Hoskh

Typology:

☀http://cals.conlang.org/language/hoskh/feature/

Consonants
* Only found in ideophones, interjections, and onomatopoeia; however, these words are relatively common

/ʜ/ is considered a fricative phonologically. Word-final obstruents are devoiced, even if the next word begins on a voiced sound, and even when free morphemes are added after the word stem, but not when bound morphemes are added after the word stem. [ɴ] only occurs as an allophone of any nasal before /q͡χ/. /ʀ ~ ʁ/ and /ʡ ~ ʡ͡ʜ/ are free variation. [ʔ] begins syllables that phonemically start with vowels, but does not occur anywhere else.

Diphthongs:
[aɪ̯], [aʊ̯], [ɔʏ̯], [ɔa̯], [εi̯], [uo̯], [œʏ̯], [eə̯], [ɪə̯], [ʏə̯], [ʊə̯] Diphthongs (except /ɔʏ̯/) come from the breaking of long vowels (some of which were later reintroduced), most diphthongs being relatively recent innovations, and all long lax vowels breaking:

/ iː/ -> /aɪ̯/

/uː/ -> /aʊ̯/

/o ː/ -> /uo̯/

/ɔ ː/ -> /ɔa̯/

/ɛː/ -> /εi̯/

/æː/ -> /eə̯/

/œː/ -> /œʏ̯/

umlaut of /aʊ̯/ -> /ɔʏ̯/

Other vowel features

All vowels can also have other features, which are phonologically seperate from vowel quality/length distinctions:

Normal phonation with no pharyngealization

Pharyngealization

Laryngealization

Stridency/harsh voice (almost exclusively stridency in the main dialect)

Vowel reduction

Vowels are reduced in unstressed syllables, which is why long vowels and diphthongs cannot appear in unstressed syllables, and also why many vowels have been elided, creating complex consonant clusters and syllabic consonants. Historical vowel reduction actually helped change the irregular stress patterns of the proto-language to regular first syllable stress in modern Hoskh.

Phonotactics
Syllable structure is very complex, but has many limits on what can occur.

(S)(T)(F)(R)(J)(V)(R)(R)(A)(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)

S is a sibilant fricative

T is a stop, affricate or /ɣ/

F is any fricative

R is any sonorant

J is /j/ or /v/

V is any vowel (diphthongs and long vowels are single vowels)

A is an affricate or fricative

O is any obstruent

Morphemes can only end with 2 obstruents, but up to 4 more can be added when dependent morphemes are added to roots. Long vowels and diphthongs can only occur in stressed syllables, and lax vowels cannot occur in closed syllables. Syllables without vowels must have at least one sonorant. Words do not actually begin with vowel sounds phonetically, and a glottal stop is added before them, as well as between two vowels in hiatus, which is not permitted.

Nouns
Genders

There are four genders, masculine, feminine, animate, and inanimate. While the first three also contain many inanimate objects, the inanimate gender barely contains any animate beings (one major exception being the "diminuitive of contempt"). Genders are not predictable from a word's appearance but determine agreement for verbs, pronouns, adjectives, and determiners, as well as the plural forms. Regular masculine, feminine, and animate plurals are formed through stem changes, while regular inanimate plurals show no change in the morphology of the word but only in agreement. Some words can appear exactly the same an be in different genders. Sometimes this is accidental homophony, but sometimes they are related terms, such as fish the animal being animate and fish for eating being inanimate and the words otherwise being identical. Semantically related concepts tend to be grouped into the same genders. The default gender for people is animate, and the animate plural pronouns have developed into 2nd person formal.

Cases

Nouns have four cases: agentive, patientive, dative, genitive. Agentive is used for the subject of transitive sentences or a more agent-like argument of intransitive sentences, and patientive is used for the direct object of transitive sentences or a more patient-like argument of intransitive sentences. Case is shown through stem changes, determiner agreement, and agreement with other things e.g. adjectives. All nouns have obligatory determiners, including names of people, except when used to talk directly to people, which is sometimes analyzed as a vocative case, although there is no stem change on the noun in either proper names or lexical words used to address to people/animals/things, unlike all the "other" cases. Case marking is heavily syncretic.

Compounding

Nouns can be compounded together an unlimited number of times, like in Germanic and Finnic languages and Sanskrit. Morphologically, there are two types of compound nouns. The first is one with two heads, which covers copulative and appositional compounds, and these are formed by combining the words into a phonological word with no other changes, and can be made with any number of words, except all words other than the last must be in the patientive case form. The second is one where one noun modifies another noun, which can only be made with two words, although either or both of the words can also be a compound of either type. These are also combined phonologically into one word, but either the interfix  is added to a word that ends in a consonant, an  is added to a word that ends in a tense vowel, or a final unstressed vowel (schwa) is deleted, as well as the genitive stem change being applied.

Verbs
Agreement

Verbs agree with their subject, object, and indirect object. There is no syncreticism with verbal person agreement, unlike with noun case agreement, so as long as the nouns have different numbers and genders, the verb will differentiate what would otherwise be ambiguous. In intransitive sentences, agreement is determined based on how agent-like or patient-like the subject of the verb is, with it being marked the same as the subject of a transitive sentence if it is more agent-like, and the same as the object of a transitive sentence if it is more patient-like. Personal agreement is also fused with tense.

Incorporation

Verbs can productively incorporate their direct objects. This makes the sentence formally intransitive, so the subject can be either A or P. Subjects can also be incorporated, which makes the verb into a null-subject verb that has a 3rd person inanimate singular patientive ending. Objects can also be incorporated if there is an applicative.

Root Serialization/Verb Compounding

Hoskh has a type of verb serialization that consists of compounding verb roots into one morphological and phonological word. Serialiced verb roots must share the same object. Grammaticalized serialized verb roots are the source for much of the bound morphology.

Syntax
Word order is free and there is an approximately equal distribution between SVO and SOV in main clauses, however, dependent clauses (nominalized clauses, internally headed relative clauses, etc.) tend to be SOV. The order of genitives can be reversed and the genitives can even be split, adjectives can either precede or follow the noun and can be completely seperated from the nouns they describe, and generally the language does not have a fixed order for much anything, except that determiners must precede the noun they modify, with only quantifiers, adjectives, classifiers, etc. allowed in-between, because the determiner is generally the only way to determine case, number and gender, since there are barely any patterns to the genders of words and case and number are regularly signified only by stem changes. The general word order in a sentence looks like this:

S(V)OX(V)A

X is an oblique(s), A is an adverb(s)