Nauhi

Setting
Nauhi is spoken by the Nauhi gnomes who live in toadstool houses in the heart of a large forest in Chukotka Autonomous Ogruk, Northeast Siberia. Nauhi is supposed to be a harsh sounding language that sounds a bit like Arabic or Hebrew. The Nauhi gnomes have had little contact with other civilizations, and their language has had little influence from outside sources. It is also a language isolate, unrelated to any other language. As they live a fairly simple and primitive life, their language is a lot simpler than most human languages.

Phonology
Nauhi has the following 5 vowels and 11 consonants (sounds in brackets are allophonic):

Opening diphthongs: /ua/, /ue/, /ui/, /uo/.

Closing diphthongs: /ae/, /ai/, /ao/, /au/, /oi/.

Phonology notes

/e/ and /o/ are true mid vowels rather than high/close mid, as they are pronounced exactly half way in height between a low vowel and a high vowel. /i/ and /u/ are fully high vowels, and /a/ is a fully low and also a central vowel. Vowels in Nauhi only contrast according to their quality (features such as vowel length and nasality are not phonemically contrastive). There is little to no allophony within the vowel system, but significant allophony is present within the consonant system. The voiceless consonants /p/, /t/, /k/, /f/ /s/ and /h/ become voiced to [b], [d], [g], [v], [z] and [ɦ] respectively when occurring between two vowels within a word, and /l/ is realized as a flap [ɾ] in this environment. /n/ has a velar allophone [ŋ] before the plosive /k/. /t/ and /s/ and their voiced allophones [d] and [z] become palatalized ([tʲ], [sʲ], [dʲ], [zʲ]) when occurring before front vowels.

Phonotactic constraints  Nauhi words are subject to a number of strict phonotactic constraints. All words start in one of the following seven consonants: /p/, /t/, /k/, /f/, /s/, /h/, /l/. All words end in one of the following vowels: /i/, /a/, /u/. Diphthongs occur in about 13% of words and are always found in stressed syllables. Consonant clusters occur fairly frequently but are limited to a length of two consonants and are only found word-medially. Vowel clusters do not occur at all (adjacent vowel qualities are always pronounced as a diphthong).

Word stress

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

Root morphemes

There are 750 root morphemes in Nauhi. Due to this fairly small root vocabulary size, Nauhi 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. Nauhi morphology is discussed in more depth in the grammar section of this page (please see below). Of the 750 root morphemes in Nauhi, 32 are monosyllabic, 625 are disyllabic, and 93 are trisyllabic. Nauhi root morphemes never exceed three syllables in length. The following word structures are found for Nauhi root morphemes (C = consonant, V = vowel, D = diphthong): Monosyllabic: CV, CD; Disyllabic: CVCV, CVCCV, CDCV, CDCCV; Trisyllabic: CVCVCV, CVCVCCV, CVCDCV, CVCDCCV.

Orthography
Nauhi 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 19 letters: a b d e f h i l k m n o r s t u w x 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). As can be seen, the letters 'b', 'd', 'f', 'h', 'k', 'n', 's', 't' and 'x' each have two pronunciations. For all these letters other than 'n', the second of the pronunciations listed 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 pronunciation occurs elsewhere.

Basic Grammar
Nauhi is a nominative-accusative language with a strict Subject-Verb-Object word order. It is postpositional and predominantly left-branching. Adjectives appear before the nouns they modify in cases that the adjective and noun are linked together into a compound. Elsewhere adjectives appear after the nouns they modify. The indirect object precedes the verb.

Nauhi has a morphology that is almost entirely isolating, with very few cases of agglutinativity. To help compensate for this lack of agglutinativity, Nauhi 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 Nauhi, and the presence of the case-marking postpositions following nouns is an important way to distinguish the noun forms from the verb forms. A small number of words can function also as an adjective in addition to a noun or verb, and in these cases the adjectival form is distinguished by a postpositional adjective indicator. There are eight different parts of speech present in Nauhi; the noun, pronoun, verb, adjective, adverb, postposition, conjunction and interjection.

Nouns

Nouns is Nauhi are not marked by definite or indefinite articles, as no such articles exist in Nauhi. Neither is there any gender in Nauhi nouns. Plurality in nouns is indicated by the presence of a postpositional plural marker, which takes the same form for all nouns. As mentioned above, nouns are followed by postpositions indicating their grammatical case. The nominative, accusative and dative 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 47 different grammatical cases that are conveyed by postpositions in Nauhi. 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 animate (for the child); dative inanimate (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

There are seven personal pronouns in Nauhi: 1st person singular; 1st person plural inclusive; 1st person plural exclusive; 2nd person singular; 2nd person plural; 3rd person singular; 3rd person plural. Personal and non-personal pronouns in Nauhi are marked for grammatical case with the same postpositions that are used for nouns. Similarly to nouns, pronouns are marked as either animate or inanimate when occurring in the nominative, accusative or dative case. When a plural pronoun refers to a mixture of animate and inanimate nouns, the animate form is always used. In addition to the postpositions that mark grammatical case, postpositions indicating intensity, reflexivity, reciprocity and expletivity can mark personal pronouns.

Nauhi only contains one demonstrative pronoun that corresponds to the both the word ‘this’ and the word ‘that’ in English. A separate word does not occur for the plural form of this pronoun, but instead the plural postpositional marker is used. There are two relative pronouns corresponding to the English words ‘who/which/that’ and ‘whose’. There are also two interrogative pronouns in Nauhi corresponding to the words ‘who’ and ‘what’ respectively in the following English sentences: 1) Who is in the garden?; 2) What is his name?. Nauhi 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. As with plural demonstrative pronouns, plural indefinite pronouns in Nauhi are indicated by the presence of the plural postpositional marker. Some English equivalents to plural indefinite pronouns in Nauhi are; both/all; others; they/people in general. Negative indefinite pronouns are indicated by a postposition that means ‘opposite of’ (e.g. ‘anybody’ + [opposite] = ‘nobody’, ‘more’ + [opposite] = less, ‘either’ + [opposite] = neither).