Abashe

General information
Abashe is a language isolate spoken in the outskirts of the Shinsali Confederacy. It is generally classified agglutinative or polysynthetic and has some fusional tendences.

Consonants

 * Consonant gemination is contrastive inter- and post-vocalically across morpheme boundaries and less often in root words
 * When /h/ occurs word-finally or before another consonant, there is a slight pharyngeal frication

Vowels

 * There are three diphthongs /ai/ /au/ and /ɨi/, the latter of which occurs only due to umlaut of oi
 * Any other sequences of two vowels is pronounced with hiatus

Allophony

 * /n/ assimilates in place: becoming [ɲ] before palatal consonants and [ŋ] before velar consonants
 * /m/, in contrast, does not assimilate
 * /ɓ/ and /ɗ/ are realized as [b] and [d], respectively, word-finally and before other consonants
 * The cluster /ɓɗ/, which appears across morpheme boundaries or intervocalically, is realized as [bd]
 * Palatal-velar assimilation occurs, meaning if a palatal consonants precedes a velar consonant, it will become velar and vice versa. For example, /xc/ is realized as [çc] and /ck/ is realised as [kk].
 * /ʎ/ is realised as [l] before alveolar and post-alveolar consonants and as [ɫ] before velar consonants
 * Geminate /t͡ʃ/ is realised as [t͡ʃ:], never [t͡:ʃ]
 * The cluster /tʃ/ is contrastive with /t͡ʃ/ across morpheme boundaries

Umlaut
In Abashe, there are three productive types of umlaut: i-umlaut, a-umlaut, and u-umlaut. The table below describes the vocalic changes due to each type of respective umlaut and diachronic sound changes that followed. In the article, a morpheme that triggers i-umlaut in a preceeding syllable is notated with +I, a-umlaut is notated with +A and u-umlaut is notated with +U.

Phonotactics
The basic syllable structure in Abashe is (C₁)(F)V(C) or (C₂)(L)V(C). /t͡ʃ ɓ ɗ/ never occur in a cluster in the syllable onset. (C₁) cannot be a nasal and (C₂) cannot be /n/. V can be any vowel or diphthong.

Stress
Primary stress always occurs on the initial syllable of a word. Secondary stress, however, is sensitive to syllable structure but is nonetheless regular. Secondary stress falls on the first heavy syllable after the primary stress. A heavy syllable is any syllable other than a CV or V (so CLV, CFV, CVC, etc. are all heavy). If every syllable following the primary stress is light, then the secondary stress falls on the second syllable of the word.

Digraphs
Digraphs in Abashe historically all represented diphthongs. The original spelling of each diphthong-turned-monophthong is kept to differentiate homophones and also because of the high prevalence of umlaut in the language. Diaeresis are used on the first vowel of a digraph in order to indicate that each vowel is pronounced seperately (i.e. ëu represents /eu/ as opposed to /ø/).

Nouns
Nouns in Abashe belong to one of 14 noun classes and take on multiple suffixes, including number, demonstratives, locatives, postpositionals, possessives, derivational morphemes, diminuitives, and augmentatives. However, objective nouns are often suffixed on to the verb itself along with their respective suffixes. There are some verbal paradigms which allow both a subject and object noun to be suffixed onto the verb root, but these are rare. There are no verb roots which allow an indirect object to be suffixed onto the verb root.

Noun class
In Abashe, nouns are arranged into a number of classes. Noun class is not apparent on noun other than from its semantic meaning. The endings listed in the third column are suffixes used in various types of agreement, such as with adjectives or postpositions.

Syntax
Abashe is an exclusively suffixing polysynthetic agglutinative language. The language is highly inflected and occasionally exhibits some aspects of a fusional language. It most-often follows SOV word order, but word order is highly flexible.