Edebro

Edebro ([ˌɛdɛˈbro̞], lit. "clear tongue," and sometimes spelled Ede Bro in English) is the national and official language of Gxambfan, a nation located on the southwestern corner of Kadsrasan, the northeastern continent of the planet Aysling.

Classification and Dialects
Edebro is a well-known language isolate, although research is ongoing regarding possible affiliations with other languages. Despite the lack of confirmed relatives, however, Edebro does have some dialectal variation of its own. A slightly modified version of the dialect of Arsingxara, the capital of Gxambfan, is taken as the standard form of the language; this standard is the form reflected in this article unless otherwise noted.

Consonants
Edebro has a fairly average-sized consonant inventory, with 19 total consonant phonemes. Its inventory is fairly typical in its contents as well, with four places of articulation, and five manners of articulation. The most notable features are its series of palatalized coronals, and the phonemes which are realized in most dialects—including the standard—as affricates, of which /p͡f/ and /k͡x/ are unusual. In the actual dialect of Arsingxara, the bilabial and velar affricates are reduced to fricatives, however this is a shift unreflected in the standard form of the language.

Consonant Allophony
The most apparent example of consonantal allophony in Edebro is voicing of non-aspirated obstruents, including affricates. This voicing occurs intervocallically, as well as in clusters with voiced consonants (i.e. sonorants). The sibilants /s/ and /ʃ/ may also voice to [z] and [ʒ], respectively, when in a coda preceding a nasal stop in the following onset.

Additional allophonic variation includes the liquid /rʲ/ possibly being realized as [j] in consonant clusters or in coda. This pattern occurs in the standard dialect, while in some non-standard dialects it may be realized as such in all positions, leaving [rʲ] and [j] to be in free variation in such dialects. Similarly, /nʲ/ may be realized as [ɲ] in coda position in some dialects, or in all positions in others; however unlike /rʲ/ this variation is not typically seen in speakers of the standard dialect.

Vowels
Even more average than Edebro's consonants are its vowels, which form the common five vowel system. While the dialect of Arsingxara, and the standard form, lack diphthongs, some dialects retain diphthongs from older forms of the language. Such diphthongs include /ai/, /au/, /ei/, /ou/, /ia/ and /ua/; these have been monophthongized to /e/, /o/, /i/, /u/, /a/, and /a/, respectively, in the varieties that lack them.

Vowel Allophony
Despite the fairly small inventory, Edebro vowels exhibit only moderate allophony: The low vowel /a/ is realized as a schwa [ə] in all unstressed positions. In unstressed syllables, the mid vowels /e̞/ and /o̞/ lower to [ɛ] and [ɔ], respectively, before phonetically voiced consonants—this includes voiceless stops which have been intervocalically voiced, such as in sobfe 'craft (n.),' which is phonemically /so̞ˈp͡fe̞/ but realized as [sɔˈb͡ve̞]. And the high vowels /i/ and /u/ become [ɪ] and [ʊ], respectively, when preceding nasal stops in unstressed syllables. In stressed syllables, all vowels maintain their cardinal realizations.

Additionally, words which begin with a vowel receive epenthetic glides when the preceding word also ends in a vowel. For words beginning in /e̞/ or /i/, this glide is [j]; for words beginning in /o̞/ or /u/, the glide is [w]; and for words in /a/, the glide is [ɦ]. This same pattern of glide epenthesis is also seen when an onset-less syllable is reduplicated, such as in aanjasj 'dogs,' which is underlyingly /aaˈnʲaʃ/ but realized as [əɦəˈnʲaʃ].

Phonotactics
Edebro's syllables may consist of a maximum of CCVC. Syllable onsets may consist of any lone consonant or a cluster of a plosive or nasal with a liquid. A nucleus, of course, may be any vowel. Syllable codas in Edebro may only be a sibilant fricative or sonorant.

Stress
Stress in Edebro is contrastive, and plays a key role in distinguishing nouns from verbs. Nouns are typically marked with word-final stress, while verbs are usually marked with penultimate stress.

Writing System
For the purposes of this article, Edebro will be transcribed in a version of the Latin script. The character-to-sound correspondences of this system are displayed in the chart below: Stress may optionally be indicated with an acute on the stressed vowel; this is typically done in dictionaries, but otherwise omitted from writing. Digraphs, besides those involving , ought to have both elements capitalized when capitalized, but this is often neglected.

Nouns
Edebro nouns are morphologically quite simple. They do not inflect for case or definiteness, although they do decline according to number. While singular nouns remain unmarked, plural nouns are marked through reduplication, of the first CV pair in consonant-initial nouns, and of the first vowel with an epenthetic glide in vowel-initial nouns. An example of both is demonstrated in the following table: In front vowels, the epenthetic glide is [j]; in back vowels, it is [w]; and in the low vowel /a/, it is [ɦ] as seen above.

Nouns also do not have gender, although they do have an inherent animacy level. This animacy level is not marked explicitly on the noun itself, but will be relevant later for verbal conjugation.

