Ceraomi

Setting
Hello and thank you for visiting my language page. Please also see my other language called Nauhi. This language I'm creating is called Ceraomi (pronounced /Kerao̯mi/), and it is supposed to be spoken by the fictional Ceraomi elves who inhabit a large forest in Northeast Siberia. Ceraomi is an isolating language with SOV word order. It has a root vocabulary of about 2000 words. There are a large number of words corresponding to things found in nature and particularly in forests, whereas there are a comparatively small number of words corresponding to man-made things. Apart from a few borrowed words from Chukchi and a few from Russian, Ceraomi has had very little influence from any other language. It is also a language isolate, unrelated to any other language.

Phonology
Ceraomi has the following 5 vowels 11 consonants: Diphthongs: /ae/, /ai/, /ao/, /au/, /ei/, /eo/, /oi/, /ou/.

Ceraomi has a standard five-vowel system consisting of the vowels /i/, /e/, /a/, /o/ and /u/. Vowel quality is the only contrastive feature in the vowel system (features such as length and nasality are not phonemically contrastive). The consonant system is fairly small with only 11 consonants. A large amount of allophonic variance is found within the consonant system, however. The voiceless consonants /p/, /t/, /k/, /s/, /x/ and /h/ become voiced to [b], [d], [g], [z], [ɣ] and [ɦ] respectively when occurring between two vowels within a word, and /l/ becomes a flap [ɾ] in this environment. /s/ and voiced allophones [z] become strongly palatalized before front vowels, becoming [ɕ] and [ʑ]. /w/ is realized as [v] when preceded by a front vowel. /n/ assimilates to [ŋ] before /k/.

Phonotactics
Ceraomi words are subject to a number of strict phonotactic constraints. All words start in one of the following seven consonants: /p/, /t/, /k/, /s/, /x/, /h/, /l/. All words end in a vowel. Diphthongs occur fairly frequently but are limited to stressed syllables. Clusters of two adjacent vowels pronounced separately are not permitted. Consonant clusters also occur fairly frequently but are limited to a length of two consonants and are mostly found word-medially.

Word stress
Stress in Ceraomi words is fairly weak and also is not phonemic. Stress is always predictable and falls on the penultimate syllable when the word has more than one syllable.

Root morphemes
There are about 2000 root morphemes in Ceraomi. Due to this fairly small root vocabulary size, Ceraomi relies heavily on the joining of root morphemes to form compound structures. When forming compounds, root morphemes are placed side by side and maintain their original form, rather than being agglutinated into a single longer word. Ceraomi morphology is discussed in more depth in the grammar section of this page (please see below). Root morphemes never exceed three syllables in length. The following word structures are found for Ceraomi root morphemes (C = consonant, V = vowel, D = diphthong): Monosyllabic: CV, CD; Disyllabic: CVC(C)V, CDC(C)V; Trisyllabic: CVCVC(C)V, CVCDC(C)V.

Orthography
Ceraomi remained without any written form until the late 20th century. Since then it has been written using the latin script. The alphabet consists of the following 18 letters: a c ch e h i l m n o p r s t u v w y. The alphabet is entirely transparent and so it can be learnt quickly and easily. The table below shows each letter of the alphabet and its associated pronunciation(s). The table also shows the digraph 'sh' which is not part of the alphabet but has its own pronunciation. As can be seen, some of the letters have two pronunciations. For all these letters other than 'n', the second pronunciation listed in the table occurs when the letter is present between two vowels within a word, and the first pronunciation occurs elsewhere. For the letter 'n', the second pronunciation is found when preceding the letter 'k' and the first is present elsewhere.

Grammar overview
Ceraomi is a nominative-accusative language with a strict Subject-Verb-Object word order. The indirect object, however, precedes the verb. Ceraomi is postpositional and predominantly left-branching, with modifiers preceding the parts of speech they modify in most environments. The morphology of Ceraomi is strongly isolating, with very few cases of agglutinativity. To help compensate for this lack of agglutinativity, Ceraomi relies heavily on the use of postpositions. In fact, every noun or pronoun that occurs is followed by a postposition that indicates its grammatical case. The same words can function either as nouns or as verbs in Ceraomi, and the case-marking postpositions following nouns are important in distinguishing the noun forms from the corresponding verb forms. There are eight parts of speech present in Ceraomi; the noun, pronoun, verb, adjective, adverb, postposition, conjunction and interjection.

