Late Ma'nijr

From Linguifex
Revision as of 01:45, 26 December 2014 by Anyar (talk | contribs) (→‎Background)
Jump to navigation Jump to search


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.