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, through different processes 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 |
Phonotactics
Orthography
Grammar
Morphology
Nouns
Adjectives
Verbs
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.