Norpalic

Setting
Norpalic is a language which I am creating to be simple and easy to learn. It is not part of any conworld or conculture. The vocabulary is completely a-priori, but the semantics behind some of the root morphemes is influenced by Esperanto and Toki Pona. There are about a thousand root morphemes in Norpalic, all of which are one syllable long and consist of just one consonant and one vowel in the order Consonant-Vowel. The reason it is possible to create so many different monosyllabic Consonant-Vowel combinations is because Norpalic has a very large phonemic inventory consisting of 63 consonant phonemes and twenty vowel phonemes (taking account of long vowels and nasal vowels). The grammar of Norpalic is simple and regular. The basic word order is Subject-Verb-Object. Norpalic uses prepositions rather than postpositions and places adjectives, determiners, numerals, possessors and relative clauses after the noun they modify.

Phonology
Norpalic has a very large phonemic inventory of 63 consonants, seven oral vowels and three nasal vowels. Each vowel can occur phonemically long or short.

Consonants
Norpalic has the following 63 consonants:

Vowels
Norpalic has the following seven oral vowels and three nasal vowels. Each vowel can occur phonemically long or short. There are no diphthongs. The vowels /e/, /ẽ/, /ə/, /o/ and /õ/ are true mid vowels rather than close mid in terms of their height.

Root morphemes
Norpalic has about 1000 root morphemes, all of which are monosyllabic and consist of just one consonant and one vowel in the format Consonant-Vowel. Because Norpalic has a fairly small root vocabulary size, Norpalic relies heavily on the agglutinating of root morphemes to form compound words.

Word stress
Stress is weak and not phonemically contrastive. Stress is predictable and falls on the penultimate syllable of compound words. Root words are all monosyllabic, as mentioned above.

Orthography
Norpalic is written using the latin alphabet. The alphabet is completely transparent. The following table shows each letter of the alphabet and its IPA pronunciation:

Grammar overview
Norpalic has a rigid Subject-Verb-Object word order. Norpalic uses prepositions rather than postpositions and is strongly right-branching, with modifiers usually following the parts of speech they modify. Norpalic has about the same level of agglutinativity as English. Norpalic uses suffixes to indicate five different grammatical moods. Prepositions are used to convey the meaning of grammatical case. Norpalic has no grammatical gender. There is only one grammatical voice, the active voice. Tense and aspect are indicated by particles preceding the verb. Many words in Norpalic can function either as a noun or as a verb. The verbal forms in these cases may be marked by a suffix to indicate the word is functioning as a verb. There are eight parts of speech present in Norpalic; the noun, pronoun, verb, adjective, adverb, postposition, conjunction and interjection.

Nouns
Nouns in Norpalic are strongly isolating and there is no noun declension. Prepositions are used to indicate the meaning of grammatical case. The nominative and accusative cases are not marked for by prepositions though, but are indicated by word order. Compound nouns can be formed by combining together two root nouns, a noun and a verb, or a noun and an adjective, as well as by the use of suffixes. Norpalic is right branching when forming compound nouns, with the head preceding the modifier. Norpalic does not have any noun class system such as male versus female or animate versus inanimate, and nouns are not marked for definiteness. Norpalic has a rich set of suffixes that can be attached to nouns to change their meaning, similar to that found in Esperanto.