Cheunco

Cheuncai language is the mother tongue of Cheuncai people in Cheunca. Due to its abugida writing system, I (probably) won't publish pictures nor font files of Cheuncai script. I can say that it's influenced by Gujarati script (headless Devanagari).

I'm pretty busy right now, so I would update this page in a slow pace.

Consonants
Below is a table showing all phonemes of Cheuncai. Suggested by this table, Cheuncai makes a three-way distinction of plosives: aspirated, unaspirated voiceless, and aspirated voiced.

Vowels
There are 9 phonemes in Cheuncai and a length distinction for each of them.

Vowel Harmony
There are three classes of vowels in Cheuncai: rounded, unrounded, and neutral. Only /a/ and /aː/ are considered neutral. The harmony can also be seen in the diphthongs Cheuncai have: neutral vowel can precede / follow both rounded and unrounded vowels, but rounded vowels can never appear with unrounded ones.

Two kind of words would violate the harmony: compounds and loan words. Though each part of a compound follows the harmony individually, they can violate the harmony in the same word.

Syllable Structure
Syllables in Cheuncai are simple and can be denoted as (C)V(N) where N is the only nasal onset -n. The letter nga at the beginning of a word refers to the absence of initial.

Mora
The most basic unit of timing of Cheuncai is mora. Each mora contains a vowel. In the case of long vowels, diphthongs, and the presence of the only onset -n, there are two morae. Syllables in Cheuncai can have at most three morae.
 * Monomoraic: i, iu, ui, u, e, eo, oe, o, a
 * Bimoraic:
 * Long vowel: ii, iuu, uii, uu, ee, eoo, oee, oo, aa
 * Diphthong: ai, eu, au, ei, ia, oi, ou
 * Trimoraic: ain, eun, aun, ein, ian, oin, oun (long vowels can not receive the onset.)

Pitch Accent
Since Cheuncai is mora-timing, only one mora in a word can be accented. This mechanism resembles Ancient Greek rather than Japanese. In orthagraphy, the accent is not marked, but the romanization adopted acute (á) to indicate the accented vowel.

One of both morae in bimoraic syllable can be accented, which causes pitch contour (rising or falling). However, the nasal mora -n can never be accented. Pitch accent is crucial in Cheuncai because it can be used to refer to different grammatic roles of a word. For example, both masculine nominative and vocative of eo-stem nouns receive accent on their last mora (-eoón), but accusative on the penult mora (-eóon).

Cases
There are totally 8 cases in Cheuncai: nominative, vocative, accusative, dative, ablative, instrumental, locative, and genitive. This case system resembles Sanskrit (huh).

Nominative are used in circumstances where the noun is the object of the verb or something that equals to the object (connected by copula). Whereas accusative indicates the subject of verbs.

Dative, ablative, and instrumental are often regarded as indirect arguments of a verb and receive the same ending in dual form. They can only precede some particular postpositions.

Genitive and locative have their own wide usages. We'll talk about that later.

Genders
Most (inanimate) nouns in Cheuncai are neuter, while animate nouns can be either masculine or feminine, hence 3 genders at total. There are also suffixes that can convert nouns to another gender.

Number
To refer to plural, reduplication is introduced. The last consonant and the last mora will be copied and made follow the noun, like éthasasa ("birds") is derived from éthasa ("bird"), with s being the last consonant and a being the last mora.

Some exceptions exist in personal pronouns, like "we" in Cheuncai is hjií instead of hjíhji, which is the form we predicted.

Noun Declension
To put it simple, the declension system of Cheuncai is composed of 8 suffixes that follow nouns to modify them and mark their case. The form of these suffixes can be affected by the vowel of the nouns (vowel harmony) and the ending consonant of them. Some suffixes above are accented, which means that the position of the accent of a word could move to the suffix.

Verbs
Cheuncai features a number of infixes. Most verbs contain two syllables, like ogha ("I see").

Tense
There are only two tenses in Cheuncai: past and non-past. The non-past is not marked though, verbs in past tense would receive a prefix z-/ze-/zeo-
 * Hji ogha ethasase. ("I see birds")
 * Hji zogha ethasase. ("I saw birds.")

Verb Conjugation
Basically, a verb has 5 forms, each of which has its own usage. All these forms are derived from the stem.

Suffix
Nouns in genitive or instrumental are often followed by suffixes. Here's some common ones:

-yena(sa)(va) / -yeona(sa)(va)
This suffix refers to the diminutive form of the original word while preserving its gender.