Aoma

Aoma together with Rinap form the main languages of Herookuan family deriving from the ancestral Rinapri. Though Aoma is spoken in Eastern Sceptre it has not much to do with the languages of Western Sceptre.

Phonology

Very similar to Rinapian ones

Consonants

	Bilabial	Labio-dental	Dental	Alveolar	Post-alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Uvular	Glottal
Nasal	m			n			ŋ
Plosive	p b			t d			k g		ʔ
Fricative		f v	θ ð	z s	ʃ ʒ		x		h
Approximant				ɹ		j
Trill				r
Lateral app.				l

Consonants k, l, m, n, p, ɹ, r, s and t all have a geminated version which are mostly found in two-syllable verb infinite forms. The double-consonants have special marks in written Mihkanor so glottal stop is indicated by writing the consonants separately. Notice: pp [p:ʰ], tt [tθ]

Vowels

	Front	Back
Close	i y	u
Near-Close	ɪ	ʊ
Close-Mid	e ø	o
Open-mid	ɛ œ	ʌ ɔ
Near-open	æ
Open	a	ɑ

Similarly to consonants, vowels have geminated forms marked with special graphemes so that glottal stop is indicated by writing the short graphemes separately. Since i, æ and œ are often written over preceding consonants, there is a special glottal stop grapheme for them. There are also graphemes for vowel combinations occurring at the end of words but their pronounciation varies: aee [aɛ:]/[æeˑ], oee [oe:]/[œɛˑ] and uee [wɛ:]/[ʊe:].

Orthography

Aoma has a hand-written script developed in Eastern Sceptre from the Eastern Temple Marks of third era. Shinesharers, spreaders of the religion of Light, took the original marks to north where they were developed into Northern script (our Latin). Highly decorational Jauhmø script originates to fifth era, but is still in use mainly for formal documentation.

Basics

Aoma is a Verb-Subject-Object language with strong head-initiality (right-branching). The language has two numbers, three persons, four genders and five 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.

Verbs

Verbs are conjugated according to person, number, tense, aspect, mood which are indicated by suffixes, prefixes and reduplication.

There are three conjugations:

• vowel-ending (a/o and e)
• consonant-ending (m and tes/kes/hes)
• irregular which do show characteristics of either first or second conjugation

Conjugation Table

Nouns

Noun declension according to two numbers and five cases correlates with the four noun classes which are indicated by the last vowel:

• divine a
• masculine y
• feminine u
• neuter i.

The declension is shown with suffixes added to the stem gotten by removing the nominative vowel ending.

Declension Table

nominative, accusative, prepositional, dative and genitive

Special cases: divine time noun group with temporal cases; some locative forms

Adjectives

Many adjectives are formed from nouns simply by adding e to the genitive case. This is sometimes called the adjective case or adjective form of a noun.

Adjective Declension

Always the same.?

Prepositions

In Aoma, fusional prepositions also convey the word gender and definiteness through vowel change. Same prepositional stems have different ending consonants which give new meanings together with the case of the following word. k- a/u/y - /k/s + prep/gen/prep = at/into/from

Derivational Morphology

Aoma uses suffixes, gemination and apophony to create new words from existing ones. Same noun stems often occur in all four classes. Most important are the eight elemental nouns:

• (divine noun, verb, (secondary verb,) masculine, feminine, neuter, adjective form, colour form)
• gesha [gɛʃa] (life), gesse (live), geshy (brain), geshu (heart), geshi (nature), geshare (lively, active), geshari (yellow)
• tösha (death), tösse (die), töshy (soldier), töshu (disease), töshi (war), töshare (still, silent), töshari (purple)

Numerals

Numbers use nowadays decimal system, but were originally of base twelve also known as dozenal even though there was a special mark for twelve. Some numerologists have proposed that six was the ancient base just like in Rinap, while others say it was eight, the number of all elements when they separated light and darkness from life and death in favour of Lightlisteners' beliefs. To my mind, six is the true base of our universe and must have been the original. Use of eight came later from coastal peoples of Sceptre.