Mésylþo

=General information=

=Phonology=

Consonants
There is also the glottal /h/ ‹h›, which also indicates phonemic breathy voice in the preceding voiced phoneme.

/r/ is realized as a rhoticization of the previous vowel in coda position.

Consonant length is phonemic, but only across syllable boundaries, as consonant clusters within syllables do not exist.

Vowels
Orthography for vowels is identical with the IPA values. RTR is differentiating: non-RTR ("tense") vowels are represented with an acute accent ‹´› over the character.

Phonotactics
Mésylþo allows V, VC, CV, and CVC syllables, with no diphthongs.

/h/ may appear after the onset and after the nucleus and does not appear to carry a mora as a consonant.

Approximants only appear in onset position.

/ç/ only appears in coda position. When it appears after a consonant, the previous consonant is unpronounced and typically unwritten.

Vowels are broken up with /h/. A potential diphthong beginning with a high vowel is broken up with the appropriate approximant.

Prosody
Mora-timed with a regular pitch-accent pattern: the initial tense syllable in a word takes pitch. This creates some minimal pairs with pitch when this syllable has /a/ as a nucleus, ie lácna (field[ACC]) vs lacná (to drown[IA]).

=Morphology= Mésylþo has two grammatical genders, also called classes: animate and inanimate. These are by and large also semantic classes, but there are a number of nouns that are semantically inanimate while grammatically animate and so are better treated as genders.

"Root" refers to the word as shown in the lexicon: a single open-class morpheme. "Stem" refers to a word without affixes; that is, the open-class morpheme and any clitics.

Nouns
Nouns are inflected for person, case, animacy, and number, with the latter three features typically expressed together within a single suffix.

Eight cases exist: Nominative, Accusative, Dative, Instrumental/Associative (considered a single case), Locative, Comparative, Vialis, and Vocative, though for semantic reasons, not all exist for both animate and inanimate classes.

Many adjectives may also be attached to nouns in a clitic form, as a prefix closest to the root.

Animate Paradigm

 * The vocative is a postposed particle.

Person
Singular possessive markers are prefixes. Plural markers are suffixes paired with the appropriate singular marker.

Verbs
Verbs come in four different paradigms: Animate Intransitive (AI), Inanimate Intransitive (II), Transitive Animate (AI), and Transitive Inanimate (AI). Crucially, this means that verbs must be used appropriately for their paradigm: for instance, the root for throwing an inanimate noun such as a ball is hílo, while throwing an animate object (whether actually alive or not) is arrówe.

Verbs are obligatorily inflected for person and number (in a single prefix). Transitive verbs are obligatorily inflected for the person and number of the object (in a single suffix). They may also be inflected for tense, aspect, and voice as individual agglutinations.

Person
Subject prefix is always furthest from the root. The plural suffix is paired with the singular prefix, before the object suffix

Object
Object suffixes are always furthest from the root.

The object suffix placement is also that of the passive suffix -oc.

Adjectives
Adjectives can be treated as verbs ("to be X") but also tend to have clitic forms that prefix the noun, closest to the root. In the lexicon here, verbal adjectives will be marked with (v), and clitics with (c).

=Lexicon=

Open Class
=Examples=

Random sentences
ehmáhcifuþeh

1-neg-spit-pl

"We do not spit."

þíwašuhl ihmmálwalalijeh ruf ihmwalálijeh þíwašuhl.

always-dat.pl 1-neg-sing-pl but 1-sing-pl always-dat.pl

"We never sing but we always sing."

ihmmálfihssiwaheh þíwašuhl ruf þíwašuhl ihmfihssíwaheh

1-neg-whisper-pl always-dat.pl but always-dat.pl 1-whisper-pl

"We never whisper but we always whisper."