Nouns
Nouns is Ceraomi are not marked by any definite or indefinite articles. Neither is there any noun gender in Ceraomi. As mentioned above, nouns are followed by postpositions indicating their grammatical case. The nominative and accusative cases each have two different postpositions depending upon whether the noun is animate or inanimate. The animate category does not only include humans and animals, but also living things that are not capable of thought, such as plants, trees and flowers. There are a total of 46 different grammatical cases that are conveyed by postpositions in Ceraomi. The following is a complete list of these:

Adessive (e.g. near/at/by the building); apudessive (e.g. next to the building); inessive (e.g. inside the building); intrative (between the buildings); pertingent (touching the building); subessive (under the building); superessive I (on the building); superessive II (over the building); ablative (away from the building); initiative (beginning from the building); lative (to the building); terminative (as far as the building); perlative (through/along the road); prolative (via/ by way of the building); antessive (before the game); temporal (at eight o clock (only used for describing time)); accusative animate; accusative inanimate; instructive (by means of the building); instrumental (with/using the building); nominative animate; nominative inanimate; ablative (concerning the building); aversive I (avoiding the building); aversive II (fearful of the building); benefactive I (for the benefit of the building); benefactive II (for/intended for the building); causal (because of the building); comitative (with the building); dative (for the building); distributive (per / for each building); genitive (of the building); posessive (belonging to the building); ornative (endowed/equipped with a building); partitive (three (of the) buildings); comparative (similar to the building); equative (comparable with the building); essive ((temporary state of being) as the building); excessive ((transition from a state) from being a child (is not a child any more)); identical (being the building); orientative (turned toward the building); revertive (backwards to/against the building); translative ((change from one form to another) turning into an adult); multiplicative ((number of times) six times); vocative ((used to adress someone) O father!); disjunctive ((used in isolation or other special situations) What is it? A building).

Pronouns
Ceraomi contains 1st, 2nd and 3rd person personal pronouns. Personal pronouns in Ceraomi are not affected by gender or by formality. Similarly to nouns, however, they are marked as either animate or inanimate when occurring in either the nominative or accusative case. This also applies to non-personal pronouns. Pronouns in Ceraomi are marked for grammatical case with the same set of postpositions that are used for nouns. In addition to the postpositions that mark grammatical case, postpositions indicating intensity, reflexivity, reciprocity and expletivity can mark personal pronouns. These precede the postpositions indicating grammatical case when present in the same word. The table below shows the personal pronouns of Ceraomi:

As can be seen in the table, Ceraomi uses postpositions to indicate duality and plurality. These are discussed in more detail in the plurality section below. When a dual or plural personal or non-personal pronoun ocurring in the nominative or accusative case refers to a mixture of animate and inanimate nouns, the animate form of the postpositional case marker is always used.

Ceraomi only contains one demonstrative pronoun that corresponds to the both the word ‘this’ and the word ‘that’ in English. There are two relative pronouns corresponding to the English words ‘who/which/that’ and ‘whose’. There are also two interrogative pronouns corresponding to the words ‘who’ and ‘what’ respectively in the following English sentences: 1) Who is in the garden?; 2) What is his name?. Ceraomi contains 19 different indefinite pronouns that are equivalent to the following English words: any; anybody/anyone; anything; each; either; enough; everyone/everybody; everything; little/few; more; most; much/many; one/you; other; plenty; somebody/someone; something; such; whatever. Negative indefinite pronouns are indicated by a postposition that means ‘opposite of’ (e.g. ‘anybody’ + [opposite] = ‘nobody’, ‘more’ + [opposite] = less, ‘either’ + [opposite] = neither).

Plurality
Ceraomi uses the postposition 'she' (/ɕe/) to indicate dual forms of nouns and pronouns, and uses the postposition 'hu' (/hu/) to indicates plural forms comprising three or more things/individuals. Some English equivalents to dual and plural indefinite pronouns in Ceraomi are; both/all; others; they/people in general.

Verbs
Coming soon.

Counting system
Ceraomi has an 8-base counting system, with root morphemes coding for the numbers 1 to 8. It also has a root morpheme for the number 64, and one for 512 (64 multiplied by 8). The number 9 literally takes the form 'eight plus one', and the number 10 takes the form 'eight plus two', the number 11 'eight plus three', and so on until 16, which takes the form 'two eight' (2 multiplied by 8). The number 17 takes the form 'two eight plus one', and the number 18 'two eight plus two', and so on until 24, which takes the form 'three eight'. The numbers are formed this way until the number 64, which is written with a new morpheme. 65 takes the form 'sixty-four plus one'. 72 is 'sixty-four plus eight', and sevently three is 'sixty-four plus eight plus one'. 80 would be 'sixty-four plus two eight', and 81 'sixty-four plus two eight plus one'. 100 would be 'sixty-four plus four eight plus four'.

Colour terms
Ceraomi has root morphemes for the primary colours red, blue and yellow, and for the secondary colours green, orange and purple. It also has root morphemes for black, grey, white and brown. Other colours can be formed by placing two or more root colour words side by side.