Archaic Archipelago Southwestern

General Info
Archaic Archipelago Southwestern is an extinct Southwesterner language. It is the earliest attested ancestor of all SW Archipelago languages.

Syllable Structure
As each phonetic Archipelago word was made up of one syllable, its syllables are equivalent to words. Each syllable is made up of three components: an onset, a nucleus, and an optional coda. Several suprasegmental features also exist.

Onsets
Archipelago onsets are the obligatory, initial consonantal component of an Archipelago syllable; they cannot be omitted and are thus always present. They can be simple, made up of one consonant, complex, made up of two to four consonants, and semisyllabic, containing a minor syllable.

Simple onsets are made up of a single consonant followed by a nucleus. Such onsets can be any single consonantal segment. In contexts that demand that a syllable be stripped of its onset, the default onset, inserted to prevent an onsetless syllable, will be /ʔ/.

Nuclei
Archipelago nuclei are the 'carriers' of its syllables; as such, they are obligatory. They can be divided into two types:
 * Primary nuclei
 * The five cardinal vowels
 * Can be nuclei regardless of onset and coda
 * Secondary nuclei
 * Sonorants
 * Can be nuclei only in appropriate contexts

Nouns
Archipelago nouns, in line with the rest of the language, were morphologically overwhelmingly bare and uninflected. Although isolating, they were grouped into four animacy classes, or 'genders', that were inherent to each noun:
 * Superanimate
 * Animate
 * Edible
 * Inedible