Abrugoan

Consonants
Notes: 1. [ŋˀ] is an allophone of /nˀ/ after velar consonants.

The Abrugoan consonant inventory is fairly large, having 36 phonemically contrastive consonants - 11 plosives, 7 nasals, 8 fricatives, 3 trills, and 9 approximants. However, many consonants occur less frequently than others. As one might expect, those consonants with voiceless or plain (modal voiced) phonations appear far more pervasively than those with glottalic (ejective, aspirate, or glottalized) phonations.

The dental series of consonants are pronounced with an apical positioning of the tongue against the upper teeth. The exception to this is the dental trill /r̻/ which is pronounced with a laminal articulation.

The voicing of obstruents is common intervocally.

Final nasals and fricatives are geminated.

Vowels
Vowels can diphthongize if proceeded by either /β/ or /j/

Phonotactics.

Syllable Structure
The syllable structure of Abrugoan is CVC. The onset can either be nuller or occupied by any consonant with a few exceptions. The trills bw,rr, and gg cannot occupy an onset position if the syllable is either standing alone or if it heads a word. They can, however, exist in word-medial positions, in which case they would be analyzed as the onset of the proceeding syllable.

A good deal of syllabification is utilized in Abrugoan. Excluding glottalized resonants; all nasals, trills, and approximants can be syllabified and act as the nucleus of a syllable. However, the relative frequency of this is restricted to word boundaries. In the case of bisyllabic words, either the initial or final syllable may have a syllabic nucleus. If the syllabic nucleus occurs word-finally, a coda consonant cannot proceed it. In addition to syllabic nuclei, any vowel can be used as a syllable nucleus.

Although the onset position can be occupied by essentially any consonant, the coda position is slightly more restrictive. The set of allowable coda consonants is any non-ejected plosive, any non-glottalized resonant, any fricative, or any trill. As was stated before, if a word-final syllable ends with a syllabic nucleus, a coda consonant cannot occur after it. However, a coda consonant can occur after a syllabic nucleus if it occurs word-medially.

Consonant Clustering (Morphophonology)
Because Abwrukoo syllables can both begin and end with consonants, contact between these consonants is frequented. This leads to a number of Sandhi processes and alternations which would ultimately be superfluous to describe individually. Therefore, a table is given for ease and convenience of analysis:

KEY:

Pl. = Plosive

Ns. = Nasal

Fr. = Fricative

Lt. = Lateral

Tr. = Trill

Lq. = Liquid

Rh. = Rhotic

Sm. = Semivowel

Ej. = Ejective

As. = Aspirated

Gm. = Geminated

Gl. = Glottalized

Vl. = Voiceless

Vc. = Voiced

POA = Similar Place

Syllable Distribution
Since Abrugoan is mostly synthetic, it employs a system of lexical roots which combine with various affixes in order to specify meaning or relation. These roots and affixes have fixed quantities of syllables of which they can be constituted. Roots can typically range from 2 to 4 syllables in length. Affixes are usually less with 1 to 2 syllables.

Tone
There are three tones in Abrugoan: High, Mid, and Low. Every monosyllabic word is pronounced with a mid tone, disyllabic words with high to low, and trisyllabic or further lengthened with high to mid to low tones. The placement of tone in Abrugoan is determined by the relative heaviness of a syllable or syllable weight. In that respect, it behaves much like lexical stress. Syllable weights are determined by both progression of added constituents and their relative sonority as compared to other syllables in a word.

a > m > ma > maa > pa> paa> par > mpa > paar > mpaa >  mpar > paak > mpak >  mpaar > paakr > mpaak > mpaakr

In general, the more sonorous a consonant the less 'heavy' it is and, of course, the more consonants a syllable has the heavier it will be. Syllables with many sonorants will be lighter than syllables with many obstruents.

Tone placement can also determined by which nuclei occupy a particular syllable. The rules are pretty simple. In disyllabic words, front vowels receieve high tone, while back vowels and syllabic nuclei receive low tone. In words with three or more syllables, front vowels again receive high tone, back vowels aquire mid tone, and syllabic nuclei take low tone. If the nuclei of constituent syllables are similar, tone placement is determined solely by syllable heaviness.

Class and Case
Syntactic Roles

Relation and Form 

Location and Direction 

Time