Nauhi

Setting
Nauhi is spoken by the Nauhi gnomes who live in toadstool houses in the heart of a large forest in Chukotka Autonomous Ogruk, Northeast Siberia. Nauhi is supposed to be a harsh sounding language that sounds a bit like Arabic or Hebrew. The Nauhi gnomes have had little contact with other civilizations, and their language has had little influence from outside sources. It is also a language isolate, unrelated to any other language. As they live a fairly simple and primitive life, their language is a lot simpler than most human languages.

Phonology
Nauhi has a small phonemic inventory consisting of the following 3 vowels and 9 consonants (sounds in brackets are allophonic):

Diphthongs: /ai~ae/, /au~ao/.

Nauhi has a three-vowel system consisting of one high front vowel /i/, one high back rounded vowel /u/, and one low central vowel /a/. /i/ and /u/ become lowered to mid height before a uvular consonant, becoming [e] and [o] respectively. This lowering of /i/ and /u/ to [e] and [o] is indicated in the spelling system. The only contrastive feature of vowels in Nauhi is quality (features such as vowel length and nasality are not phonemically contrastive).

The consonant system in Nauhi is unusually small with only nine consonants, four of which are crosslingually uncommon. These include the uvular consonants /ɢ/ and /ʁ̞/, the alveolar approximant /ɹ/, and the lateral fricative /ɬ/. A large amount of allophonic variance is found within the consonant system. The voiceless consonants /p/, /t/, /k/, /ɬ/ and /h/ become voiced to [b], [d], [g], [l] and [ɦ] respectively when occurring between two vowels within a word, and /ɹ/ is realized as a flap [ɾ] in this environment. Note that the voiced allophone of /ɬ/ is an approximant [l] rather than a fricative. /n/ is the only phonemic nasal in the language. When occurring before non-alveolar plosive consonants, /n/ assimilates to the same place of articulation as the following consonant, becoming [m] before /p/, [ŋ] before /k/, and [ɴ] before /ɢ/.

Phonotactic constraints Nauhi words are subject to a number of strict phonotactic constraints. All words start in one of the following six consonants: /p/, /t/, /k/, /h/, /ɹ/, /ɬ/. Over 96% of words end in a vowel. The only consonant that can end a word is /ʁ̞/. Diphthongs occur in about 12% of words and are always found in stressed syllables. Clusters of two adjacent vowels pronounced separately occur in only 1-2% of words. Consonant clusters occur fairly frequently but are limited to a length of two consonants and are only found word-medially.

The phonotactic constraints and allophonic variance present in Nauhi has the effect of aiding in the segmentation of oral words, as a different set of consonant sounds always occurs at the beginning of a new word than the middle or end of an existing word. When a voiceless consonant sound or the sound /ɹ/ is heard after a vowel or after the consonant /ʁ̞/, it is the beginning of a new word. Elsewhere (when a voiced consonant sound other than /ɹ/ is heard, or when a voiceless consonant sound or /ɹ/ is heard next to a consonant sound other than /ʁ̞/), it is the middle or end of an existing word.

Word stress

Stress in Nauhi words is fairly weak and is also not phonemic. Stress is always predictable and falls on the penultimate syllable when the word has more than one syllable.

Root morphemes

There are 750 root morphemes in Nauhi. Due to this fairly small root vocabulary size, Nauhi relies heavily on the joining of root morphemes to form compound structures. When forming compounds, root morphemes are placed side by side and maintain their original form, rather than being agglutinated into a single longer word. Nauhi morphology is discussed in more depth in the grammar section of this page (please see below). Of the 750 root morphemes in Nauhi, 32 are monosyllabic, 625 are disyllabic, and 93 are trisyllabic. Nauhi root morphemes never exceed three syllables in length. The following word structures are found for Nauhi root morphemes (C = consonant, V = vowel, D = diphthong): Monosyllabic: CV(C), CD(C); Disyllabic: CVC(C)V(C), CD(C)CV(C); Trisyllabic: CVCVC(C)V(C), CVCDC(C)V(C), CVVC(C)V.

Orthography
Nauhi remained without any written form until the late 20th century. Since then it has been written using the latin script. The alphabet consists of the following 15 letters: a e h i k l m n o p q r t u x. The alphabet is entirely transparent and so it can be learnt quickly and easily. The table below shows each letter of the alphabet and its associated pronunciation(s). As can be seen, the letters 'h', 'k', 'l', 'p', 'r' and 't' each have two pronunciations, and 'n' has three. For the letters with two pronunciations, the second pronunciation listed in the table occurs when the letter is present between two vowels within a word, and the first pronunciation occurs elsewhere. For the letter 'n', the second pronunciation is found when preceding the letter 'k', the third is found when preceding the letter 'q', and the first is found elsewhere.

