Hoyu

Haiju is a language spoken in Haigwo, an island nation south of China, where it is the sole official language of Haigwo's 9 million residents. It is a language isolate written with a modified-Latin script and occasionally Chinese logograms called Toshiwa  (图写七) - figure writing - in Haiju.

General information
Haiju is the native language of the Hai people in the South China Sea. It is a verb-heavy language with a agglutinative grammar. Word order is usually SVO, but it can be flexible do to the high level of inflection. Historically, the language was written with Chinese logograms, but because they represented little of the actual language, the Hai people officially adopted the Latin script in the mid-1900s. Still, the Chinese logograms see use today, mostly among elders, but also as a simpler means of communication. Because of the nation's long history of trade with the Chinese, there are many loanwords from Chinese in the Haiju language.

Etymology
The word Hai, which is representative of the Hai people, is a Chinese loan (海 Hǎi) and it literally means "sea". Historically, many Chinese were surprised to find an island nation south of their land and talked of it appearing from the ocean overnight and referred to it as the sea nation (海国 Hǎi guó), which is where the nation gets it's modern name from. Haiju (from Chinese 海语 Hǎi yǔ) means "sea language". Residents of Haigwo are called Haireneb (sea people) in Haiju, which is taken from the Chinese phrase for sea people (海人 hǎi rén).

Monopthongs

 * 1) /i/ is only realized as /ɪ/ in dipthongs or tripthongs, it is realized as /i/ on it's own

Alphabet

 * 1) /ŋ/ can not occur in the syllable onset so there is no majascule form

Chinese logograms
The Hai people adopted the Chinese logograms (called 图写七 Toshiwa - figure writing in Haiju) hundreds of years ago. The logography was a very crude way of communicating because not much can be understood by simply looking at the Chinese characters. In order to actually read the Chinese characters for Haiju and understand them, near-fluency and knowledge of the logography is needed. Even then, the meaning conveyed through the logograms was ambiguous. The most commonly used Chinese character in Haigwo is 海 Hǎi - the chinese character for Sea, which is still featured on the nation's flag and all government-affiliated documents.

Rules of Use

 * Noun cases are indicated by Chinese characters for prepositions.
 * Chinese numerals are never used as numerals. Latin numerals are used instead.
 * Pluralization is indicated by the Chinese character for two (二) following the noun.

Phonotactics
(C)(C)V(C)(C)

A word may be a single vowel, which can be a monop-, dip, or tripthong. Any single consonant can occur in the syllable coda other than /ɲ/. Any consonant other than /ŋ/ can occur in the syllable onset.

Syllable-onset consonant clusters
/sk/, /sl/, /sm/, /sn/, /sɲ/, /sp/, /st/, /sv/, /br/, /dr/ /ðr/, /fr/, /gr/, /kr/, /pr/, /ʃr/, /θr/, /ʃk/, /ʃl/, /ʃm/, /ʃn/, /ʃɲ/, /ʃp/, /ʃr/, /ʃt/, /ʃv/, /gl/, /fl/, /kl/, /bl/

Syllable-coda consonant clusters
/ks/, /ls/, /ms/, /ns/, /ŋs/, /ps/, /rb/, /rd/ /rð/, /rf/, /rg/, /rk/, /rp/, /rʃ/, /rθ/, /rʃ/, /lʃ/, /mʃ/, /nʃ/, /ŋʃ/, /pʃ/, /rʃ/, /vʃ/, /nt/, /nd/, /ft/, /kt/, /ld/, /lt/, /lp/, /lb/, /lk/, /lf/, /lv/, /rt͡ʃ/, /lt͡ʃ/, /mp/, /mf/, /nz/, /ŋk/, /pt/, /ŋθ/

Structural Agreement
Haiju words must all agree in structure. The structure of all words is CVCVCV... where C is a consonant or permitted consonant cluster and V is a vowel or dip/tripthong. Because of this, Haiju has many epithetic particles, which can be different depending on the affix it is attached to.

Verbs
Haiju conveys much information through verbs. A verb root can take prefixes or suffixes to convey speaker (person, gender, number, clusivity), mood, tense, and voice. All affixes are one or two letters. In the jussive mood, the subject marker becomes the object. The Chinese character for each affix is listed below or next to the Latin affix.

Subject prefixes
There are three non-grammatical genders in Haiju: masculine, feminine, and inanimate. They always agree with the subject, that is, a chair would be inanimate, one's sister would be feminine, and one's father would be masculine. If the subject or every subject (if plural) can agree to a gender, the gender must be included on the verb. There are three persons: first, second, and third person, and two numbers: singular and plural, which produces a total of 6 person+number markers.

Tense Markers
Haiju has three tenses. If the tense marker does not structurally agree with the verb step, an epithetic -s- is added.

The verb stem
Verb stems in Haiju are always one syllable and do not undergo any conjugation. However, dual verbs ("start playing" "start to sing" "need to move" etc) can stack next to each other. If there is an adverb, adjective with an adjectival suffix, or adjective (adjectives are usually found alongside the verb "be") modifying the verb, it stacks similar to dual verbs (are green, am hungry, play fair, stand defensively, etc). Nouns or adjectives modifying nouns (be-adjectives are an exception) will never stack with a verb. If the end and beginning of two verb/verb modifiers end with a consonant or vowel respectively, an epenthetic -i- and a -g- are inserted.

Mood markers
If the verb root does not end in a consonant, the mood marker adds an epenthetic -g- in between the end of the verb root and the beginning of the mood marker.

Indicative
The indicative mood is used for factual statements, such as in the examples listed below.

Subjunctive
The subjunctive mood is used when speaking about something hypothetical (an "if" statement).

Conditional
The conditional mood is used when one statement depends on another. In english, this usually translates as would + verb (e.g. I would buy). The conditional mood is almost always used alongside the subjunctive mood.

Nouns
The noun is the second most important thing in Haiju. Most nouns are one syllable, but two nouns can be combined to represent a single idea. Loanwords from English for modern ideas, however, can be multiple syllables, such as "Computer", which is spelled as "kompjutor" in Haiju.

Noun cases
The nominative case is almost always unmarked but gerunds will always take a case ending and, as such, will take on the nominative suffix given that a gerund is the subject. The genetive case, along with showing posession, takes the function of a partitive case as well, with the numbers taking on the "partitive" suffix. All noun cases have two suffixes for structural agreement.

Determiners
Determiners are affuxes attached to the beginning of the noun. The posessive article takes on affixes similar to the verb to show gender and plurality. An epinthetic -n- is added if the ending of the determiner does not structurally agree with the noun. Posessive determiners, like all determiners, attach to the beginning of the noun. An epinthetic -i- is added if the ending of the determiner does not agree structurally with the noun. To form posessive pronouns (mine, yours, his, hers, it's, etc), the posessive determiners listed below take on the nominative case ending.