Archaic Archipelago Southwestern

General Info
Archaic Archipelago Southwestern is an extinct Southwesterner language. It is the earliest attested ancestor of all SW Archipelago languages.

Syllable Structure
As each phonetic Archipelago word was made up of one syllable, its syllables are equivalent to words. Each syllable is made up of three components: an onset, a nucleus, and an optional coda. Several suprasegmental features also exist.

Onsets
Archipelago onsets are the obligatory, initial consonantal component of an Archipelago syllable; they cannot be omitted and are thus always present. They can be simple, made up of one consonant, complex, made up of two to four consonants, and semisyllabic, containing a minor syllable.

Simple onsets are made up of a single consonant followed by a nucleus. Such onsets can be any single consonantal segment. In contexts that demand that a syllable be stripped of its onset, the default onset, inserted to prevent an onsetless syllable, will be /ʔ/.

Complex onsets are made up of anywhere from two to four consonants. Unlike simple onsets, they cannot be any sequence of consonants, and thus have special combinations. Each type of combination has its own unique name.

Biconsonantal onsets are the most diverse in makeup. They include the following classes of combinations:

Nasal-nasal sequences, known as dʱɨsp mʕu, are a simple kind of biconsonantal onset class. They include the following:

Nasal-plosive sequences are divided into two classes: voiced-plosive (ʀal tʀak mʕu) and voiceless-plosive (spɜ tʀak mʕu) nasal-plosive sequences. They include the following:

Nasal-approximant sequences, known as pʰi mʕu, are a wide group that includes the following:

Fricative-plosive sequences, known as tlan mʕu, include the following:

Fricative-nasal sequences, known as pjiʀ mʕu, include the following:

Plosive-fricative sequences, known as tʀɜn mʕu, include the following:

Nuclei
Archipelago nuclei are the 'carriers' of its syllables; as such, they are obligatory. They can be divided into two types:
 * Primary nuclei
 * The five cardinal vowels
 * Can be nuclei regardless of onset and coda
 * Secondary nuclei
 * Sonorants
 * Can be nuclei only in appropriate contexts

Nouns
Archipelago nouns, in line with the rest of the language, were morphologically overwhelmingly bare and uninflected. Although isolating, they were grouped into four animacy classes, or 'genders', that were inherent to each noun:


 * Superanimate
 * Animate
 * Edible
 * Inedible

Each noun came with a specifying postfixed clitic classifier that classified it according to certain rudimentary properties. Some of the more common classifiers:


 * ʔɜm – small animal
 * ɻujp – large, dangerous animal
 * ðɨ – bird
 * pʰal – human
 * gʱiʋ – one's close relative

All classifiers came after the noun. A noun could be introduced in full, nominal plus classifier, and then afterwards — when definite and certain — could be referred to using only the classifier.

Verbs
Archipelago verbs were, in essence, phrases made up of several words. Each verb was made up of one verbal root, one specifier — in the form of an obligatory noun, preposition or particle that acts as a classifier — and anywhere from zero to three pronominal arguments. The stucture of such specialised phrasal verbs (termed Vp) was rigidly ordered as TAM-classifier-pronoun-root.

Classifiers and Verb Class
Archaic Archipelago essentially had no intransitive verbs: each sentence had at least one object. For otherwise intransitive sentences, this object was taken to be the verb's nominal classifier — all 'intransitive' sentences had to have a verb with a nominal classifier component. 'Transitive' verbs, on the other hand, could have a particular or prepositional component instead of a nominal one.

All such components were marked as either classifiers or pronominals.

Nominal Classifiers [Intransitives]
All technically intransitive Archipelago verbs behaved as otherwise true transitives with one caveat: they always have a fixed and bare nominal component that goes along. This nominal is considered the object of the verb. As a rule, it is never a nominal classifier.

Verbs formed like this are usually fixed syntactical phrases — polyphrasal verbs.

Particular Classifiers [Transitives]
All transitive Archipelago verbs include a particular element as a classifier: it is usually a particle or a preposition indicating direction or benefit.

Pronoun Chain
Every archipelago verb had a pronoun chain, for personal agreement, that came between the verb's classifier and root. This chain included three types of pronominal elements: a nominative pronoun, an accusative pronoun and a benefactive. Not all verbs had all three pronouns, though verbs generally tended to include a benefactive regardless of valency.

The pronouns employed by the chain were:

Many verbs, when lacking a well-defined benefactive, would sometimes include a reflexive benefactive. The development of this feature shaped the verb systems of the language's descendants.

Syntax
Archaic Archipelago word order was mostly limited to SOVp-type sentences.