Rangyayo

Consonants
The following are phonemic transcriptions of Rangyan consonants.


 * 1) /ŋ/ appears only in the syllable coda.
 * /s, z/ are palatalised [ɕ, ʑ] before /i, j/
 * 1) /h/ is palatalised [ç] before /i, j/; and is bi­la­bialised [ɸ] before /u, w/
 * 2) /ts, dz, tsʰ/ are palatalised [tɕ, dʑ, tɕʰ] before /i, j/
 * 3) /ɾ/ is an alveolar flap [ɾ] in the syllable onset; and is [l] in the syllable coda.

Monophthongs

 * 1) /i/ is pronounced /ɪ/ before velar codas /ŋ, k̚/
 * 2) /u/ is /ʊ/ before velar codas /ŋ, k̚/

Diphthongs
In the Rangyan language, because semivowels /j/ and /w/ may follow consonants in initial position in a word, which no other consonant can do, and perhaps due also to yenmun orthography, which transcribes them as vowels, they are sometimes considered to be elements of diphthongs and triphthongs rather than separate consonant phonemes.


 * 1) /ju/ is pronounced /jʊ/ before velar codas /ŋ, k̚/
 * 2) /uɪ/ is a falling diphthong [uɪ] after a consonant in an open syllable; and is a rising diphthong [wi] when it is a syllable of its own or in a closed syllable.

Positional allophones
Rangyan consonants have two principal positional allophones: initial and final. The initial form is found at the beginning of a syllable and the final form is found at the end of a syllable. All plosives [p, t, k] are unreleased [p̚, t̚, k̚] at the end of a syllable. Final [ɾ] is a liquid [l].

Phonotactics
Rangyan syllable structure is maximally CgVC, where the first C is the initial consonant; g is a semivowel glide /j/ or /w/; V is a vowel; the second C is a coda. Any consonant but /ŋ/ may occur initially, whereas only /m, n, ŋ, p, t, k, s, l/ may occur finally.

Below is the table of all syllable finals (gVC) in Rangyan.


 * 1) pronounced [wi] when it is a syllable of its own or before codas /n, t̚, s, l/; and pronounced [wɪ] before codas /ŋ, k̚/
 * 2) pronounced [uɪ] after an onset in an open syllable.

Additional finals /wam/, /wɛm/, /wim/, /wap/, /wɛp/, /wip/ can be found in foreign loanwords.

Vowel harmony
Traditionally, the Rangyan language has had strong vowel harmony; that is, in pre-modern Rangyan, not only did the inflectional and derivational affixes change in accordance to the main root vowel, but native words also adhered to vowel harmony. However, this rule is no longer observed strictly in modern Rangyan. In modern Rangyan, it is only applied in certain cases such as onomatopoeia and interjections.

There are three classes of vowels in Rangyan: positive, negative and neutral. The vowel classes loosely follow the vowel heights. Exchanging positive vowels with negative vowels usually creates different nuances of meaning, with positive vowels sounding fast, hot, dry, hard, solid, focused or aggressive, and negative vowels sounding slow, cold, wet, soft, insubstantial, diffuse or tranquil.

Pitch accent
Rangyan pitch accent can be presented with a two-pitch-level model. In this representation, each syllable is either high (H) or low (L) in pitch.


 * 1) If the accent is on the first syllable, then the first syllable is high-pitched and the others are low: HLL...
 * 2) If the accent is on a syllable other than the first, then the first syllable is low, the following syllables up to and including the accented one are high, and the rest are low: LHLL..., LHHLL..., LHHHLL...
 * 3) If the word does not have an accent, the first syllable is low and the others are high: LHH... This high pitch spreads to unaccented grammatical particles that attach to the end of the word, whereas these would have a low pitch when attached to an accented word.

Examples are given in the table below. The number before each pitch pattern tells you the syllable where the last high pitch is.

Nouns
Rangyan has no grammatical number, gender or articles. Thus, Rangyan nouns are non-inflecting. The noun iku can be translated as "dog", "dogs", "a dog", "the dog", "some dogs" and so forth, depending on context. However, as part of the extensive pair of grammatical systems that Rangyan possesses for honorification and politeness, nouns too can be modified. Nouns take politeness prefix ya- to produce their respectful forms. A few examples are given in the following table.

Rangyan does not differentiate between count and mass nouns. A small number of nouns have collectives formed by reduplication, for example, oro "person" and orooro  "people". However, reduplication is not productive. Words in Rangyan referring to more than one of something are collectives, not plurals. Orooro, for example, means "a lot of people" or "people in general". It is never used to mean "two people". A phrase like rangya ti orooro would be taken to mean "the people of Rangya", or "the population of Rangya", not "two people from Rangya" or even "a few people from Rangya".

Lacking grammatical number, the noun haya may refer to a single bird or several birds. Where number is important, it can be indicated by providing a quantity (often with a counter word). For example, haya ju ik means seven birds.

Pronouns
Suffixes are added to pronouns to make them collective, for example, kigomi-te "we" and asobeda-nün  "they".

