Sangi/Vowel Mutations

=Sangi Vowel Mutations=

Like Sangi consonant mutations, there are two classes of vowel mutation. "Pure mutation" affects the meaning of the word in changing its phonology and "affection" changes only the phonology"

Pure Mutation
Pure mutation has two subsets; A-mutation and I-mutation. I-mutation involves the raising of the final vowel of the stem, while a-mutation involves the lowering of the final vowel.

¹ long “a” becomes “œ” in a-mutation, but is written as a two circumflexed “a”s.

² long “i” becomes “ia” in i-mutation and long “u” becomes “wá”, but are both written as a two umlauted letters.

In the orthography the base vowel is written as it is with a diacritic to mark that it is mutated. I-mutation is shown by the use of the umlaut and the letter “y” for the sound “ü”. A-mutation is shown by the use of the circumflex. If the word changes semantic class, e.g. a verb becomes a noun, then the vowel with the diacritic is written with the vowel that marks its pronunciation, e.g. “ü” > “au”. This is not the, however, when a plural noun is used as a stative verb, the vowel marked with the diacritic is kept to mark the plurality and a special tense infix is added.

Vowel Affection
Affection comes in two subsets; I-affection and A-affection. Under I-affection the vowel is raised and under A-affection the vowel is lowered, just like in pure vowel mutation and they are represented in the orthography by a grave accent and a breve respectively. The difference is that vowel affection has no semantic effect on the word and occurs under different circumstances. I-affection occurs when the last vowel of the stem was raised to either an “i”, “y” or “e”. A-affection occurs when the last vowel was lowered to either an “o” or an “a”. Affection works right through the word, changing the sound of every syllable until one of them cannot be changed, working back from the last suffix to the stem. If the stem vowel changes through pure mutation then this is not affected, but previous syllables will be by the raising or falling of the stem-final vowel. “i” and “u”, though, are not affected by vowel i-affection and “a” is not affected by a-affection. Affection also occurs when a derivational suffix is added. This changed the root vowel, but it is marked by pronunciation and not by diacritics as with affection caused by pure mutation, e.g. lap (laugh) > läp (laughs) but lap (laugh) > lepfi (chuckle). Vowel Affection, also, does not affect truly mutated vowels. Unlike normal affection, that which occurs when a new stem is formed, acts with each subsequent suffix added.

It should also be noted that only the letters "i", "e", "a", "o" and "u" undergo affection in non-derivation circumstances. The sounds "œ" and "ę" also undergo affection but only derivation affection.

For example, when "úśem" (mansion) is in the causative case, i.e. it is followed by the suffix "-ma" it becomes "ŭŭśĕmma". This word is pronounced "oośamma" and is created by lowering the penultimate "e" to an "a" then lowering the initial "ú" to a long "o".