Onnatic

Onnatic is a descendant of Nessëran, characterised by the continuing loss of phonemic vowel length, the reduction of close vowels, and the simplification of some consonant clusters.

Vowels
Onnatic has a system of eleven vowels. Unlike in its parent language, none of the vowels are determined phonetically by length.

Consonants
The Onnatic language has significantly fewer consonants than its parent language, this is because the language has lost all of its voiced fricatives, meaning that /z/ and /s/ have merged into /s/, and /f/ and /v/ have merged to /f/.

Sound Changes from Nessëran
The phonemic vowel length found in Nessëran was lost in Onnatic, with /ɑː/ and /eː/ merging with their short counterparts. /ɶː/ was also raised to /œ/.

/jɔ/ and /jɒ/ became /iɔ/ and /iɒ/, which later both became /œ/. The same process also affected /u/, causing /ju/ to become /y/.

Characteristic of Onnatic is the reduction of the Nessëran close vowels /i/ and /u/ to /ɪ/ and /ʊ/ respectively in some occurrences, particularly in single-syllable words and before nasal consonants. For example Nessëran [dup] "down" became Onnatic [dʊp].

/ɾ/ also appears as an allophone of /t/ and /d/ between vowels. This is represented in writing by the letter , as the sound also appears as a phoneme in it's own right.

Another striking feature of Onnatic when compared to it's parent language is the devoicing of fricatives. Nessëran had already devoiced /dz/, /dʒ/. /ʒ/, /ʝ/, but Onnatic went one step further and also devoiced /v/ and /z/ to /f/ and /s/ respectively.

Orthography
The language uses a modification of the Latin alphabet, with the addition of the use of the acute accent, caron, dot and umlaut diacritic marks. The letters v, w, x, y and z are not used, and are only seen in words of foreign origin.

Cases
Onnatic has an extensive noun-case system. Most of Onnatic cases are descended from it's parent language, however some are derived from collapses of Nesseran words. For example the prolative case suffix -ta is derived from the word otta meaning "road".

Articles
There are two articles in Onnatic, indefinite and definite. These are added as suffixes to the noun they are modifying. The indefinite article is -lé, and the definite article is -fá. They can be coupled with the plural suffix -n, as in the following table:

Number
There are two numbers in Onnatic, singular and plural. The plural is indicated by adding the suffix -n or -en to the noun. For example sesket (chair) to sesketen (chairs).

Posession
Possession is indicated by a suffix added to the end of a noun. For example, in the following table, using the noun "irše" meaning "pear":

Adjectives
Suffixes are added in Onnatic to indicate intensity and comparison.

Dictionary
Onnatic Dictionary