Cheunco

Cheoincai language is the mother tongue of Cheoincai people in Cheoinca. Due to its abugida writing system, I (probably) won't publish pictures nor font files of Cheoincai script. I can say that it's influenced by Gujarati script (headless Devanagari).

I'm pretty busy right now, so I would update this page in a slow pace.

Consonants
Below is a table showing all phonemes of Cheoincai. Suggested by this table, Cheoincai makes a three-way distinction of plosives: aspirated, unaspirated voiceless, and aspirated voiced.

Vowels
There are only 5 phonemes in Cheoincai and no vowel o. The only rounded vowel is eo.

Syllable Structure
Syllables in Cheoincai are simple and can be denoted as (C)V(N) where N is the only nasal onset -n. The letter nga at the beginning of a word refers to the absence of initial.

Mora
The most basic unit of timing of Cheoincai is mora. Each mora contains a vowel. In the case of long vowels, diphthongs, and the presence of the only onset -n, there are two morae. Syllables in Cheoincai can have at most three morae.
 * Monomoraic: a, e, i, u, eo
 * Bimoraic: aa, ee, ii, uu, eoo, ai, eoi, au, ei, ia, an, en, in, un, eon
 * Trimoraic: ain, eoin, aun, ein, ian (long vowels can not receive the onset.)

Pitch Accent
Since Cheoincai is mora-timing, only one mora in a word can be accented. This mechanism resembles Ancient Greek rather than Japanese. In orthagraphy, the accent is not marked, but the romanization adopted acute (á) to indicate the accented vowel.

One of both morae in bimoraic syllable can be accented, which causes pitch contour (rising or falling). However, the nasal mora -n can never be accented. Pitch accent is crucial in Cheoincai because it can be used to refer to different grammatic roles of a word. For example, both masculine nominative and vocative of eo-stem nouns receive accent on their last mora (-eoón), but accusative on the penult mora (-eóon).

Different Stems
There are three main groups of nouns, according to their ending of nominative form: eo-stem, a-stem, and n-stem. Among all n-stem nouns bears strong irregularity.

Cases
There are totally 8 cases in Cheoincai: nominative, vocative, accusative, dative, ablative, instrumental, locative, and genetive. This case system resembles Sanskrit (huh).

Nominative are used in circumstances where the noun is the object of the verb or something that equals to the object (connected by copula). Whereas accusative indicates the subject of verbs.

Dative, ablative, and instrumental are often regarded as indirect arguments of a verb and receive the same ending in dual form. They can only precede some particular postpositions.

Genetive and locative have their own wide usages. We'll talk about that later.

Genders
Most (inanimate) nouns in Cheoincai are neuter, while animate nouns can be either masculine or feminine, hence 3 genders at total. There are also suffixes that can convert nouns to another gender.

Eo-stem
Eo-stem nouns are the most common group of nouns in Cheoincai. Nouns in this group has richer reflection than in other groups.

Eo-stem neuter =


 * -|Eo-stem masculine =


 * -|Eo-stem feminine =

A-stem
A-stem nouns are somehow simplified and some inflection is longer than eo-stem. Most a-stem nouns are feminine, but there are also some neuter nouns. Most place names are a-stem, for example, róndona (London) and phári (Paris).

A-stem neuter =
 * -|A-stem feminine =

Suffix
Nouns in genetive or instrumental are often followed by suffixes. Here's some common ones:

-yeo(n)(o)
This suffix refers to the diminutive form of the original word while preserving its gender. The ending suggests that all diminutive nouns in Cheoincai are eo-stem. For example:
 * ghabeo ("mountain") → ghabiyeo ("small mountain")
 * yonta ("girl") → yontaiyeo ("small, girl, baby girl, bitch, slut")