Personal Pronouns
Edebro has a set of 14 personal pronouns, which contrast three persons, two numbers, a T-V distinction in the second person, and animacy and proximity/obviation in the third person. The third person pronouns are adopted from the demonstratives, which in their singular form they are identical to. When used as a standalone pronoun, these demonstrative-pronouns have an optional plural form formed via reduplication. These plural forms are typically only used when the context would otherwise leave ambiguity.

Personal pronouns do not vary in form for case, and do not have distinct possessive forms. Possession by pronoun is instead constructed the same way as possession by a regular noun.

Verbs
In Edebro, all clauses (with one exception, which will be covered later) require two parts to express the function of a verb: a lexical verb and an auxiliary verb.

Lexical Verbs
The first element of an Edebro verb is the lexical component. Lexical verbs are an open class, and they convey the semantic content of the action or state the clause is describing. The lexical verb does not inflect for grammatical categories such as tense, aspect, mood, or voice. The only inflection the lexical verb may undergo is partial reduplication, identical to that which nouns undergo for plural marking, which can have two meanings depending on the type of verb. For active-type verbs, reduplication marks telicity (an unmarked verb indicates an incomplete action, whereas a reduplicated verb indicates an action whose goal has been met); for stative-type verbs, reduplication marks intensiveness (similar to the English word 'very'). The below table provides examples of reduplication in both types of lexical verb.

Auxiliary Verbs
In contrast with the lexical verb, which does not inflect for almost any grammatical information itself, the auxiliary verb inflects for the categories of transitivity, inverseness, voice, tense, and mood, but does not bear any other semantic content. The forms of the auxiliary verbs appear in the chart below. Lexical verbs may be either active or stative. While stative verbs will typically take the copular auxiliary, active verbs may take the intransitive, direct or inverse, and some active verbs, such as verbs of movement, may also take the copular auxiliary.

As Edebro is a direct-inverse language, the auxiliary verb makes a distinction in inversivity in transitive clauses. The direct form of the auxiliary verb is used in clauses in which the more animate noun is taking the role of the agent, while the inverse form is used when the less animate noun is the agent. Therefore, a sentence like sjúrjo anjásj tjo mas translates to "a man saw a dog," while the same sentence but replacing mas with mare results in a translation as "a dog saw a man."

Syntax
Edebro is a head-final language with a mandatory auxiliary verb. As such, its underlying default word order is SOVA (subject, object, verb, auxiliary). However, as Edebro is topic-prominent, this is often not the order that actually surfaces. Both topic and focus are mandatory in all transitive matrix clauses, except when both arguments are pronouns, as pronouns cannot be focused. Topics are fronted to the beginning of the clause, and focuses immediately precede the auxiliary verb. The auxiliary verb always appears at the end of a clause, apart from any complementizer that may be present.

Because there is no morphological case marking on nouns, and word order is complicated by the topic-comment structure, Edebro has no morphosyntactic case. Instead, to indicate the roles of arguments in transitive clauses, nouns are inherently ranked on an animacy hierarchy; nouns higher on the hierarchy are the agent by default. In cases where the lower animacy argument is the agent, the auxiliary verb is marked with an inverse marker, -re, which indicates that the arguments' roles are reversed. This system is known as direct-inverse alignment.

Additionally, as there is no agreement marking on verbs, Edebro is not pro-drop; pronouns must always be explicit. Furthermore, there are no articles such as 'a' or 'the', but Edebro does have a set of demonstratives, ru 'this (inan.)', dsa 'that (inan.)', ke 'this (anim.)', and dsjas 'that (anim.)'; which also function as the third person pronouns. These words reduplicate for plurality when functioning as pronouns, but not when determiners.

Edebro employs serial verb constructions, often for expressions that would be conveyed in English using adverbs. In these constructions, the clause has two or more lexical verbs, but only one agent and one auxiliary verb; there may be more than one patient, however. In cases with multiple patients, patients may intercede the lexical verbs, but only one may be focused. Other uses for serial verb constructions in Edebro are to express causally or temporally linked actions, or actions/events with more than two arguments.

Edebro has no true adjectives, but rather stative verbs that must occur alongside the copular auxiliary o. When modifying a noun, these stative verbs occur within a relative clause. Relative clauses are constructed using a gapped construction with a relativizer particle, which appears as the clitic =m(i). Relative clauses, in accordance with head-final tendencies, precede their heads.

Edebro indicates possession via a locative construction, and makes a distinction between alienable and inalienable possession. Alienable possession is expressed with the postposition e 'at', while inalienable possession is indicated with the postposition no 'on'. In possessive clauses, the possessor is expressed as an argument, and the possessee as an adpositional phrase, linked by the copular auxiliary o.

Simple polar questions are formed by the addition of the question particle, sje, to the end of the clause, following the auxiliary verb. Content questions are formed using interrogative pronouns, which are always placed in the focused position, preceding the auxiliary verb.

Imperatives are formed by omitting the auxiliary verb (or in other analyses, by use of a zero auxiliary), and in those cases directed towards a second person singular, the subject. In the latter cases, the lexical verb may appear alone, or followed by objects or adpositional phrases. In second person plural or first person plural imperatives, the pronoun always occurs before the verb (effectively in the topic position).