Arugabar

Arugabar is an isolate spoken in Tricin. It is a Sino-Caucasian language.

Phonology

Arugabar has five vowel sounds: a e i o u, as in Spanish, and no contrastive vowel length in the standard language. Earlier versions of Arugabar and some dialects have contrastive vowel length, written with a circumflex accent.

Consonants are as follows:

p b sp t d st z j c/qu g/gu sc/squ tu du stu zu cu gü scu f /p b pʰ t d tʰ θ x k g kʰ tʷ dʷ tʷʰ θʷ kʷ gʷ kʷʰ f/

Furthermore, b d g have allophones as in Korean, like sp st sc with low tone at the start of words, as in dari "mountain", and like fricatives otherwise, as in algabán "bag".

m n l r s y /m n l ɾ s~sʰ~h ʃ/

Stress

Arugabar stress is consistently on the second-to-last mora. Dialects that lost vowel length have turned it into contrastive stress, as in lazacra "he watches" vs lazacrá "cupboard". Furthermore, loanwords in Arugabar can have prepenultimate stress, as in the name of the statesman and author Amilcar Álava.

Phonotactics

Arugabar phonotactics are a lot like Spanish.

Grammar

Arugabar is a borderline polysynthetic analytic language.

Nouns

Nouns in Arugabar come in three states: indefinite, definite and construct. The definite prefix is always a- or ab-. The construct state includes possessive prefixes: