Katäfalsen: Difference between revisions

'''Katafalsen''' (pronunciation: {{IPA|[ˈkɑtɑfɑlsɛn]}}) is an apriori language, which is partially inspired by Basque, Hebrew and Latin. The aim was to construct a language with simple phonology along with unorthodox grammar and syntax. Katafalsen is highly synthetic and features a free word order and ergative-absolutive alignment.

The consonant phonemes of Modern Katafalsen are as follows:

The vowel inventory of Katafalsen is quite symmetrical as there are each three front, back, rounded and unrounded vowels.

The Latin alphabet used for Katafalsen therefore contains the following letters.

The syllable structure in Katafalsen is KV(K), where K denotes a consonant and V a vowel. The syllable onset is also allowed to be a glottal stop {{IPA|/ʔ/}} but only intervocalically in hiatus and word initially, i.e. after a break. This is not represented in the orthography.

Metathesis occurs in Katafalsen when a suffix beginning with a consonant is added to a word. If the word ends with a vowel or diphthong, the morphemes are simply concatenated. The suffix ''-n'', which creates female forms, is used for examples here.

Old Katafalsen had the additional phoneme {{IPA|/ħ/}}, which has disappeared in Modern Katafalsen but has left still observable effects. We already know that the sequences {{IPA|/ɑj/}}, {{IPA|/ɑw/}}, {{IPA|/ɑːj/}} and {{IPA|/ɑːw/}} yield diphthongs. Moreover, whenever one of the phonemes {{IPA|/j/}}, {{IPA|/w/}} and {{IPA|/ħ/}} are syllable codae, they melt into the preceding vowel and cause the mutations summarised in the following table:

=== Sound changes from Old Katafalsen ===

A lot of the complexity of Katafalsen arises out of the sound changes from Old to Modern Katafalsen. So it is reasonable to consider these before occupying oneself with morphological processes in Modern Katafalsen. In the following, we shall leave the exact pronunciations out of consideration.

Old Katafalsen had six vowel phonemes: {{IPA|/ɑ, i, u, ɑː, iː, uː/}}. The consonant inventory was very similar to Modern Katafalsen but had two additional phonemes {{IPA|/ħ/}} and {{IPA|/ʔ/}}. In contrast to Modern Katafalsen, the syllable structure was KV(K), i.e. onsets were mandatory. Due to previous loss of word final vowels, words always had to end with a consonant, the only exception being word final {{IPA|/ɑ/}}.