Hoyu

Haiyu (Haiyu: Hoʻjantư) is a language spoken in Haigwo, an island nation south of China, where it is the sole official language of Haigwo's 9 million residents. It is a language isolate.

General information
Haiyu is the native language of the Hai people in the South China Sea. It is a verb-heavy language with an agglutinative grammar. Word order is preferably SOV in basic sentences, but in interrogative sentences, there is a rigid VSO word order. It is written with the Latin alphabet. Because of the nation's frequent contact with the Chinese, French, and Vietnamese, there are many loanwords from these languages in the Haiyu language.

Etymology
The English name for the language, Haiyu, is a direct loan from Chinese (海语 Hǎi yǔ) and literally means "sea language". When the Qing Dynasty discovered Haigwo in 1651, it was officially reported to the emperor that the people spoke a strange "sea language" that was impossible to understand. The Hai people and their homeland, Haigwo, are also called so because of this.

The native name for the language, Hoʻjantư [hoʔʒantɯ̽], is a middle Haiyu word meaning "what we speak" and is composed of the verb stem jan, a subject marker oʻ, and the nominalizing circumfix h(a)-'' -tư. If the same thing is said in modern Haiyu, it is slightly different: oʻjant'ư ''[oʔʒantɯ̽].

History
Much of the languages phonological and grammatical changes are unknown due to the poor written history of Haiyu. Prior to the French contact (and the subsequent French annexation of Haigwo) with the Hai people, it was unwritten. A few known major phonological changes took place between 1703 and 1931: initial /x/ became /h/, final /x/ was lost completely, /ɮ/ was lost completely and merged with /ɬ/, and /f/ merged with /v/. These changes are reflected in the orthography. During the same time period, a few major grammatical changes occured: circumfixes were lost and became suffixes, noun root reduplication to show plurality (which only occured in vowel-final nouns) was lost, marking of the nominative case was lost on nouns, plural marking was lost when a noun was modified by a numeral, and the interrogative mood marker was lost on verbs.

/x/ and /h/ remained in allophonic variation for quite some time, but by the 1986 proposal to remove x from the orthography, /x/ had merged completely with /h/.

Vowels
Dipthongs may be formed with the semivowels /j/ and /w/ in addition to pure vowels.

Vowels
All vowels have stressed and unstressed phonemes, and certain vowels change word-finally as well. Vowels can be rhotacized if they directly preceed / ɹ/. Most speakers pronounce word-final /i/ and /e/ as [i] and [ə] respectively, instead of [ ɪ] and [ ɛ].

Consonants

 * Stops are unreleased at the ends of words. For example, /p/ > /p̚/.
 * Stops and affricates are aspirated before another stop or affricate across a syllable boundary.
 * Nasals assimilate to a following consonants place of articulation across syllable boundaries.
 * Unvoiced consonants become voiced before another voiced consonant and vice-versa. For example, /f/ is an allophone of /v/ before an unvoiced consonant and /ɮ/ is an allophone of /ɬ/ before a voiced consonant.
 * /ɸ/ and /β/ are allophones of /v/ after (not before) an unvoiced and a voiced labial consonant, respectively.
 * The velar series /ŋ k g x/ are palatised to /ɲ c ɟ ç/ before a front vowel or before /j/.

Phonotactics
Haiyu syllables follow the simple structure (C)(S)V(V₂)(C) where C is any consonant, S is a non-nasal sonorant, V is any vowel, and V₂ is /j/ or /w/.

Writing System

 * Affricates are written as follows:
 * t͡s > ts
 * t͡ʃ  > tc
 * q͡χ > qħ
 * t͡ɬ > tł

History
The first written record of Haiyu is from 1703 in a Latin alphabet introduced by French missionaries. It was written without diacritics and based on the French alphabet: /k/ was represented by c, /ʃ/ was represented by ch, /t͡ʃ/ was represented by tch, /x/ and /h/ were both represented by h, /χ/ was represented by qh, /q͡χ/ was represented by qqh, /ŋ/ was represented by ng, /ɬ/ was represented by lh, /ɮ/ was represented by lz, /t͡ɬ/ was represented by tl, /w/ was represented by ou, /ɤ/ was represented by the digraph eo, and /ɯ/ was represented by iu. The glottal stop was unwritten. All other consonants (including the now-lost /f/) were represented by their IPA equivalents. The modern alphabet was introduced in 1931. However, a minor reform was introduced in 1993, eliminating the letter Xx.

Verbs
Haiyu conveys much information through verbs. A single sentence can be one verb. The only necessary elements in a Haiyu verb is the verb root and the subject prefix. Everything else is only included if needed. The non-past tense, simple aspect, indicative mood, and active voice are all implied.

Subject prefix
The subject prefix is the only required part of a verb other than the root. It is the only prefix found in the entire language. The fourth person translates as an unknown person, i.e. "one should..", "someone did", "everyone should".

The verb stem
Verb stems in Haiyu do not undergo modification to conjugate as in European languages, instead they take on affixes to convey information.

Serial verb construction
In Haiyu, verbs that agree to the same subject, tense, etc stack together. These include constructions like "I came, I saw, I conquered" or "I came to win" or "I sang and danced" would form a serial verb constructions. Beginning or ceasing to do something also results in a serial construction, as well as items in a list, or doing something in order to do something else.

Adjectives take on a stative suffix -ik in order to act as a stative verb, such as in the sentence "I am blue".

Tense
Haiyu has four tenses: non-past, hodernial past, hesternal past, recent past, or general past. Hodernial past is translated as something that happened earlier in the day, hesternal past is translated as something that happened yesterday, recent past is anytime between two days and a week ago, and the general past is anytime before a week ago or for actions where the tense is unknown or unnecessary.

Vocabulary
 Haiyu Dictionary at ConWorkShop