Mjegun

General information
Mjegún /mj æ' ʁũ:/ is a semi-engineered artlang. While I intend for it to be usable and aesthetically pleasing, I am also using it to try out many experimental grammar forms. The phonology and phonotactics were inspired by Sanskrit and the Semitic languags, the alphabet was inspired by Nepalese, and the grammar was inspired by my own deviling purism when it comes to agglutination - I wanted the ability to use any noun root as a measure word or classifier, and the specific meaning root to be analogous to an adjective. I also began with a complex system for case-marking and relative clauses, we'll see how that turns out.

Phonology
In parentheses are the letter or digraph which represents the sound in standard romanization.

Vowels

 * Vowels with macrons are intended to represent any long form of that vowel. In reality, the vowel would either have an acute or grave accent, depending on pitch accent.

Alphabet
The letters with their romanizations are as follows:

Consonants
ʔ

p ph b m

t th d n

k kh g ng

s c h

Glides
j v l r

Vowels
a u e i

Finals
N Q

The alphabet is an abugida that functions similar to Nepalese. Images and descriptions of forms to come.

Phonotactics
Syllable structure is C(G)V. Dental consonants (t th d s) become palatal before j, i, or e. Unaspirated plosives (p b t d k g) become the corresponding fricatives intervocalically. /tl/ and /dl/ lenite to /tɫ/ or /ɫ/ and /dɮ/ or /ɮ/, respectively. Vowels may be short, which tend to have more central or lax pronunciations, or long. Long vowels either have high or low pitch accent, indicated by acute accent (é ) or grave accent (è ), respectively. High pitch accent has longer duration and high-flat pitch, similar to French stress, while low pitch accent has longer duration and low-falling pitch. Tone sandhi rules are as follows: épé>>epé, épè>>épe, èpé>>eppé, èpè>>eppè. There are no dipthongs in basic roots, though falling dipthongs may be created by assimilation when two vowels are adjacent. The final N becomes a nasal consonant when followed by another consonant, even across word boundaries, and occurs at the same place of articulation. Otherwise, it nasalizes the previous vowel. The final Q is a geminate seed. Before a consonant, it geminates that consonant. Between vowels, it is a glottal stop. Word-finally, it is not pronounced.



Nouns
Nouns are largely compounds, with a classifier head, comparable to a class marker in Swahili or a measure word in Mandarin or Malay, and a specific final. Any root may be made a classifier, though there are a handful of common classifiers.

Adjectives
Adjectives are take either the form of a nominal modifying affix, where doing so would not cause ambiguity or confusion and especially where it signified a semantic compound, or a stative verb, where the adjective cannot be unambiguously affixed to the noun or where a sense of distance or transitivity is desired.

gvimù - a blueberry

gví mùke - a fruit which is blue