Himalayan

General information
Himalayan is the most widely spoken language on the mountains of Himalayas and the northern villages of Tibet in the far future, at a time when India will plow into Tibet a further 180km, like the width of Nepal. It evolved from Proto-Himalayan, which in turn evolved from a mixture of a wide variety of Sino-Tibetan and Austroasiatic languages, including Mandarin Chinese, Tibetan, Santali, Khmer, Vietnamese, Thai and more.

Vowels
The pronunciation of each phoneme is listed in the tables below, preceded by its romanization.

There are 18 vowels: 10 nasalized versions of them: And 20 diphthongs. 10 of these end in /j/ and the 10 other end in /w/.

Vowel length
Vowel length is phonemic, on both vowels and diphthongs and is contrastive. When writing long vowels, the single vowel or the first vowel of a diphthong is doubled, and already-doubled vowels are written with a macron on the first vowel.


 * hów /how˥/ - flower
 * hóow /hoːw˥/ - good

Vowel tone
There are 6 tones (xien) in Himalayan: high, rising, falling-rising, falling, falling-rising creaky and mid. When writing tones, tone indication can be used: * T stands for a tonal placeholder.

Tone sandhi
There are rules governing tone sandhi in Himalayan, like in Mandarin, Vietnamese and other many Asian languages. Some such changes have been noted above in the descriptions of the individual tones; however, the most prominent phenomena of this kind relate to consecutive sequences of keon tone syllables. There are also a few common words that have variable tone.


 * When there are two keon tones in a row, the first one becomes ráwkēe.
 * The son tone is pronounced at different pitches depending on what tone it follows.
 * lǒ (two) is ráwkēe, except when it's followed by another ráwkēe tone, where it's pronounced lèn.
 * riin (you) is kaw when it represents the formal form. It changes when it refers to the casual 'you', following a pattern of cǫw when following a keon tone and ráwkēe when following a lèn tone.

The tone sandhi may be classified as a pitch sandhi. It is similar to that in Mandarin Chinese.

Vowel harmony
There is vowel harmony in Himalayan, every first vowel in every suffix must harmonize in frontness to the root's final vowel.

Consonants
Rather than making a voiced-unvoiced distinction (like in French and Russian), Himalayan makes an unaspirated-aspirated contrast (as in Icelandic and Scottish Gaelic).

The denti-alveolar stops /t/ and /tʰ/ vary between dental, apical or alveolar.

To distinguish the palatalized stops from alveolo-palatal/palatal affricates/stops, the palatalized stops /tʲ/ and /tʰʲ/ are articulated with more force (tense) than the palatal stops/affricates /tɕ/ and /tɕʰ/.

The phoneme /ŋ/ is only found word-final, otherwise it becomes /n/.

Consonant harmony
A specific feature of Himalayan is consonant harmony. Himalayan consonant harmony can be grouped into two groups, unaspirated and aspirated. Many affixes exhibit two alternate forms, one with an unaspirated consonant and one with an aspirated. When they attach to a word that begins with a unaspirated consonant, the form of the affix with the unaspirated consonant is used. If the word begins with an aspirated consonant, the form of the affix with the aspirated consonant is used. Consonant harmony only applies to stops and affricates.

For example, the 1st person potential iterative non-past tense is zca- when it follows a root beginning with an aspirated consonant e.g.


 * jie koñ - to look
 * zcakoñ - I can look repeatedly
 * jie taay - to bring
 * zcataay - I can bring repeatedly

But it's za- when it follows an unaspirated cansonant.


 * jie gu - to cry
 * zagu - I can cry repeatedly

Phonotactics
The phonotactics of Himalayan is very limited, with only CV and CVN allowed. (N stands for either n or ng)

Noun morphology
Himalayan nouns are relatively simple, with no marking in number, definiteness or gender. The word go can either mean 'dog', 'a dog', 'the dog', 'dogs', 'the dogs' and so on, depending on context. Himalayan nouns only inflect of case (ergative, absolutive, dative, prosecutive, ablative and comitative) and possession.

Verbs
Verbs are the most important and most advanced part of speech in Himalayan. They take place of adjectives, and they have six evidentials (sensory, non-sensory, reported, inferential, admirative and quotative).