Kannafi

Kannafi is a language isolate that is highly influenced by the Semitic and Romance languages. Its autoglotonym is kanafa. It had inspired many languages, such as Arabic, Maltese, French, Romanian, Spanish and to some extent Swedish and Persian.

General information
Kannafi is a language spoken on Kanafa, a fictional place located just on the south of Ukraine, with Romance vocabulary. Its grammar features the following characteristics: no word-level nor grammatical stress, broken plurals and some degree of tonal accent.

Allophony
Allophones of /i/ include:


 * [ɪ] in unstressed positions
 * [ɨ] when preceding a velar consonant
 * [əɪ] when following an approximant
 * [e] in unstressed final positions

Allophones of /u/ include:


 * [ʊ] in unstressed positions
 * [ʉ] when following /j/
 * [o] in unstressed final positions

Allophones of /a/ include:


 * [ɑ] when following a dorsal (velar/uvular) consonant
 * [ɒ] when following a dorsal consonant and preceding /w/
 * [æ] in unstressed positions

Syllable structure
Kannafi syllable structure can be summarized as follows, in which parentheses enclose optional components:


 * (C1 (C2)) (S1) V (S2) (C3 (C4))

Kannafi syllable structure consists of an optional syllable onset, consisting of one or two consonants; an obligatory syllable nucleus, consisting of a vowel optionally preceded by and/or followed by a semivowel; and an optional syllable coda, consisting of one or two consonants.

Pitch accent
Rather than having a stress accent (that means Kannafi has no grammatical stress), Kannafi has a pitch accent, which is an increase of tone on the vowel /á/.

There are three rules governing pitch accent in Kannafi.


 * 1) In nouns and adjectives, pitch is always on the last syllable by default (ģatú, buenú). Some suffixes (-esti) shift into the last instead.
 * 2) Other suffixes, such as pronoun clitics and gender suffixes, are never accented.
 * 3) In verbs, adverbs and interjections (kántor, áriva, bónǧornu), they are accented on the first syllable.