Basic Grammar
Nauhi is a nominative-accusative language with a strict Subject-Verb-Object word order. It is postpositional and predominantly left-branching. Adjectives appear before the nouns they modify in cases that the adjective and noun are linked together into a compound. Elsewhere adjectives appear after the nouns they modify. The indirect object precedes the verb.

Nauhi has a morphology that is almost entirely isolating, with very few cases of agglutinativity. To help compensate for this lack of agglutinativity, Nauhi relies heavily on the use of postpositions. In fact, every noun or pronoun that occurs is followed by a postposition that indicates its grammatical case. The same words can function either as nouns or as verbs in Nauhi, and the presence of the case-marking postpositions following nouns is an important way to distinguish the noun forms from the verb forms. A small number of words can function also as an adjective in addition to a noun or verb, and in these cases the adjectival form is distinguished by a postpositional adjective indicator. There are eight different parts of speech present in Nauhi; the noun, pronoun, verb, adjective, adverb, postposition, conjunction and interjection.

Nouns

Nouns is Nauhi are not marked by definite or indefinite articles, as no such articles exist in Nauhi. Neither is there any gender in Nauhi nouns. Plurality in nouns is indicated by the presence of a postpositional plural marker, which takes the same form for all nouns. As mentioned above, nouns are followed by postpositions indicating their grammatical case. The nominative and accusative cases each have two different postpositions depending upon whether the noun is animate or inanimate. The animate category does not only include humans and animals, but also living things that are not capable of thought, such as plants, trees and flowers. There are a total of 47 different grammatical cases that are conveyed by postpositions in Nauhi. The following is a complete list of these:

Adessive (e.g. near/at/by the building); apudessive (e.g. next to the building); inessive (e.g. inside the building); intrative (between the buildings); pertingent (touching the building); subessive (under the building); superessive I (on the building); superessive II (over the building); ablative (away from the building); initiative (beginning from the building); lative (to the building); terminative (as far as the building); perlative (through/along the road); prolative (via/ by way of the building); antessive (before the game); temporal (at eight o clock (only used for describing time)); accusative animate; accusative inanimate; instructive (by means of the building); instrumental (with/using the building); nominative animate; nominative inanimate; ablative (concerning the building); aversive I (avoiding the building); aversive II (fearful of the building); benefactive I (for the benefit of the building); benefactive II (for/intended for the building); causal (because of the building); comitative (with the building); dative animate (for the child); dative inanimate (for the building); distributive (per / for each building); genitive (of the building); posessive (belonging to the building); ornative (endowed/equipped with a building); partitive (three (of the) buildings); comparative (similar to the building); equative (comparable with the building); essive ((temporary state of being) as the building); excessive ((transition from a state) from being a child (is not a child any more)); identical (being the building); orientative (turned toward the building); revertive (backwards to/against the building); translative ((change from one form to another) turning into an adult); multiplicative ((number of times) six times); vocative ((used to adress someone) O father!); disjunctive ((used in isolation or other special situations) What is it? A building). Pronouns

Nauhi contains 1st, 2nd and 3rd person personal pronouns. The plural forms of personal pronouns are formed by the addition of the postposition indicating plurality. Personal pronouns in Nauhi are not affected by gender formality. Similarly to nouns, however, they are marked as either animate or inanimate when occurring in the nominative or accusative case. This also applies to non-personal pronouns. When a plural personal or non-personal pronoun in the nominative or accusative case refers to a mixture of animate and inanimate nouns, the animate form is always used. Pronouns in Nauhi are marked for grammatical case with the same set of postpositions that are used for nouns. In addition to the postpositions that mark grammatical case, postpositions indicating intensity, reflexivity, reciprocity and expletivity can mark personal pronouns.

Nauhi only contains one demonstrative pronoun that corresponds to the both the word ‘this’ and the word ‘that’ in English. A separate word does not occur for the plural form of this pronoun, but instead the plural postpositional marker is used. There are two relative pronouns corresponding to the English words ‘who/which/that’ and ‘whose’. There are also two interrogative pronouns in Nauhi corresponding to the words ‘who’ and ‘what’ respectively in the following English sentences: 1) Who is in the garden?; 2) What is his name?. Nauhi contains 19 different indefinite pronouns that are equivalent to the following English words: any; anybody/anyone; anything; each; either; enough; everyone/everybody; everything; little/few; more; most; much/many; one/you; other; plenty; somebody/someone; something; such; whatever. As with plural demonstrative pronouns, plural indefinite pronouns in Nauhi are indicated by the presence of the plural postpositional marker. Some English equivalents to plural indefinite pronouns in Nauhi are; both/all; others; they/people in general. Negative indefinite pronouns are indicated by a postposition that means ‘opposite of’ (e.g. ‘anybody’ + [opposite] = ‘nobody’, ‘more’ + [opposite] = less, ‘either’ + [opposite] = neither).