Sïsang

Consonants

 * These are allophones of /u/ and /i/ when used as consonants.

Phonotactics
All syllables are of the form CV, where C can be an affricate.

Tone
There are three contour tones, a rising tone, a falling tone, and a flat tone.

Writing System
The writing system is featural. Voicedness of any given consonant is indicated by the middle-bar - so, the voiced equivalent of /p/ Г is the letter /b/ F. Letters are written starting from the left.

Diacritics
The three diacritics used for tone are: The acute accent, for the rising tone; the grave accent, for the falling tone; and nothing, for the flat tone. Examples:

[ŋ̊i˧˥] - Ɔṕ

[ŋ̊i˧] - Ɔp

[ŋ̊i˧˩] - Ɔp̀

Note on Affricates: instead of being written as separate letters, the plosive and fricative components are ligated.

Grammar
The word-order is subject-object-verb, and the parts of a sentence are determined only by location. Each part is consisted of a single word; any modifiers to a word are suffixed to that word.

The 'past' morpheme is what differentiates present from past tense - unlike Indo-European languages, there is no inflection, and all case, tense, number, &c. is represented by suffixing morphemes. Note also that 'we' is represented by 'me-you'. This is because a word like 'we' represents more than one thing, which simply never happens in this language, at least not in the single-morpheme components of words.

The nouns in this language are not built like "Corenoun-adjective-adjective-adjective", but in fact like "adjective-adjective-adjective". The adjectives making up the noun construct a mental image of what the subject is like - it may be flat, black, red, hard, hot and painful - a stove-top; or it may be round, red, small, and connected to a stem, like a cherry.

The potential ambiguity of these sorts of words, in addition to the way they are open to several ways of writing down (in different levels of detail, or in different orders, or from different points of view) tells a more subjective and descriptive idea of the things one is trying to talk about in this language.

Here's a deconstruction of an English sentence to demonstrate how this grammar would apply:

"We ate pie", make "ate" into a prefixed verb

"We past-eat pie", change word order

"We pie past-eat", split "we" into simpler parts

"Me-you pie past-eat", split "eat" into simpler parts

"Me-you pie past-move-to-mouth", deconstruct nouns (leave pronouns intact)

"Me-you sweet-round-nourishing past-move-to-feeding"

It may look cumbersome, but recall that in this language, each morpheme is one syllable in length, and each syllable is two letters. All in all, this would be two words of 22 letters in total, which (though longer than the English 8) is very manageable and can hold a lot of descriptive meaning. Depending on context, morphemes like "to" could be omitted if context was clear, or more descriptors like "on the left" or "fruity" to further specify.

Lexicon
The lexicon is composed of a relatively small number of mono-morphemic, monosyllabic words which can be agglutinated to form larger ones.