Ngmẹev tshigz

Ngmẹev tshigz ([ŋ͡mɛ͡e˩˧ t͡sʰḭ˧˩], alternatively spelled Ngmèev tshigz, and also known as Ngmei in English) is a language spoken on the planet Aysling.

Consonants
Ngmẹev tshigz has a rather large consonant inventory, characterized by prenasalized stops, voiceless nasals, a low proportion of fricatives, and a wide array of places of articulation, including retroflexes, uvulars, and doubly articulated labial-velars. In total, Ngmẹev tshigz has between 40 and 45 consonants, depending on the dialect.

The non-sibilant retroflex consonants occur only in some dialects. In others, they have merged into the alveolars. In some dialects that have merged them, the retroflex sibilants realize as post-alveolar instead. Likewise, the linguolabial series occurs only in some dialects; in those that have lost them, the results vary: most often, they have merged into the alveolar series, while in more conservative lects they may merge with the labials instead. Some lects may maintain them as a contrastive series but realize them as a dental series, resulting in an apical dental versus laminal alveolar contrast. The voiceless lateral approximant and voiceless lateral fricative are in free variation.

The glottal stop occurs predictably at the beginning of vowel-initial words, except those at the beginning of an utterance.

Vowels
Ngmẹev tshigz has moderately large vowel inventory, with nine oral monophthongs and an additional three nasal monopthongs. The vowel inventory is characterized by the presence of both a rounded front vowel and unrounded back vowel. The vowel identified in the chart as /ɤ/ actually has a fairly wide range of realizations, the most common of which is [ɯ̽], but which also include [ɤ], [ɯ], and [ɨ]. Some dialects have a preference for one realization or another, while in others it appears to largely be up to the individual speaker, or vary by phonological environment. Additionally, all vowels may appear long, and there are a wide array of diphthongs, which are detailed below.

Diphthongs
Ngmẹev has a wide variety of diphthongs. Including long vowels, some dialects have up to 58 diphthongs. However, not all dialects maintain all of the diphthongs included below. Please note that the header cells use IPA while the interior cells indicate the orthography used for the corresponding diphthong.

Tones
Ngmẹev tshigz is a tonal language. It possesses five tones, which may occur in conjunction with three phonation qualities.

Any combination of tone and phonation can occur.

Phonotactics
The Ngmẹev tshigz syllable is very simple, consisting of a vowel, which may be either a monophthong or a diphthong, and an optional onset, which may only consist of a single consonant. Ngmẹev tshigz syllables may not have codas. Additionally, most syllables bear tone, though clitics do not possess a tone of their own, but rather echo that of their host word.

Writing System
As an Ayslingian language, Ngmẹev tshigz is not natively written in the Latin alphabet. However, for presentation purposes on this website, the following romanization will be the primary mode of transcription used here.

Long vowels are written by doubling the vowel, e.g. /qʰoː˥/. Diphthongs are similarly written with the corresponding component vowels, e.g. /ŋ̊a͡e˩/. When a non-mid-tone syllable is also creaky or breathy, the letters  and  follow the letters and .

When unavailable, the characters <ẹ> and <ọ> may be replaced by <è> and <ò>.

Initial Consonant Mutations
Some grammatical environments trigger mutations in word-initial consonants. There are two primary kinds of mutations that can occur, the choice depending on the particular triggering environments. Below is a chart examining these mutations:

Verb Phrases
Verb phrases consist of a verb, an optional trigger marker, and an optional aspect marker.

The trigger marker, if there is one, appears before the verb. The default trigger is the agent trigger, so it is unmarked, meaning there is no trigger marker. The patient trigger is qhẹ.

The aspect marker, if there is one, appears after the verb. The perfective aspect is marked by the word nto.

Noun Phrases
Noun phrases consist of a noun, a focus marker, and optional adjectives or other modifiers.

The focus marker can appear as either a proclitic on the first word of the noun phrase, or a word following the noun itself. When it appears as a proclitic, it can also trigger mutation in the head noun. The focused marker, or direct marker, is typically mọ in its proclitic form, which triggers N-mutation, and mon in its postpositional form. The unfocused marker, or indirect marker, is typically xe in its proclitic form, which does not trigger mutation.