Brung

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Brung is a Khoisan language isolate spoken in Lõis's South Africa and Namibia.

Phonology

Orthography

Consonants

prevoiced stops spelled dt, bp, gk?

Brung consonants
Labial Alveolar Palatal Velar Uvular Glottal
Click voiceless /kʘ/, k! /k!/, /kǀ/, /ɡǁ/, /kǂ/
voiced /ŋʘ~ɡʘ/, g! /ŋ!~ɡ!/, /ŋǀ~ɡǀ/, /ɡǁ/, /ŋǂ~ɡǂ/
Nasal m /m/ n /n/ ng /ŋ/
Plosive voiceless p /p/ t /t/ k, ck /k/ /ʔ-/
voiced b /b/ d /d/ g /ɡ/
Fricative voiceless f /f/ ß /s/, ßch /ʃ/ ch /ç/ ch [χ] h /h/
voiced w /v/ s /z/, sch /ʒ/
Affricate pf /pf/, bw /bv/ z, tz /ts/ kch /kx/
Tap r /ɾ/
Approximant l /l/ j /j/

Vowels

Lifted from Finnish.

Brung has vowel harmony where front and back vowels can't be in the same word; in addition, there's also click harmony where words that have front vowels can have palatal clicks but not alveolar clicks, which pattern with back vowels. Bilabial, dental and lateral clicks are considered neutral.

Prosody

Prosody and other suprasegmentals are very similar to Standard German.

Phonotactics

Morphophonology

Morphology

Nouns in Brung have three grammatical genders as in German and Nama.

There are four grammatical cases: nominative, accusative, genitive/prepositional and ablative, the last functioning as a partitive and a dechticaetiative.

Nominal morphology is marked entirely on the article/determiner. Determiners depend on specificity, deixis, gender, number, case, and honorifics.

Syntax

Constituent order

Noun phrase

Verb phrase

Sentence phrase

Dependent clauses

Example texts

Other resources