Nauhi

Setting
Hello and thank you for visiting my language page. Please also view my other language called Ceraomi. This language I'm creating is called Nauhi. I am trying to make it a very simple language that is easy to learn.

Phonology
Nauhi has a small phonemic inventory of 3 vowels and 12 consonants that are shown in the tables below. The sounds in brackets are allophonic.

Diphthongs: /ai~ae/, /au~ao/.

Nauhi has a basic three-vowel system consisting of the vowels /i/, /a/ and /u/. /i/ and /u/ become lowered to [e] and [o] respectively when occurring before a uvular consonant, as is indicated in the spelling system. Vowel quality is the only contrastive feature within the vowel system (features such as length and nasality are not phonemically contrastive).

The consonant system of Nauhi is fairly small with 12 consonants. There is, however, a large amount of allophonic variance within the consonant system. The voiceless consonants /p/, /t/, /k/, /q/, /ɸ/, /s/, /h/ and /ɬ/ become voiced to [b], [d], [g], [ɢ], [β], [z], [ɦ] and [l] respectively when occurring between two vowels within a word, and /ɹ/ becomes a flap [ɾ] in this environment. Note that the voiced allophone of /ɬ/ is an approximant [l] rather than a fricative. /n/ assimilates to /ŋ/ before /k/ and to [ɴ] before /q/.

Phonotactic constraints All words start in one of the following eight consonants: /p/, /t/, /k/, /ɸ/, /s/, /h/, /ɬ/, /ɹ/. Over 96% of words end in a vowel. The only consonant that can end a word is /ʁ̞/. Diphthongs occur in about 11% of words and are always found in stressed syllables. Clusters of two adjacent vowels pronounced separately occur in only 1-2% of words. Consonant clusters occur fairly frequently but are limited to a length of two consonants and are only found word-medially.

Word stress

Stress in Nauhi words is fairly weak and is not phonemically contrastive. Stress is predictable and falls on the penultimate syllable.

Root morphemes

There are about 1500 root morphemes in Nauhi. Due to this fairly small root vocabulary size, Nauhi relies heavily on the joining of root morphemes to form compound structures. When forming compounds, root morphemes are placed side by side and maintain their original form, rather than being agglutinated into a single longer word. Nauhi morphology is discussed in more depth in the grammar section of this page. Nauhi root morphemes never exceed three syllables in length. The following word structures are found for Nauhi root morphemes (C = consonant, V = vowel, D = diphthong): Monosyllabic: CV(C), CD(C); Disyllabic: CVC(C)V(C), CDC(C)V(C); Trisyllabic: CVCVC(C)V(C), CVCDC(C)V(C), CVVC(C)V.

Basic Grammar
Nauhi is an ergative-absolutive language with a Subject-Object-Verb word order. It is postpositional and predominantly left-branching. The morphology of Nauhi is strongly isolating. All nouns are marked by obligatory postpositions indicating their grammatical case. More on the grammar of Nauhi coming soon.