Ashouctian

General information
Ashouctian is a fusional nominative-accusative mostly head-intial language. Word order is strictly SVO. It is mostly head-initial in that adjectives follow the nouns they modify, adverbs follow the verbs they modify, the language has postpositions, but genitive phrases preceed the head noun. Despite it's fusional nature, the language makes heavy use of infixing, and soforth makes extensive use of consonant modification when infixing.

Nouns decline for four cases: nominative, oblique, genetive, and adverbial, as well as to indicate plurality. Verbs conjugate for person, number, tense (past, present, and future), aspect (imperfect, perfect, and progressive), mood (indicative, optative, interrogative, imperative, and conditional), and voice (active, passive, and mediopassive). Some of these are expressed periphrastically, however. Adjectives agree with the noun they modify in case and number, and adverbs simply follow the verb they modify.

Phonology
Consonants
 * Nasal assimilation does not occur, therefore /nk/ and /ŋk/ are contrastive. Clusters such as /ŋm/ are permitted across syllable boundaries as well.

Vowels

 * There are also four diphthongs, treated as long vowels /ai/, /au/, /əi/, and /əu/

Allophony

 * After (but not before) a labialized consonant or in between two labialized consonants, unrounded vowels are often rounded.
 * Word-final labialized consonants are often, but not always, pronounced as a plain consonant.
 * Short and long vowels are often more centralized in the vicinity of a uvular consonant
 * Velar consonants are palatalized before /i/ or /e̞/
 * /ʁ/ and /ʁʷ/ are respectively pronounced /j/ and /w/ syllable-finally and, by some speakers, are replaced entirely by the latter phonemes.
 * The short vowels, as well as /ə:/, have many realisations
 * /i/ is realised as /ɪ/ interconsonantally, and /i/ elsewhere
 * /e̞/ is realised as /ɛ/ interconsonantally,/ə/ word-finally, and /e̞/ elsewhere
 * /a/ is realised as /ə/ word-finally and /a/ elsewhere
 * /u/ is realised as /ʊ/ interconsonantally and /u/ elsewhere
 * /ə/ and /ə:/ have the widest range of realisations
 * They remain the same when unstressed and following a plain consonant
 * Often, they are /o̞/ and /o̞:/ after (not before) non-dorsal labialized consonants
 * In the vicinity of a velar or uvular consonant, they are often realised as /ɔ/ and /ɔ:/ regardless of labialization
 * /ə:/ often becomes /ɤ̞:/ when stressed and remains /ə:/ when unstressed

Phonotactics
Syllable structure is (C)(r, l, F)V(C) where C is any consonant, F is a fricative sans /h/, and V is any vowel or diphthong. Onsets of (N)(F) where N is a nasal and F is a fricative do not occur. /h/ may only occur syllable initially and by itself, i.e. it is not allowed in a cluster.

Orthography

 * Main article: Ashouctian Orthography

Ashouctian uses the Latin alphabet and employs a complex orthography using only the following letters:


 * a á b c d e é è f g h i í l m n o ó p r s t u ú

Consonant mutation

 * Main article: Ashouctian consonant mutation 

Ashouctian consonants undergo multiple forms of mutation during declension and conjugation. This generally only effects word-final consonants or ultimate consonants, but it can effect other consonants due to infixing as well. Different conjugations, declensions, and infixes trigger different mutations and not all mutations are regular.

Nouns
Nouns in Ashouctian decline differently for a multitude of word structures, deemed "classes" for convenience. There is a hierarchy of endings, beginning at -VCVC, -VVCV, -VVC, -V and -C. If a noun does not end in the first three, it will decline for simple ending in a vowel or consonant, where a consonant final ending is simply suffixation.

-VCVC nouns
The pattern of -VCVC noun declension is in the table below (in IPA), followed by an example declension, in which IPA is available by hovering over the word.

-VVC
This declension is identical to the -VVCV, but there is no final vowel truncation.

Verbs
Ashouctian verbs conjugate for person, number, 3 tenses (past, present, and future) 3 aspects (imperfective, perfective, and progressive), 5 moods (indicative, imperative, optative, conditional, and interrogative), 3 voices (active, passive, and reciprocal) and polarity. There are two conjugations depending on the verbs syllable structure.

All Ashouctian verbs end with -e or -iae in the infinitive.