Ćín

General Information
Ćín, is a memeber of the Cit [kit] language family. It is spoken by almost 600 million native speakers, and more than 1.5 billion L2 and L3 speakeres.

TBD

Currently, this language is being redesigned

Hopefully this is a thorough overview of the language (there's more in the phonology section then ever before :).


 * While I don't have examples up yet, I will put them up when the language is developed enough.

Consonants
Ćín's 23 consonants are listed below. The orthography is written next to them in bold. There are relatively few consonants in Ćín.

Vowels
Ćín's 17 vowels are listed below along with the accepted dipthongs (V is a vowel). As with consonants, the orthography is written next to them in bold.
 * [e, ɛ, and a] become [ẽ, ɛ̃, and ã] before /m and n/.

Vowel Strength
Like consonants, vowels have strengths.

Strong vowels: 

Weak vowels: 

Vowel Mutation
Certain vowels can affect the consonants around them. This was known to affect how compounnd words were formed, but was only important when two stressed syllables were brought next to each other

Weak Vowel Mutations

While not extremely prevelant, weak vowles did strengthen palatalized consonants by one step.

Srong Vowel Mutations

These were extremely prevelant.

I. These vowels softened  by one step

II. 

These vowels softened  by two steps,   by one step,  one step.

III. Other diphthongs

These vowels softened all soft consonants by one step

IV. Triphthongs

These did not affect consonants around them.

Syllables and Stress
Syllables in Ćín are (C)V(C) where C is a consonant and V is a vowel, diphthong, or triphthong.

Stress
Stress is determined by morae in PC. The number of mora a syllable contains is determined by the vowel in that syllabe.

Monomoraic: a short weak vowel

Bimoraic: a short strong vowel or a long vowel

Trimoraic: a diphthong

Quadmoraic: a triphthong

Stress in Ćín always falls on the antepenultimate mora of a word, and functions as a pitch accent. If the antepenultimate mora falls in a monomoraic or bimoraic syllable, the pitch is rising, if it is in a trimoraic or quadmoraic syllable, the pitch is falling.

Sandhi
While not extremely prevalent or complicaated, sandhi did occur at word boundries between a final vowel and a, á, or i. This resulting in a liquid being placed between the two words, j for between a final vowel and a, w between a final vowel and á, and l between a final vowel and i. Despite the fact it is written on the first word, it is pronunced with the second world. While it did not serve a grammatical function, it did generate irregularities in daughter languages.

Word Construction/Parts of Speech/Grammar Overview
Ćín has a very fixed word structure. The lexical meaning of any word is given by its root. This meaning can be modified with prefixes, e.g. cán meant hand but décán meant fingers (from dést + cán). Suffixes provided grammatical meaning and always allowed a word to switch parts of speech.

There were 5 main parts of speech in Ćín: nouns, verbs, adjuncts, adpositions, and conjuctions. Nouns and verbs were the main parts of speech and almost adjuncts, with a few exceptions, were derived from nouns and adjectives. It was always possible to turn nouns, verbs, and adjuncts into a different part of speech and, while not all words were built in this way, a large number of words were.

Thus -cVn- was a root, cán- was the noun, cím- (to build) was the verb, cán-il (hand-like) was the nominal adjective, cín-éd (built) was the verbal adjective, and cím-íd was the theoretical adverb. Similarly, dé-cVn- was a root, dé-cán was the noun, dé-cím (to give) was the verb, dé-cán-il (finger-like) was the nominal adjective, *dé-cín-éd (given) was the verbal adjective, and dé-cím-íd was the theoretical adverb.

Ćín often uses a combination of vowel mutation (ablaut) and suffixing to indicate grammatical meaning. For example, examine the thematic noun endings -ā, -és, -ēz representing the nominative singular definite, nominative singular, indefinite, and nominative plural endings.

It is unknown why, but it appears that nouns had separate definite and idefinite singular forms, but one plural form. In descendant langauges, the definite/indefinite forms became articles and the plural forms split into singular and plural forms.

Adjuncts were split into two categories: adjectives and adverbs. While nouns and verbs had independent roots, adjuncts were almost always derived from a noun or a verb. Adjectives could be derived from a noun or a verb, whereas adverbs were only ever derived from a verb. There are only a few exceptions to his rule: the adjectives aclé and déscé (meaning good and bad) and the adverbs  íclé, díscé, pacid, d́omíd, and ṕíbed (meaning few, many, and only). While not directly derived from verbs in Ćín, aclé appears like it could be derived from *autalte, proposed predecessor of sucétí "to be" 

Adpositions were normally placed after their head, but could be placed as a prefix to modify the meaning of a noun.

Nouns
Nouns make up one of two main groups that have roots with unique lexical meaning (the other being verbs).