Late Ma'nijr

Background

Late Ma'nijr has retained 60-70% of its English ancestor, but radical sound changes and syllable reductions created words that were unrecognizable from their original forms. Numerous homophones emerged, which exerted pressure on the language to disambiguate these homophones. For example, the original American English words big, fruit, and visit merged in Middle Ma'nijr into /vɪʔ/, represented orthographically in the Reformed Harless-Colter 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> (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.