Reflexive pronouns
Rangyan has three reflexive pronouns jishin, jiki and osu, all meaning "self". However, there are subtle differences in usage among the three reflexive pronouns.
 * jishin tends to take a local antecedent and is used more often for first person antecedents;
 * jiki takes long-distance antecedents much more than local ones;
 * osu is less used than the other two and takes local and long-distance antecedents equally well. The antecedent to which it refers can be inferred by context, which is generally the subject of the sentence.

The examples below demonstrate the difference in usage between jishin and jiki.

Verbs
Verbs are the most complex lexical category in Rangyan. Their structure when used as the predicate of a clause is verb stem + up to six suffixes, and can be illustrated with this table.

This is a conjugation table for the verb yabü "eat". Honorific and modality are not included to keep the table shorter.

Compound verbs
Rangyan has many compound verbs, reflecting the agglutinative nature of the language. A Rangyan compound verb is a multi-word compound that acts as a single verb. The main component of the compound is a verb in its conjunctive participial form, which carries most of the semantics of the compound, and determines its arguments. The other component is a vector, which carries any conjugations, indicating tense, mood, or aspect, but provides only fine shades of meaning.

For example, in yuttsubirü "start reading", the vector verb birü  "start" changes according to tense, mood, aspect, and the like, while the main verb yuttsü  "read" stays in its conjunctive participial form yuttsu  "reading" and remains unchanged.

Attributive verbs
A Rangyan attributive verb is a verb which modifies (gives the attributes of) a noun as an attributive, rather than expressing an independent idea as a predicate. Unlike English, Rangyan allows regular verbs to be attributive. In Rangyan, predicative verbs come at the end of the clause, after the nouns, while attributive verbs come before the noun. These are equivalent to relative clauses in English as Rangyan does not have relative pronouns like "who", "which", or "when".

Example:

ne oro we dotuwei "That person came."

ne dotuweit oro we "That person who came"

Copula
The Rangyan copula rü is a verb-like word used to link the subject of a sentence with a predicate (a subject complement). Rangyan sentences with rü most often equate one thing with another, that is, they are of the form "A is B".

Example:

khi we ontso rü "I am a soldier."

Copula rü can also link predicative adjectives to the noun or pronoun they modify.

Example:

muse we ha'i rü "Snow is white."

Demonstratives
Demonstratives occur in the i-, ne-, and ko- series. The i- (proximal) series refers to things closer to the speaker than the hearer, the ne- (mesial) series for things closer to the hearer, and the ko- (distal) series for things distant to both the speaker and the hearer. With ma-, demonstratives turn into the corresponding interrogative form.

Demonstratives limit, and therefore precede, nouns; thus i maro for "this stone", ne maro  for "that stone", and ko maro  for "that stone over there".

Adjectives
All Rangyan adjectives end in -i, for example, ko'i "big" and hyogi  "heavy". Their syntactic role is to modify a noun or pronoun, giving more information about the noun or referent of pronoun. In Rangyan, adjectives form an open class of words, that is, it is relatively common for new adjectives to be formed via such processes as derivation.

A given occurrence of a Rangyan adjective can generally be classified into one of the two major kinds of uses:
 * Attributive adjectives are part of the noun phrase headed by the noun they modify, for example, ko'i is an attributive adjective in ko'i haku "big cow". Since Rangyan is a head-final language, attributive adjectives always precede their nouns.
 * Predicative adjectives are linked via a copula to the noun or pronoun they modify, for example, ko'i is a predicate adjective in haku we ko'i rü "cow is big".

Adjective order
In Rangyan language, attributive adjectives usually occur in this default order, with other orders being permissible:
 * 1) demonstrative
 * 2) intensifier (adverb of degree)
 * 3) opinion
 * 4) size
 * 5) age
 * 6) shape
 * 7) colour
 * 8) proper adjective (e.g. nationality, origin, material)
 * 9) noun adjunct (noun used as adjective)
 * 10) head noun

Example:

i ya'i nitsi gani haya "this good small red bird"

Comparative
Rangyan adjectives, unlike their English counterparts, do not have a comparative form. To compare two things ( NP1 and NP2 ), the noun phrase being compared ( NP2 ), together with the postpositional comparative particle e, are placed between the subject noun phrase ( NP1 ) and the predicative adjective in a sentence ended with a copula.

Example:

ne iku we i haya e ko'i rü "That dog is bigger than this bird."

Superlative
Rangyan adjectives also lack a superlative form. The adverb nim "most" is placed before adjectives for superlative degree of comparison.

Example:

ne iku we nim ko'i rü "That dog is the biggest."

Adverbs
An adverb is any word that modifies verbs, adjectives, clauses, sentenses and other adverbs. Not all but many Rangyan adverbs are formed by adding -m to adjectives. For example, nepi ("angry") yields nepim ("angrily") and ya'i ("good") yields ya'im ( "well"). This derviation is quite productive but there are a few adjectives from which adverbs may not be derived.

Particles
Particles in Rangyan are postpositional, as they immediately follow the modified component.

