Common Saakkih

Iboorxaa /ibo:rħa:/ is a language isolate spoken by approximately 70,000 Iboor people from the Saakkih peninsula in the Shinsali Confederacy.

General information
Iboorxaa is a fusional nominative-accusative language. The language makes heavy use of ablaut, especially in nouns.

Consonants

 * Consonant gemination (of all consonants other than /h/) is contrastive and occurs in roots, across morpheme boundaries, and in affixes

Vowels

 * There are five diphthongs: /ai au ao ou oi/

Allophony

 * /r/ is tapped before other consonants or word-finally
 * Vowels become more lax before (not after) the pharyngeal fricative
 * /i/ > /ɪ/
 * /u/ > /ʊ/
 * /o/ > /ɔ/
 * /a/ > /æ/

Writing system

 * Except for below, all consonants are written as in the IPA
 * /ħ/ is represented by x
 * /pʰ/ is represented by p
 * /p/ is represented by b
 * Long vowels and geminate consonants are written with a double grapheme, i.e. /a:/ is orthographically aa
 * In order to differentiate words with sequences of vowels and or diphthongs, such as /aka.a/ and /aka:/, which would both be written as akaa, or /oka.ai/ and /oka:.i/, which would both be written as okaai, diaresis are placed above the first seperate short vowel, meaning /oka.ai/ would be written as okäai and /aka.a/ is written as akäa

Phonotactics
Any syllables derivable from (s)(C)(R)V(C) that do not violate the rules below is permissible, where C is any consonant, R is any non-nasal resonant or fricative sans /h/, and V is a vowel or diphthong.
 * Geminate consonants may not occur in word-initial clusters
 * If there is all three of (s)(C)(R) present in a syllable, (R) may not be /s/
 * /h/ only occurs in isolation in the syllable onset