Chali

Chali is a Berber-Cushitic dialect continuum spoken in the River of Shala, Ethiopia. It is an mainly-suffixing agglutinative language, with some slight Semitic influence.

Consonants
Chali's consonantal inventory shares most of the Omotic and Cushitic languages, with the lack of phonemic /p/ and labialized stops and nasals. Voiceless stops are aspirated at the beginning of a word, and have no audible release at the end of words e.g. táat [ˈtʰaːt̚˦] (folk).

Vowels
When in unstressed positions, /a/ reduces to [ə], /e/ reduces to [i] and /o/ reduces to [u]. Phonemic /ə/ is rare.

Tone indication
When needed, the conventions for marking tone in written Chali are as follows:


 * acute accent (á)- high tone /˦/
 * grave accent (à) - low tone /˨/
 * circumflex (â) - falling tone /˦˨/

Tones on long vowels are marked on the first vowel symbol.

Pitch accent
In Chali, the tone-bearing unit is the mora rather than the vowel of the syllable.


 * 1) A long vowel or a diphthong consists of two morae and can bear two tones. Each mora is defined as being of high or low tone.
 * 2) Only one high tone occurs per word and this must be on the final or penultimate mora.
 * 3) Particles do not have a high tone. (These include prepositions, clitic pronouns for subject and object, impersonal subject pronouns and focus markers.)

There are therefore three possible "accentual patterns" in word roots.

The tone accent in Chali may be classified as a pitch accent. It is similar to that of Oromo and Somali.

Rules of tone
Phonetically there are three tones: high, low and falling. Rules:


 * 1) On a long vowel, a sequence of high-low /˦˨/ is realized as a falling tone.
 * 2) On a long vowel, a sequence of low-high /˨˦/ is realized as high-high /˦˦/. (Occasionally it is a rising tone.)

Stress-tone connection
Chali also conceptualizes stress in terms of tone. The high tone has strong stress; the falling tone has less stress and the low tone has no stress.

Syllable structure
The Chali syllable structure is a maximum of C(r)(S)V(S)(C), where S represents a semivowel and initial Cr is only used in loanwords e.g. traag (truck). To avoid such initial consonant clusters, an epenthetic /a/ or prosthetic /i/ (sometimes toned) may be used (táraag). All consonants may be geminated, except /t/, /k/, the labialized consonants and the fricatives.

Orthography
Chali is written with the Latin Kotaax or Arabic Wotaa script. The Kotaax script uses all letters of the Latin alphabet, minus p and v. It also uses a phonemic system, meaning that it uses a one to one grapheme orthography. Long vowels are shown by doubling the vowel. Labialized consonants are made by putting w after the letter (KW, GW, QW, NGW) (In Wotaa, a waw is placed after the consonant). Diphthongs are represented using Y or W as the second element (AY, AW, EY, EW, OY, and OW), and long versions of them are shown with the first vowel doubled.

Consonants
The names and order of the consonants are based on the Arabic alphabet.

Gender
Every Chali noun has a gender, either masculine or feminine. Grammatical gender in Chali enters into the grammar in the following ways:


 * verb agreement in the 2nd and 3rd persons e.g. keennaa (you (m.) bring), keentaa (you (f.) bring)
 * pronouns in the 2nd and 3rd persons are distinguished by gender e.g. adaw (you (m.)), aday (you (f.))
 * adjectives are also declined depending on the gender of the noun.

Plurals
There are four rules regarding plurals of Chali:


 * 1) Feminine nouns ending with -i have a plural ending in -yaa.
 * 2) Masculine nouns ending with -a have a plural ending in -ol.
 * 3) Masculine mono-syllabic nouns usually form by partial final reduplication.
 * 4) Other nouns usually have a plural that ends in -(y)u.

Examples

 * 1) gíri - giraffe, giríyaa - giraffes
 * 2) raa - frog, raanol - frogs
 * 3) eey - dog, eeyey - dogs
 * 4) saba - morning, sabayu - mornings

Definiteness
Nouns also inflect for definiteness. The indefinite is unmarked, while the definite is marked with the following suffixes based on gender and final consonant:

Case
There are four cases in Chali, nominative, absolutive, genitive and ablative.

Nominative
The nominative is the base form of the noun, with no other prefix or suffix added.


 * bóg - book

Absolutive
The absolutive case is used when a noun:


 * is a subject of a transitive verb
 * is the objects of a predicative/non-predicative sentence
 * follows absolutive prepositions

It is formed with a separate suffix, -ga.


 * bógga - book (abs.)

Genitive
The genitive case is used for marking a noun a possessor of another noun. It is usually formed by reduplicating the first syllable (excluding its coda) of the noun.


 * bobóg - book's

Ablative
The ablative case marks movement away from a noun. It is marked with the prefix -ata.


 * bogáta - from the book

Adjectives
Adjectives, like nouns are also inflected for