Xongeith

Information
Made for the August Challenge.

Consonants
Nasals will always assimilate in place to a following plosive, fricative or trill. The uvular plosive may be pronounced pro-uvular depending on the speaker, but is normally a plain uvular.

Phonotactics
(C)V(V)((f/v)C(f/v)).

The consonant cluster in a coda must follow these rules: It may only have one or two consonants; all the consonants must have the same voice; the f/v may only come before the other consonant if the other consonant is aspirated, and it may only come after the other consonant if that consonant is not aspirated; the syllable with the cluster must be at the end of the word.

Most words have two syllables, but there are some exceptions. The only legal diphthongs are 'ai', 'au', 'ei', and 'ou'. No syllables may end with a trill consonant. For words with two syllables, the stress comes on the first one. With other words the stress is left up to the speaker.

The uvular consonants are the most common in the language.

Example Words
Keikyz = /keikyz/

Ghunúj = /ʁunʉj/

Thúxosf = /tʰʉχosf/

Ghél = /ʁəl/

Kairéfqh = /kairəfqʰ/

Nouns
Nouns are declined according to their gender. The three genders are based upon the three Gods, Tashéth (the God of Water), Néxéx (the God of Land), and Myrref (the God of Sky); therefore, the genders are water, land and sky. Each of the Gods is believed to have created all concepts/objects that have words assigned to them.

There are five different cases: ergative, accusative, absolutive, locative and instrumental. The usage of each will be explained in the syntax section. All of these cases apart from the accusative have singular and plural forms. In the accusative there are singular, plural and dual forms; there used to be dual forms of the other cases in Old-Xongeith, but these fell out of common usage and soon merged with the plural forms. Using the accusative dual is also quite uncommon but it should be used in formal situations.

To decline an noun, one must first apply the case using the following prefixes: (the accusative is the plain form) To create a plural, one must add a bilabial fricative to the end of the last syllable in the word. It must have the same voice as the consonant it is next to (or vowel where it will always be voiced), and if it is next to a aspirated stop it must come before that consonant in order to follow the phonotactics. If the last consonant of the word is already a bilabial fricative, then one must add the vowel '-ú' after that consonant.

Finally, to create the dual accusative, one must add the suffix '-fe' for water and sky nouns, or '-fo' for land nouns.

Here are some examples of declined nouns: To show indefiniteness a noun may recieve the suffix '-i'. This is not required and only used to solve problems of ambiguity, thus a more correct transliteration for it than the English 'a(n)' would be the word 'another'. This is placed after any plural markers.

Here is a list of the common derivational suffixes, applied to the root before any declension. New words may also be created through compounding, however sound change has introduced extra parts between the original words. For example, 'Xongeith' is made from 'Xo' and 'Eith' which means 'person language', but the 'ng' has appeared seemingly without reason.

Adpositional Suffixes
Adpositions are treated as suffixes for nouns and must agree with the gender of the constituent to which they are connected. For example, 'in' in the sentence 'I read the book in the library' could agree with the gender of the words 'book' or 'read', depending on to which it applied. The word 'library' would have the 'in' suffix attached and would be in the accusative case. They also must agree in number with the noun of the prepositional phrase: 'in' would be singular, dual or plural depending on whether 'library' was singular, dual or plural.

Here are the forms of the adposition 'in'. (Note the many adpositions are irregular and have their forms noted in the lexicon, while the regular ones have their water singular form given only.) Unlike the nouns the dual is still used, even if the noun is actually in the plural.

To clarify: an adpositional suffix must agree with the noun that is part of the PP in number, and the word to which the PP is attached in gender.

Vocabulary
Please go to http://conlang.wikia.com/wiki/Xongeith/Vocabulary to view Xongeith's lexicon.

Article 1
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Article 2
Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.