Rumon

General information
Rumon split from Classic Latin, earlier than other romance languages. Because of that, it developed a phonology capable of retaining all Latin cases, but anyway the dative and genitive were replaced by innovations.

Consonants
Geminated consonants were lost except for voiceless fricatives and the rhotic. Unlike in other modern romance languages, the initial consonant can be either simple or geminated, as initial /r/ lost its geminated nature early in Rumon history, /f/ and /s/ followed. Soon after, initial st became geminated and the loss of weak syllable vowels retained their existance due to geminated consonants. In modern Rumon, these consonants are not actually geminated but still distinct from their simple forms.

Consonants
/s/, /z/ and /ɾ/ are retracted to [s̠], [z̠] and [ɾ̠].

[j] is an allophone of an unstressed /i/ close to another vowel. And [w] of /u/.

Palatal consonants [ɲ] and [ʎ] are considered allophones of /n/ and /l/ before /i/ or /j/.

Vowels
/a/ is ~[ä].

/e/ is [e̞]~[ε].

/o/ is [o̞]~[ɔ].

/i/ and /u/ are [ɪ] and [ʊ] when unstressed except immediately before the stressed syllable.

/e/ is [ə] when unstressed.

All vowels can be nasalized. Nasal vowels are distinct phonemes and often make pairs, notably as verbs.

Alphabet
Nasal vowels are represented with a tilde, /s/ with the digraph ss and the alveolar trill with the digraph rr. They are not considered separated letters.

The acute accent indicates last syllable stress when necessary and anywhere else to distinguish pairs. The basic rules are, the stress goes to the penultimate syllable, except when this syllable has an /e/ rhyme with no coda, in this case, it can be either unstressed and having its vowel lost or stressed and having the /e/. This is only marked to distinguish pairs and is sometimes predictable (for example, a middle syllable starting with a stop and followed by a syllable starting with a liquid will always be stressed). The stress is final when a word ends on a nasal and a coda or two consonants as coda. When a word has such ending but the stress isn't final, the acute is used.

Nouns
There are three cases: Nominative, Accusative and Ablative. A typical masculine noun has an -s ending, usually after a consonant. Feminine nouns have an -e ending and neuter nouns can have a -u or -ũ ending but often have no ending at all, instead having a nasalized stem for nominative. There are exceptions, for example, the word mãs is feminine having a masculine ending.

Adjectives
As the same masculine and neuter nominative endings often have different possible declination patterns (for instance, -õs can have -oni, -omi or -onis as plural), the dictionary will list the feminine form of the adjective, for that never happens to them.

Verbs
Most conjugations were retained, but Rumon lost the future tense, passive voice and imperative mood. This is an example of a regular verb:

Stem changing is very important in Rumon. Often a Latin verb would not change the stem in Perfective and Plurperfect, mostly for being lost due to phonology simplification, but when that happens, the suffix -ov being added to the stem, as it happened in verbs that added -u, which was lost, in Latin, and some verbs that add a lost preffix. This is often what distinguishes some indicative verb tenses, such as vede (sees) and vide (saw), vive (lives) and visse (lived), etc..

Orders are expressed with the subjunctive. If you wanted to say "Look!" to many people, you would say "specots!"

The verb "to be" is an example of an irregular verb:

Rumon is a pro-drop language, but the pronoun is not dropped for the subjunctive case, only for giving orders.

Predicative phrases
Many expressions in Rumon are predicative phrases that don't have an expressed subject or verb. This is often used for climate, as nominative neuter adjectives, but there are other situations when this can happen. When an adverb is used, it is placed after the predicative.


 * Nevũs odi: It is snowing today.