Sïsang

Allophones
[j] - /i/ acting as a syllable onset

[ɥ] - /y/ acting as a syllable onset

[ɰ] - /ɯ/ acting as a syllable onset

[w] - /u/ acting as a syllable onset

These are the allophones of consonants that are changed by a following /i/ or /y/:

/n̥/ - [ɲ̊]

/n/ - [ɲ]

/t/ - [c]

/d/ - [ɟ]

/s/ - [ç]

/z/ - [ʝ]

/ts/ - [cç]

/dz/ - [ɟʝ]

Phonotactics
CV(V), where C can be any consonant or one of the onset-vowels that become approximants.

Tone
There are three contour tones, a rising tone, a falling tone, and a flat tone.

Writing System
The writing system is a featural abugida.

http://s24.postimg.org/migrluscl/Scanned_Document.png

Not mentioned in this image: when a vowel has no consonant coming before it, it attaches to a horizontal line, the null character.

Grammar
The word-order is subject-object-verb, and the parts of a sentence are determined only by location. Each part is consisted of a single word; any modifiers to a word are suffixed to that word.

The nouns in Siseɑ are not built like "Corenoun-adjective-adjective-adjective", but in fact like "adjective-adjective-adjective". The adjectives making up the noun construct a mental image of what the subject is like - it may be flat, black, red, hard, hot and painful - a stove-top; or it may be round, red, small, and connected to a stem, like a cherry.

The potential ambiguity of these sorts of words, in addition to the way they are open to several ways of writing down (in different levels of detail, or in different orders, or from different points of view) tells a more subjective and descriptive idea of the things one is trying to talk about in this language.

Here's a deconstruction of an English sentence to demonstrate how this grammar would apply:

"We ate pie", make "ate" into a prefixed verb

"We past-eat pie", change word order

"We pie past-eat", split "we" into simpler parts

"Me-you pie past-eat", split "eat" into simpler parts

"Me-you pie past-move-to-mouth", deconstruct nouns (leave pronouns intact)

"Me-you tastes-good-round past-move-to-feeding"

The 'past' morpheme is what differentiates present from past tense - unlike Indo-European languages, there is no fusional inflection, and all case, tense, number, &c. is represented by suffixing morphemes. Note also that 'we' is represented by 'me-you'. This is because a word like 'we' represents more than one thing, which simply never happens in this language, at least not in the single-morpheme components of words.

It may look cumbersome, but recall that in Siseɑ, each morpheme is one syllable in length, and each syllable is two letters. All in all, this would be three words of 18 letters in total, which (though longer than the English 8) is very manageable and can hold a lot of descriptive meaning. Depending on context, morphemes like "to" could be omitted if context was clear, or more descriptors like "on the left" or "purple" to further specify.

Lexicon
The lexicon is composed of a relatively small number of mono-morphemic, monosyllabic words which can be agglutinated to form larger ones. Much of the lexicon is adapted from Mandarin Chinese.

Numbers (base-6):
0: [diɑ˩˥] 1: [ji]

2: [ɰɯ˥˩]

3: [sa]

4: [çi˥˩]

5: [wu˩˥]

10: [cçi˩˥]

11: [cçi˩˥ji]

20: [ɰɯ˥˩cçi˩˥]

100: [bβai˩˥]

1000: [ciɑ]

Ordinal suffix: [di˥˩]

Colors:
Color: [sa˥˩]

Red: [xɒɑ˩˥] Green: [dy˥˩]

Blue: [da˩˥]

White, bright, shining: [bai˩˥]

Black, dark, dim: [xai]