Nāmic

Nāmic is an Indo-European influenced, mixed a priori-posteriori language, by Waahlis. Formely known as Nāmaς, until wikicode drove it to extinction.

Introduction
Dēna vēȷyans! - Welcome!

This page uses IPA phonetic notation as standard.

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Nāmic, ([ˈnɑːm.ık], translates as "name, noun, meaning or thing"), or Naṃkrthāvāka [ˌnã.kr̩ˑ.ˈtʰaː.faː.xa] "Named constructed speech" - is a mixed constructed a priori/ a posteriori language. It draws inspiration from mainly the Indo-European branch, yet makes a decisive stance to preserve artificial features. For the sake of simplicity I suppose it could be called the Namian language, or whatever. Doesn't really matter.

Since there is a tendency in Nāmic to blend characteristics of both artificial and natural languages, a rather unholy mixture has arisen, for example:

It is a fusional language, like its predecessors Latin, Sanskrit, Greek and Germanic - yet displays the highly unnatural ergative-accusativ alignment, or tripartite, - which is rarely seen outside conlanging.

Concerning the vocabulary, both words derived from Indo-European stems, as well as complete a priori words, appear; such as "dhrȳa" - tree, from Indo-European *dóru, and the word for heaven, "ıāmna" - from... me.

Other than that, other, rather unique features are included, such as: Plus an extremely constructed characteristic:
 * Phonemic and manipulated stress.
 * Progressive metaphony.
 * Partial regressive metaphony.
 * Consonant harmony, based upon voicedness.
 * Distinguished transitivity

Phonology
The following table portraits Nāmic's phonetic inventory of consonants. All consonants, except aspirated ones, may be geminated, which is phonemic, and represented by doubling by the grapheme. The letter /h/ represents aspiration when succeding consonants, and breathy-voice when preceding vowels. "Nh", is an exception, being a velar nasal.

Please note that all retroflex consonants and the dental trill rhoticise the surrounding consonants. The pronunciation of  is considered dialectal.

Alphabet
Hence the alphabet of Nāmic:

Please note that the letters /h/ and /ṃ/ are modifiers of adjacent vowels. See the Vowel Quality section.

The letter /ς/ is a possible alternativeto lexeme-final /s/.

Lenition
In addition to the consonants above, Nāmaς suffers from severe allophony, lenition, caused when:


 * Consonants lie in medial position between two vowels.
 * Consonants lie in final position in lexemes.

The aspirated consonants become completely spirantisised, whilst the unaspirated phonemes become affricates. The exceptions are the velars, which all become fricatives. The nasal consonants, affricates, trills and approximants remain unaffected.

Please note that the phonemes without brackets are the "basic" consonants.

Nota bene

There is additional allophony, regarding phonation. The pairs [c - ɟ], [ç -ʝ], [v - f], and [w - ʍ], are only represented by one grapheme each: ȷ, hy, v, and vh respectively. Their voiced counterpart is an allophone - see Consonant Assimilation.

The murmur-phonation letter /h/ receives the pronunciation [ç/x] when final in a syllable.

Thus, our conclusion is that the word vāka- voice, speach - shouldn't be pronounced [ˈwaːka], but rather [ˈʍaːxa].

Affricates
In addition to these, there's a multitude of digraphs with corresponding affricates. It is important to note that the four digraphs /pt/, /vt/, /kt/, and /jt/ symbolise consonant clusters with an affricate onset. They are not affected by lenition.

Consonant Assimilation
Nāmic possesses a progressive consonant assimilation word-internally, based upon phonation, or voicedness.

The consequence is that a consonant, a cluster, or an affricate, is pronounced differently, depending on whether it is preceded by a voiced or voiceless consonant. There are exceptions to this rule, since the alveolar trill [r] and the retroflex tap [ɽ] do not differ between voicedness.

The nasal stops are affected quite differently, with a complete nasalisation of the preceding vowel - and loss of the stop - if the initial or first consonant is voiced. However, nasals are perceived as neutral in nature, and does therefore not affect voiceless nor voiced phonemes.

There are, however, two dialects of Nāmic;


 * Staṇya, which means "current, dominating".

The Staṇya dialect will be featured in this article, and is the main dialect that distinguishes consonant assimilaton upon voicedness.
 * Ḷestra, which means "golden, posh".

Vowels
The representation of Nāmic's vowels. There are are fifteen vowel phonemes, yet only 7 graphemes, thus, it may be assumed some are allophones during certain circumstances. It is obvious that many of the vowel graphemes are recycled, since many phonemes are allophones. The background is covered in the Metaphony section.

Diphtongs
There are a limited number of diphtongs in Nāmaς, with the same amount rising as falling diphtongs. [ɪ̯] is most often equivalent to [j], and [u̯] is often just [w]. The left diftong is its front value, and the right one is the back value. All other vowel clusters are diaeresis. The main phoneme in all diphtongs may be geminated.

Diphtong Allophony
No falling diphtongs occur inter consonants, as a nucleus, nor do the falling diphtongs appear geminated in open coda position. They are transformed into geminated, or short monophtongs - and are inconsistently written as monophtongs, however it isn't compulsory. The allophony according to this schedule:

Front diphtongs on the left, back ones at the right.

Vowel Metaphony
The Naṃkrthāvāka suffers from a certain kind of vowel harmony, called progressive vowel metaphony. This urges all vowel phonemes in a lexeme to be of the same kind of the preceding one. That is: Va = type-a vowel, Vb = type-b vowel, C = consonant: VaVb Vb > VaVa Va

There are tqo exception, causing the metaphony to be regressive instead; when a word is initialised by an [ɛ], or an [ә]. The [ɛ] and [ә] the gets assimilated by the succeeding consonant: Vb Va Vb > VaVa Va

These modified [ɛ-ә] -sounds will occurr later in text, and will be referred to as "affected" /ɛ-ә/.

The metaphony is present, and affect for example the plural endings of many case declensions, where the coda vowel gets completely assimilated by the former. However, if the preceding vowel has the same front-back value, it's just diphtongised.


 * Horse - thētosya (abs. sing.) > thētosyoı (abs. plu.)


 * But not; "fire" - kēma (erg. sing.) > *kēmeı, but rather kēmaı (erg. plu.)

Nāmic's metaphony is based upon backness, with eceptions being when /e/, /y/ and /o/ are followed by an [r], which ignores the harmony, and modifies the phoneme.

Vowel Quality
There are no less than six different vowel qualities: The vowels will be represented by a default /a/. Please note that any nasal can nasalise the preceding vowel, however in non-voiced environments, only the letter "ṃ" may.
 * Short and geminated Oral
 * Short and geminated Nasal
 * Short and geminated Murmured

Nota Bene

When /h + vowel/ is preceded by a vowel, a glottal stop is inserted.

Other
Some phonemes create new pronunciations when adjacent to eachother:
 * [s] + [r] = [xr]
 * [s] + [u] + [vowel] = [su̯V]
 * [s] + [u] + [ı] = [sʍı]