A'Leamona

A'Leamona is an ergative-absolutive language. Its ISO-639-2 code is alm.

General information
A'Leamona isn't a language spoken in some fantastic otherworldly world. It's not Elvish or Klingon, and it's not the language spoken by a vast and powerful empire that exists only in my head. I've never thought of the people who might speak that kind of language. Anyway, A'Leamona is a language that can be spoken by anyone else.

The phonology of this language consists of 24 consonants, and it is heavily influenced by Basque because it makes the distinction between apical and alveolar consonants. There are 11 vowels, making it a total of 35 consonants.

Nouns are inflected for case, number, predication, possession, honorifics and evidentiality, but not for definiteness nor gender. Verbs are the most complex part, with 20 moods, 5 voices and 10 types of evidentiality (tense and aspect are not defined as lexical categories in A'Leamona). There are no adjectives in A'Leamona, so verbs take over these.

Consonants
The laminal approximants /l̻, r̻/ may be realised as retroflex /ɻ, ɭ/.

Phonotactics
The maximal syllable structure is CVCCC, where C is a consonant and V is a vowel. A high-mid vowel rarely appears in syllable-final position. If a word was monosyllabic historically, *CH has become CL. [ŋ] is restricted to codas (else it becomes [n]), and /p/ and /v/ do not occur in codas for historical reasons. For two-consonant clusters, the following restrictions obtain:


 * a laminal consonant can be preceded only by another laminal consonant or sometimes by /g/, /tʃ/ and /ʃ/
 * /ŋ/ may precede only /ʃ, x, ɡ, ɟ/ and /c/
 * /l̻/ does not seem to appear in second position
 * /p/ and /v/ do not occur as first consonant and as second consonant only if preceded by /r/ or /l/ or their lateral counterparts.

Stress
Stress is non-phonemic in A'Leamona, meaning that there are no minimal pairs that involve stress position.

Stress falls on the antepenultimate syllable unless it's followed by a CVCC syllable.