Hoyu

Haiyu (Haiyu: Hoxzantư) is a language spoken in Haigwo, an island nation south of China, where it is the sole official language of Haigwo's 9 million residents. It is a language isolate.

General information
Haiyu is the native language of the Hai people in the South China Sea. It is a verb-heavy language with an agglutinative grammar. Word order is preferably SOV in basic sentences. It is written with the Latin alphabet. Because of the nation's frequent contact with the Chinese and Vietnamese, there are many loanwords from these languages in the Haiyu language.

Etymology
The English name for the language, Haiyu, is a direct loan from Chinese (海语 Hǎi yǔ) and literally means "sea language". When the Qing Dynasty discovered Haigwo in 1651, it was officially reported to the emperor that the people spoke a strange "sea language" that was impossible to understand. The Hai people and their homeland, Haigwo, are also called so because of this.

The native name for the language is Hoxzantư [hɔʔzæntɯ̽]. It is of unknown etymology.

Vowels
All of /i ɯ u ɤ/ occur short and long, differed only by length, while /ɛ ɔ æ/ have the respective long counterparts /e: o: a:/.

Consonants

 * Stops are unreleased at the ends of words. For example, /p/ > /p̚/.
 * Similarly to English, /ɹ/ is commonly realised as post-alveolar or retroflex and produces rhotic vowels when preceeded by a vowel.
 * Stops and affricates are aspirated before another stop or affricate across a syllable boundary.
 * Nasals assimilate to a following consonants place of articulation across syllable boundaries.
 * Unvoiced consonants become voiced before another voiced consonant and vice-versa.
 * Consonants can be geminated across morpheme boundaries.
 * If a nasal consonant appears before a sibilant across a morpheme boundary, the /NS/ cluster is simplified to /S/ and the vowel preceeding it is lengthened.

Vowels

 * Two identical short vowels are never realized with hiatus, instead as a long vowel.
 * If /a/ and /u/ appear as /au/ across a morpheme boundary, they merge into /ɔ/ and spelled ‹o›. If either vowel is long, this change does not occur.

Phonotactics
Haiyu syllables follow the simple structure (C)V(A)(C) where C is any consonant, V is any vowel, and A is an approximant.

Writing System
Haiyu is written using the Latin alphabet.

Alphabet
If /j/ and /w/ appear after a vowel in the coda, they are written as ‹i› and ‹u› respectively. If two short vowels appear together in a word (i.e. ‹ii›) they are written as a long vowel.

Verbs
The only necessary elements in a Haiyu verb is the verb root and the personal suffix.

Personal suffix
The person suffix agrees with the nominative case argument of the verb in subject and number. If the subject is pronominal, the pronoun is often omitted. The first person suffixes are ú, kaú, and seú, respectively, before a sibilant consonant.

Tense
There are two morphological tenses in Haiyu. The non-past tense, which is unmarked, is used in present tense constructions and with the future tense auxilliary verb. The past tense is marked with the suffix -sứ.

Mood
There are six verbal moods in Haiyu. They are listed in a table below along with their suffixes. The conditional mood expresses the idea that the action or state expressed by the verb may or may not actually happen. It is never used for polite requests like in English. The imperative mood expresses a command to the addresse(s). The potential mood is used to express that an event is likely to happen but not certain. The dubitative mood expresses doubt that an event happened. The interrogative mood asks a simple question but is also used as a polite imperative.

Vocabulary
 Haiyu Dictionary at ConWorkShop