Caohi

SettingEdit
Hello and thank you for visiting my language page. This language I'm creating is called Caohi (/Kao̯ɦi/). I am trying to make it a very simple language that is easy to learn.

PhonologyEdit
Caohi has a small phonemic inventory of 4 vowels and 12 consonants that are shown in the tables below. The sounds in brackets are allophonic. Diphthongs: /e̯a/, /eo̯/, /ai̯/, /ae̯/, /ao̯/, /oi̯̯/, /o̯a/. Caohi has a four-vowel system consisting of the vowels /i/, /e/, /a/ and /o/. The vowel /o/ is pronounced with a height about three quarters of the way between a low vowel and a high vowel, significantly higher than the vowel /e/ which is a true mid vowel. 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 Caohi 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/, /f/, /s/, /x/ and /h/ become voiced to [b], [d], [g], [v], [z], [ɣ] and [ɦ] respectively when occurring between two vowels within a word, and /l/ becomes a flap [ɾ] in this environment. /s/ and voiced allophone [z] become strongly palatalized ([sʲ] and [zʲ]) before a front vowel. /n/ assimilates to /ŋ/ before /k/.

Phonotactic constraints

All words start in one of the following eight consonants: /p/, /t/, /k/, /f/, /s/, /x/, /h/, /l/. All words end in a vowel. Diphthongs occur in about 13% of words and are always found in stressed syllables. Clusters of two adjacent vowels pronounced separately are not permitted. Consonant clusters occur fairly frequently but are limited to a length of two consonants and are only found word-medially.

Word stress

Stress in Caohi 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 Caohi. Due to this fairly small root vocabulary size, Caohi 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. Caohi morphology is discussed in more depth in the grammar section of this page. Caohi root morphemes never exceed three syllables in length. The following word structures are found for Caohi root morphemes (C = consonant, V = vowel, D = diphthong): Monosyllabic: CV, CD; Disyllabic: CVC(C)V, CDC(C)V; Trisyllabic: CVCVC(C)V, CVCDC(C)V.

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