Adwan

Adwan is the label used to refer not only to the constructed language itself, but also to its evolution throughout time. Conceived in 2010, as an exercise to understand better the nuance behind foreign language morphologies, Adwan has evolved from a boilerplate language meant to facilitate the learning of natural languages, to an actively engineered personal language.

Adwan also forms the ancestor for the languages of Myrh, groups of people inhabiting land only accessible during random natural phenomena.

Phonology

Consonants

The consonants 'g', 'h', 'm' and 'n' are used with other a finite amount of other consonants to form further graphemes that represent distinct sounds. Moreover, consonant sound realizations change based on position in the syllable. Therefore, a consonant typically varies depending on whether it lies in the onset of a syllable or the coda. Moreover, for the semivowel consonants representing the sounds /j/ and /w/ are represented by their vowel forms 'i' and 'w' when preceding a vowel and after a consonant, and by 'gh' and 'mh' otherwise, respectively. When preceding 'g', the consonants 'm' and 'n' become nonsyllabic nasalized velar and palatal approximants /j̯̃/ and /ɰ̯̃/, respectively.

	Bilabial	Labio-dental	Dental	Alveolar	Retroflex	Palatal	Velar
Nasal	m			n
Plosive	p b			t d, tʲ dʲ			k g
Fricative	ɸ β	f v	θ ð	s	ʂ ʐ		x
Approximant						j	w
Flap or tap				ɾ
Lateral fric.				ɬ ɮ
Lateral app.				l

• Under gemination, /g/ undergoes lenition to /ɣ/ such that the segment /g.g/ -> /ɣː/, i.e., /gː/ does not occur.
• There exists phonemic distinction between pure alveolar plosives /t, d/ and palatalized alveolar plosives /tʲ, dʲ/. However, the palatalized forms /tʲ, dʲ/ may be realized as the alveolar affricates [t͡ʃ, d͡ʒ]

Vowels

There are a number of 7 non-nasal, non-diphthong vowels in Adwan.

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i		u
Near-close	ɪ	ʏ ~ ʊ
Close-mid	e		o
Open	a

Furthermore, the following vowels can be "nasalized", in which a diphothong involving a nasal consonant is introduced. On introducing the nasal consonant, notice that the vowel pronunciation is also slightly changed.

I		II
amg	ɐ̃ɰ̯̃	ang	æ̃j̯̃
emg	ɛ̃ɰ̯̃	eng	ɛ̃j̯̃
omg	õɰ̯̃	ong	õj̯̃
umg	œ̃ɰ̯̃	ung	œ̃j̯̃
wmg	ũɰ̯̃	wng	ũj̯̃
ymg	ɨ̃ɰ̯̃	yng	ɪj̯̃

Morphology

Lexemes are given types, and are further distinguished amongst other lexeme types via different inflection paradigms. A lexeme typically consists of a root and an ending. A great deal of Adwan grammar may effectively be described using the correct operations of concatenation of strings (i.e., adding strings of letters to words) and vowel and consonant morphisms, in which parts of current endings are changed rather than having any new endings appended). Nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and determiners are declined according to four morphological cases and two numbers, while verbs are conjugated for person, number, tense, mood, aspect, and follow a pattern of conjugating pronouns in compound constructions. Nouns follow a relatively simple declension paradigm, while verb conjugations follow a more complex pattern of use. Adjectives have two separate declension paradigms and the distinction between the two paradigms plays a large role in further compound verb constructions. Furthermore, determiners share the same declension paradigm as verb participles used in certain constructions.

Nouns

Noun cases.

Case	Singular	Plural
Nominative	-a	-amg
Accusative	-w	-emg
Genitive	-y	-ing
Instrumental	-o	-yng
Dative	-u	-ung
Locative	-o	-oa
Ablative	-wy	-i
Oblique	-oe	-omh

Verbs

Verbs are perhaps the most heavily used part of speech in the Adwan language as a whole, and aside from a few crucial inflections, follow a relatively simple agglutivative structure. Verbs all end in the same infinitive ending of -an. In finite forms, verbs are inflected according to person and number (these inflections are simultaneously structurally distinct but not phonemically separable), tense (where the present tense indicative, the marker is null), mood (indicative vs conditional vs subjunctive), and aspect (perfective vs imperfective). Verbs have a large inventory of constructions, and are thus divided into simple constructions, consisting of verb conjugations acting on the same stem as the verb, and into compound constructions, which are the verbal forms associated with certain morphisms. Verb endings are given in pairs of the form a/b, where a = imperfective aspect, b = perfective aspect.

The vowel morphisms on verbs determines which combinations of vowels determine which grammatical meaning. In our case, we can view vowel morphisms as permutations of vowel phonemes, denoted by an asterisk. So if 'u' were to get mapped to the vowel 'e', then we would write u* = e. Below is a table of the vowel morphism used.

vowel (U)	new vowel (U*)	identity
a	o	a* = o
e	y	e* = y
i	i	i* = i
o	w	o* = w
u	e	u* = e
w	a	w* = a
y	u	y * = u

Realis

Present

Person	Singular	Plural
1	-um/em	-amg/omg
2	-et/yt	-utg/etg
3	-yr/ur	-erg/yrg
4	-ys/us	-eth/yth

Past

Notice that the past tense is formed by inserting a variable infix after the root of the verb but before the personal endings.

Person	Singular	Plural
1	-eghum/yghem	-ocamg/wcomg
2	-yghet/ughyt	-ecutg/ycetg
3	-ughyr/eghur	-ycerg/ucyrg
4	-ughys/eghus	-yceth/ucyth

Other resources

[[Category:Template:Adwan]]