Onnatic

Onnatic is a descendant of Nessëran, characterised by the continuing loss of phonemic vowel length, the reduction of close vowels, and the simplification of some consonant clusters.

=Phonology=

Vowels
Onnatic has a system of eleven vowels.

Consonants
The Onnatic language has signigicantly fewer consonants than it's parent language, this is because the language has lost all of it's voiced fricatives, meaning that /z/ and /s/ have merged into /s/, and /f/ and /v/ have merged to /f/.

Sound Changes from Nessëran
The phonemic vowel length found in Nessëran was lost in Onnatic, with /ɑː/ and /eː/ merging with their short counterparts. /ɶː/ was also raised to /œ/.

/jɔ/ and /jɒ/ also became /œ/. The same process also affected /u/, causing /ju/ to become /y/.

Characteristic of Onnatic is the reduction of the Nessëran close vowels /i/ and /u/ to /ɪ/ and /ʊ/ respectively in some occurrances, particularly in single-syllable words and before nasal consonants. For example Nessëran [dup] "down" became Onnatic [dʊp].

Another striking feature of Onnatic when compared to it's parent language is the devoicing of fricatives. Nessëran had already devoiced /dz/, /dʒ/. /ʒ/, /ʝ/, but Onnatic went one step further and also devoiced /v/ and /z/ to /f/ and /s/ respectively.

=Orthography= The language uses a modificiation of the Latin alphabet, with the addition of the use of the acute accent, caron, dot and umlaut diacritic marks. The letters v, w, x, y and z are not used, and are only seen in words of foreign origin.

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