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 (C)(S)V(C) that do not violate the rules below is permissible, where C is any consonant, S is any non-nasal sonorant or fricative sans /h/, and V is a short or long vowel or a diphthong.
 * Geminate consonants may not occur in word-initial clusters
 * /h/ only occurs in isolation in the syllable onset and cannot appear in the coda

Ablaut
Ablaut in Iboorxaa is very productive and can alternate between multiple grades of each specific vowel. The rules governing the Iboorxaa ablaut are simple. Only noun roots with a short or long vowel in their first syllable can go through ablaut, and only monosyllabic roots that end in a non-nasal resonant or fricative or any affix that does not end in a plosive or nasal can be in the zero grade. The table below lists all 5 possible ablaut paradigms. The second paradigm stems from an earlier e/ee/eu, but has become a/ii/uu due to the loss of /e/ and vowel mergers.