Caohi

SettingEdit
Hello and thank you for visiting my language page. This language I'm creating is called Caohi (/Kao̯hi/). I am trying to make it a very simple language that is easy to learn.

PhonologyEdit
Caohi has the following 5 vowels and 9 consonants (sounds in brackets are allophonic): Diphthongs: /ei̯/, /e̯a/, /eo̯/, /əi̯/, /əo̯/, /ai̯/, /ae̯/, /ao̯/, /oi̯̯/, /o̯a/. Caohi has a five-vowel system consisting of the vowels /i/, /e/, /ə/, /a/ and /o/. The vowel /o/ is pronounced with a height about three quarters of the way between a low vowel and a high vowel, significantly higher than /e/ or /ə/ which are true mid vowels. The vowel system contains no significant allophonic variance. Vowel quality is the only contrastive feature within the vowel system (features such as length and nasality are not phonemically contrastive).

The consonant system of Caohi is small with only nine consonants. There is only one bilabial consonant, /m/. The plosives /t/ and /k/ are allophonically realized as fricatives [s] and [x] respectively when occurring between two vowels within a word, and this change is indicated in the spelling system.

Word stress

Stress in Caohi words is fairly weak and is not phonemically contrastive. Stress is predictable and falls on the penultimate syllable.

Root morphemes

There are about 1500 root morphemes in Caohi. Due to this fairly small root vocabulary size, Caohi relies heavily on the joining of root morphemes to form compound structures. When forming compounds, root morphemes are placed side by side and maintain their original form, rather than being agglutinated into a single longer word. Caohi morphology is discussed in more depth in the grammar section of this page. Caohi root morphemes never exceed three syllables in length. The following word structures are found for Caohi root morphemes (C = consonant, V = vowel or diphthong): Monosyllabic: (C)V(C); Disyllabic: (C)VC(C)V(C) Trisyllabic: (C)VC(C)VC(C)V(C).

OrthographyEdit
Caohi is written using the Latin alphabet. The following table shows each letter of the alphabet and its associated IPA pronunciation:

Basic Grammar
Caohi is an ergative-absolutive language with a Subject-Object-Verb word order. It is postpositional and predominantly left-branching. The morphology of Caohi is strongly isolating. All nouns are marked by obligatory postpositions indicating their grammatical case. More on the grammar of Caohi coming soon.