Hoyu

Haiyu (Haiyu: Hoxzantư) is a language spoken in Haigwo, an island nation south of China, where it is the sole official language of Haigwo's 9 million residents. It is a language isolate.

General information
Haiyu is the native language of the Hai people in the South China Sea. It is a verb-heavy language with an agglutinative grammar. Word order is preferably SOV in basic sentences. It is written with the Latin alphabet. Because of the nation's frequent contact with the Chinese and Vietnamese, there are many loanwords from these languages in the Haiyu language.

Etymology
The English name for the language, Haiyu, is a direct loan from Chinese (海语 Hǎi yǔ) and literally means "sea language". When the Qing Dynasty discovered Haigwo in 1651, it was officially reported to the emperor that the people spoke a strange "sea language" that was impossible to understand. The Hai people and their homeland, Haigwo, are also called so because of this.

The native name for the language is Hoxzantư [hɔʔzæntɯ]. It is of unknown etymology.

Vowels
All of /i ɯ u ɤ/ occur short and long, differed only by length, while /e o a/, which are phonetically always [ɛ ɔ æ], have the respective long counterparts /e: o: a:/.

Consonants

 * Stops are unreleased at the ends of words. For example, /p/ > /p̚/.
 * Similarly to English, /ɹ/ is commonly realised as post-alveolar or retroflex and produces rhotic vowels when preceeded by a vowel.
 * Stops and affricates are aspirated before another stop or affricate across a syllable boundary.
 * Nasals assimilate to a following consonants place of articulation across syllable boundaries.
 * Unvoiced consonants become voiced before another voiced consonant and vice-versa.
 * Consonants can be geminated across morpheme boundaries.
 * If a resonant consonant appears before a sibilant across a morpheme boundary, the /RS/ cluster is simplified to /S/ and the vowel preceeding it is lengthened.

Vowels

 * Two identical short vowels are never realized with hiatus, instead as a long vowel.

Diphthong compression
Historically, diphthongs in Haiyu became short monophthongs. Diphthongs in older Haiyu varieties did not occur as long. This sound change is reflected orthographically across morpheme boundaries and is presented as an irregularity in the language.
 * /a/ + /u/ as ‹au› > /ɔ/ ‹o›
 * /a/ + /i/ as ‹ai› > /e/ ‹e›

Phonotactics
Haiyu syllables follow the simple structure (C)V(C) where C is any consonant and V is any vowel.

Writing System
Haiyu is written using the Latin alphabet.

Alphabet
If /j/ and /w/ appear after a vowel, they are written as ‹i› and ‹u› respectively, unless adjacent to an existing  ‹i› or ‹u›. If two short vowels appear together in a word (i.e. ‹ii›) they are written as a long vowel.

Verbs
The only necessary elements in a Haiyu verb is the verb root and the personal suffix.

Personal suffix
The person suffix agrees with the nominative case argument of the verb in subject and number. If the subject is pronominal, the pronoun is often omitted.

Voice
There are three voices in Haiyu. The active voice, wherein the grammatical subject is the agent, is personal and unmarked on the verb. The passive voice, wherein the grammatical subject is the patient, is nonpersonal, meaning that personal suffixes are not used, and is marked by the suffix ''-oqư. The reflexive voice, wherein the subject is simultaneously the agent and the patient, is personal and marked by the suffix -nu''.

Tense
There are two morphological tenses in Haiyu. The non-past tense, which is unmarked, is used in present tense constructions and with the future tense auxilliary verb. The past tense is marked with the suffix -si. The future tense is constructed with the use of an auxiliary verb.

Mood
There are six verbal moods in Haiyu. They are listed in a table below along with their suffixes. The conditional mood expresses the idea that the action or state expressed by the verb may or may not actually happen. In a sentence such as "I would do X if you did Y", the conditional mood is used in both halves of the sentence with the second preceeded by han, meaning if. It is never used for polite requests like in English. The imperative mood expresses a command to the addresse(s). The potential mood is used to express that an event is likely to happen but not certain. The dubitative mood expresses doubt that an event happened. The interrogative mood asks a simple question but is also used as a polite imperative.

Aspect
There are six verbal aspects in Haiyu.

Auxiliary verbs
Haiyu regularly employs auxiliary verbs. If an auxiliary verb is employed, the auxiliary verb takes on suffixes and the main verb stem immediately follows the conjugated auxiliary. These verbs cannot stand by themselves and must occur before another verb. The table below lists the auxiliary verbs and their meanings.

If two auxiliary verbs need to be used, for example the negative verb or the future tense auxiliary and a verb expressing modality, the negative verb will always take on verbal suffixes and appear before anything else in the verb phrase, then the future tense auxiliary, then auxiliary verbs expressing modality. If one wants to say I won't be able to sing, it would be constructed as such: imétun hésna ałan nuưn, with nuưn, "sing", being preceeded by three auxiliary verbs in the correct order. The future tense is constructed periphrastically using hésna, "go", as an auxilliary verb, constructed in the same way as any normal auxiliary verb, but hésna can be used on its own.

Nouns
Nouns in Haiyu decline for number, case, and definiteness/proximity, and can take on various other suffixes.

Vocabulary
 Haiyu Dictionary at ConWorkShop