Caohi

Setting
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.

Phonology
Caohi has a fairly small phonemic inventory consisting of 5 vowels and 11 consonants. The language has two front vowels /i/ and /e/, two central vowels /ə/ and /a/, and only one back vowel /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/ and /ə/ which are true mid vowels in terms of their height. 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). In addition to the five vowels there are ten phonemic diphthongs in the language, two of which are opening diphthongs (/e̯a/ and /o̯a/) and eight of which are closing diphthongs (/ei̯/, /eo̯/, /əi̯/, /əo̯/, /ai̯/, /ae̯/, /ao̯/ and /oi̯̯/). Diphthongs occur in about one in every eight syllables. The consonant system is small with only 11 consonants. The plosives /p/, /t/ and /k/ are unaspirated in all environments. The fricative /h/ is pronounced more raspy and with greater frication than the /h/ in English. Similarly to the vowel system, there is no significant allophony within the consonant system. The tables below show the vowels and consonants of Caohi: Diphthongs: /ei̯/, /e̯a/, /eo̯/, /əi̯/, /əo̯/, /ai̯/, /ae̯/, /ao̯/, /oi̯̯/, /o̯a/.

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 agglutinating of root morphemes to form compound structures. 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).

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

Grammar overview
Caohi is a nominative-accusative language with a strict Subject-Verb-Object word order. The indirect object, however, precedes the verb. Caohi is predominantly predominantly right-branching, with modifiers following the parts of speech they modify in most environments. However, the language uses postpositions rather than prepositions to convey the meaning of grammatical case, number and voice. Caohi has about the same level of agglutinativity as English. Verbs are the only part of speech that inflect. Verbs inflect for tense, mood, and aspect. Many words in Caohi can function either as a noun or as a verb. The verbal forms in these cases may be followed by a postpositional marker indicating the word is functioning as a verb. There are eight parts of speech present in Caohi; the noun, pronoun, verb, adjective, adverb, postposition, conjunction and interjection.

Nouns
Nouns is Caohi are not marked by any definite or indefinite articles. Neither is there any noun gender in Caohi. As mentioned above, nouns are followed by obligatory postpositions indicating their grammatical case. The nominative and accusative cases each have two different postpositions depending upon whether the noun is animate or inanimate. The animate category does not only include humans and animals, but also living things that are not capable of thought, such as plants, trees and flowers. There are a total of 46 different grammatical cases that are conveyed by postpositions in Caohi. The following is a complete list of these:

Adessive (e.g. near/at/by the building); apudessive (e.g. next to the building); inessive (e.g. inside the building); intrative (between the buildings); pertingent (touching the building); subessive (under the building); superessive I (on the building); superessive II (over the building); ablative (away from the building); initiative (beginning from the building); lative (to the building); terminative (as far as the building); perlative (through/along the road); prolative (via/ by way of the building); antessive (before the game); temporal (at eight o clock (only used for describing time)); accusative animate; accusative inanimate; instructive (by means of the building); instrumental (with/using the building); nominative animate; nominative inanimate; ablative (concerning the building); aversive I (avoiding the building); aversive II (fearful of the building); benefactive I (for the benefit of the building); benefactive II (for/intended for the building); causal (because of the building); comitative (with the building); dative (for the building); distributive (per / for each building); genitive (of the building); posessive (belonging to the building); ornative (endowed/equipped with a building); partitive (three (of the) buildings); comparative (similar to the building); equative (comparable with the building); essive ((temporary state of being) as the building); excessive ((transition from a state) from being a child (is not a child any more)); identical (being the building); orientative (turned toward the building); revertive (backwards to/against the building); translative ((change from one form to another) turning into an adult); multiplicative ((number of times) six times); vocative ((used to adress someone) O father!); disjunctive ((used in isolation or other special situations) What is it? A building).

Pronouns
Caohi contains 1st, 2nd and 3rd person personal pronouns. Personal pronouns in Caohi are not affected by gender or by formality. Similarly to nouns, however, they are marked as either animate or inanimate when occurring in either the nominative or accusative case, as are non-personal pronouns also. Pronouns in Caohi are marked for grammatical case with the same set of postpositions that are used for nouns. In addition to the postpositions that mark grammatical case, postpositions indicating intensity, reflexivity, reciprocity and expletivity can mark personal pronouns. These precede the postpositions indicating grammatical case when present together. There are two different first person plural personal pronouns in Caohi, one for inclusivity and one for exclusivity. When a plural personal or non-personal pronoun occurring in the nominative or accusative case refers to a mixture of animate and inanimate nouns, the animate form of the nominative/accusative case marker is always used. The table below shows the personal pronouns of Caohi:

Caohi uses the postposition 'hë' (/hə/) to indicate plurality. As can be seen in the table, this postposition is not used to form plurals with personal pronouns.

Caohi only contains one demonstrative pronoun that corresponds to the both the word ‘this’ and the word ‘that’ in English. There are two relative pronouns corresponding to the English words ‘who/which/that’ and ‘whose’. There are also two interrogative pronouns corresponding to the words ‘who’ and ‘what’ respectively in the following English sentences: 1) Who is in the garden?; 2) What is his name?. Caohi has 19 different indefinite pronouns that are equivalent to the following English words: any; anybody/anyone; anything; each; either; enough; everyone/everybody; everything; little/few; more; most; much/many; one/you; other; plenty; somebody/someone; something; such; whatever. Negative indefinite pronouns are indicated by a postposition that means ‘opposite of’ (e.g. ‘anybody’ + [opposite] = ‘nobody’, ‘more’ + [opposite] = less, ‘either’ + [opposite] = neither).

Colour terms
Caohi has root morphemes for the primary colours red, blue and yellow, and for the secondary colours green, orange and purple. It also has root morphemes for black, grey, white and brown. Other colours can be formed by placing two or more root colour words side by side.

Verbs
Verbs in Caohi are marked by postpositions for tense, aspect, modality, mirativity and voice. The same postpositions are used to represent both tense and aspect. There are three tenses (past, present, future) and three aspects (perfective, habitual, continuous) expressed through these postpositions. The table below shows the postpositions used to represent each aspect occurring in each tense:

Specific postpositions are used to indicate the following moods in Caohi: imperative; conditional; subjunctive; optative; potential; cohortative. The infinative form of a verb is formed by the addition of the postposition 'an' (/an/). The postposition 'nget' (/ŋet/) expresses mirativity. The following sentence makes use of mirativity:

To ma loni ahit cëoren nami moyan taotë owap lo nget.

You [subj. anim.] - very good - play [pres. habit.] - foot ball game [obj. inam.] - [mir.]

You play soccer very well!

Caohi has both an active and a passive voice. The passive voice is indicated by the postposition 'mai' (/mai̯/) following the verb.

Adjectives
Adjectives in Caohi can take either the attributive, absolute, predicative or nominal form. The comparative degree for adjectives is formed by adding before the adjective the word 'mota' (/mota/) meaning 'more', and the superlative degree is formed by adding before the adjective the word 'mahi' (/mahi/) meaning 'most'. Attributive adjectives in Caohi tend to occur in the following order: quantity; color; size; quality; shape; age; opinion; purpose. Other orders are permissible also. Adjectives and other modifiers are not marked for restrictiveness.