ''kevol'' (empire) → ''kevol joshol'' (many empires).

Using genitive or dative cases is the most usual way of creating compound words, but they can be joined together as well. The strong right-branching of Aoma is visible in the compounds in such manner that, when words are joined together, the head noun stays on the left while modifiers and the origin-suffix ''s*'' with correct head gender succeed it.