Writing system
The modern Rangyan writing system uses two main scripts: To a lesser extent, modern written Rangyan also uses the Latin alphabet. Examples include abbreviations such as "CD" and "DVD".
 * Hanji, ideographs from Chinese characters, and
 * Yenmun, a Korean phonemic alphabet organised into syllabic blocks that make up words.

Romanised Rangyan, called romaji, is frequently used by foreign students of Rangyan, who have not yet mastered the two main scripts, and by native speakers for computer input.

Yenmun
Yenmun is a phonemic alphabet organized into syllabic blocks. Each block consists of at least two of the 24 yenmun letters (jimu), with at least one each of the 14 consonants and 10 vowels. These syllabic blocks can be written horizontally from left to right as well as vertically from top to bottom in columns from right to left. Originally, the alphabet had several additional letters for pre-modern Korean, however, these letters have never been used in Rangyan.

Jimu
Jimu are the units that make up the yenmun alphabet. Ji means letter or character, and mo means mother, so the name suggests that the jimu are the building-blocks of the script.

There are 39 jimu, of which 24 are equivalent to letters of the Latin alphabet. The other 15 jimu are clusters of two or sometimes three of these letters. Of the 24 simple jimu, 14 are consonants ("child sounds") and 10 are vowels ("mother sounds"). 5 of the simple consonant letters are doubled to form the five voiced consonants (see below). The 10 basic vowel jimu can be combined to form 10 more complex ones. Here is a summary:


 * 14 simple consonant letters: ㄱ, ㅋ, ㅇ, ㄷ, ㅌ, ㄴ, ㅂ, ㅍ, ㅁ, ㅈ, ㅊ, ㅅ, ㅎ, ㄹ
 * 5 double letters (voiced): ㄲ, ㄸ, ㅃ, ㅉ, ㅆ
 * 6 simple vowel letters: ㅏ, ㅓ, ㅗ, ㅜ, ㅡ, ㅣ
 * 4 simple iotized vowel letters (semi consonant-semi vowel): ㅑ, ㅕ, ㅛ, ㅠ
 * 10 compound letters: ㅐ, ㅒ, ㅔ, ㅖ, ㅘ, ㅙ, ㅚ, ㅝ, ㅞ, ㅟ

Four of the simple vowel jimu are derived by means of a short stroke to signify iotation (a preceding i sound): ㅑ /ja/, ㅕ /jɛ/, ㅛ /jɔ/, and ㅠ /ju/. These four are counted as part of the 24 simple jimu because the iotating stroke taken out of context does not represent /j/. In fact, there is no separate jimu for /j/.

Of the simple consonants, ㅋ, ㅌ, ㅍ, and ㅊ are aspirated derivatives of ㄱ, ㄷ, ㅂ, and ㅈ, respectively, formed by combining the unaspirated letters with an extra stroke.

The doubled letters are ㄲ, ㄸ, ㅃ, ㅉ, ㅆ. Double jimu do not represent geminate consonants, but rather a voiced phonation.

Jimu order
The alphabetical order of yenmun does not mix consonants and vowels as Western alphabets do. Rather, the order is that of the Indic type, first velar consonants, then coronals, labials, sibilants, etc. However, the vowels come after the consonants rather than before them as in the Indic systems.

Historical order
The consonantal order of yenmun in 1446 in the document titled Funmintsengim "The Proper Sounds for the Instruction of the People" was, ㄱ ㅋ ㆁ ㄷ ㅌ ㄴ ㅂ ㅍ ㅁ ㅈ ㅊ ㅅ ㆆ ㅎ ㅇ ㄹ ㅿ and the order of vowels was, ㆍ ㅡ ㅣ ㅗ ㅏ ㅜ ㅓ ㅛ ㅑ ㅠ ㅕ

Modern Rangyan order
In the Rangyan order, double jimu are placed immediately after their single counterparts. No distinction is made between silent and nasal ㅇ: ㄱ ㄲ ㅋ ㅇ ㄷ ㄸ ㅌ ㄴ ㅂ ㅃ ㅍ ㅁ ㅈ ㅉ ㅊ ㅅ ㅆ ㅎ ㄹ ㅏ ㅐ ㅑ ㅒ ㅓ ㅔ ㅕ ㅖ ㅗ ㅘ ㅙ ㅚ ㅛ ㅜ ㅝ ㅞ ㅟ ㅠ ㅡ ㅣ The modern monophthongal vowels come first, with the derived forms interspersed according to their form: first added i, then iotized, then iotized with added i. Diphthongs and triphthongs beginning with w are ordered according to their spelling, as ㅏ or ㅓ plus a second vowel, not as separate digraphs.

The order of the final jimu is, (null) ㄱ ㅇ ㄷ ㄴ ㅂ ㅁ ㅅ ㄹ "Null" stands for no final jimu, and the final jimu ㅅ and ㄹ can only be found in foreign loanwords.

Romanisation
There are a number of methods of rendering Rangyan in Roman letters. The Mackenzie method of romanisation makkhenzhi-sik romaji, designed for English speakers, is a de facto standard widely used inside and outside Rangya.