Tonuao



is a zonal auxlang intended to be quickly learnable, readily comprehensible, and mutually communicative between persons of the East Asian cultural sphere. It uses Chinese characters for much of its writing, with some forms being simplified according to the shinjitai (新字体) standards of Japan. The Japanese syllabary katakana is used for all other sounds. It is not tonal, mostly analytic, SVO, topic-prominent, uses classifiers, is pro-drop, copula-drop, and uses postpositions.

Phonology
has 5 vowels and 11 consonants.

While there is a great deal of consonantal allophony (see below), every language speaker will experience some sounds as difficult, especially in achieving consistency.

Again, a great deal of tolerance is required when listening to others. Non-Mandarin speakers will have the hardest time being patient with Chinese vowels, but accents are part of being international!

un pun tun jun kun mun nun sun hun lun yun

Phonotactics
The three allowable syllable structures are V, CV, Cya, and CVn. There are gaps in all these series, and allophony.

The complex syllables of are clearly much more limited.

Derivation
Middle Chinese (MC) had much more complex syllables than were possible in any of the language influenced by it. tries to be equal to CJKV languages by taking an average derivational position. First, it considers the initial consonant in MC

Syntax
Like Chinese and Vietnamese (and unlike Japanese and Korean), is SVO, subject-verb-object. The subject of an intransitive verb and the actor of transitive verb come before early in the sentence, and the accusative argument must come after the verb. There are no particles to mark subject or object. tries to have the verb be second-to-last, comparable but backwards to the Germanic V2 word order. Like most Asian languages, has several verbs corresponding to European "is": 乃 nai is 'to be equal', 有 yu means 'to have', and 在 jai means 'to exist' or 'to be at'. Only 乃 nai may be dropped, and it usually is.

In the East Asian style, is very topic-prominent. The topic is marked with the postposition ヘ he, derived from 兮 hei. Typically, if present, it will come first in the sentence. The dative argument may be unmarked, if easily discernible from context, but is more often marked with the postposition ウ u, derived from 于 yu. A genitive relationship is 之 ji which is not written in katakana most of the time.

Sentence Final Particles

 * フ hu, derived from 乎 huo, forms polar questions at the end of an utterance.

Classifiers
Counting is not done with numerals as adjectives before the noun phrase, but with special classifiers + numerals after the noun phrase, as adverbs.

Plants, animals and things that may have hanji beyond our corpus or are nation-specific, should be spelled out phonetically, but appended with a "determiner", a hanji that shows what class of being the creature is. This is helpful, as it gives a hint to those unfamiliar with the being.

Demonstratives and indefinite
Demonstratives occur in the 此 ji-, 其 ki-, and 彼 pi- series. The 此 ji- (proximal) series refers to things closer to the speaker than the hearer, the 其 ki- (mesial) series for things closer to the hearer, and the 彼 pi- (distal) series for things distant to both the speaker and the hearer. With 何 ha-, demonstratives turn into the corresponding interrogative form.

Lexica

 * Tonuao/Hanji - Character list based on the 1800 list of hanja for Koreans and 2136 list of kanji for Japanese

Sample

 * Tonuao/Sample/218_sentences - Sentences to test syntax

Links

 * 1) CJKV Auxlang Facebook Group
 * 2) CJKV Auxlang Google sheets
 * 3) Sister language 単亜語