Nāmic

Nāmic is an Indo-European influenced, mixed a priori-posteriori language, by Waahlis. Formely known as Nāmaς, until wikicode drove it to extinction.

Introduction
Dēna vēȷyans! - Welcome!

This page uses IPA phonetic notation as standard.

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Nāmic, ([ˈnɑːm.ık], translates as "name, noun, meaning or thing"), or Naṃkrthāvāka [ˌnã.kr̩ˑ.ˈtʰaː.faː.xa] "Named constructed speech" - is a mixed constructed a priori/ a posteriori language. It draws inspiration from mainly the Indo-European branch, yet makes a decisive stance to preserve artificial features. For the sake of simplicity I suppose it could be called the Namian language, or whatever. Doesn't really matter.

Since there is a tendency in Nāmic to blend characteristics of both artificial and natural languages, a rather unholy mixture has arisen, for example:

It is a fusional language, like its predecessors Latin, Sanskrit, Greek and Germanic - yet displays the highly unnatural ergative-accusativ alignment, or tripartite, - which is rarely seen outside conlanging.

Concerning the vocabulary, both words derived from Indo-European stems, as well as complete a priori words, appear; such as "dhrȳa" - tree, from Indo-European *dóru, and the word for heaven, "ıāmna" - from... me.

Other than that, other, rather unique features are included, such as: Plus an extremely constructed characteristic:
 * Phonemic and manipulated stress.
 * Progressive metaphony.
 * Partial regressive metaphony.
 * Consonant harmony, based upon voicedness.
 * Distinguished transitivity

Phonology
The following table portraits Nāmic's phonetic inventory of consonants. All consonants, except aspirated ones, may be geminated, which is phonemic, and represented by doubling by the grapheme. The letter /h/ represents aspiration when succeding consonants, and breathy-voice when preceding vowels. "Nh", is an exception, being a velar nasal.

Please note that all retroflex consonants and the dental trill rhoticise the surrounding consonants. The pronunciation of  is considered dialectal.

Alphabet
Hence the alphabet of Nāmic:

Please note that the letters /h/ and /ṃ/ are modifiers of adjacent vowels. See the Vowel Quality section.

The letter /ς/ is a possible alternativeto lexeme-final /s/.

Lenition
In addition to the consonants above, Nāmaς suffers from severe allophony, lenition, caused when:


 * Consonants lie in medial position between two vowels.
 * Consonants lie in final position in lexemes.

The aspirated consonants become completely spirantisised, whilst the unaspirated phonemes become affricates. The exceptions are the velars, which all become fricatives. The nasal consonants, affricates, trills and approximants remain unaffected.

Please note that the phonemes without brackets are the non-lenitioned consonants.

Nota bene

There is additional allophony, regarding phonation. The pairs [c - ɟ], [ç -ʝ], [v - f], and [w - ʍ], are only represented by one grapheme each: ȷ, hy, v, and vh respectively. Their voiced counterpart is an allophone - see Consonant Assimilation.

The murmur-phonation letter /h/ receives the pronunciation [ç/x] when final in a syllable.

Thus, our conclusion is that the word vāka- voice, speach - shouldn't be pronounced [ˈwaːka], but rather [ˈʍaːxa].

Affricates
In addition to these, there's a multitude of digraphs with corresponding affricates. It is important to note that the four digraphs /pt/, /vt/, /kt/, and /jt/ symbolise consonant clusters with an affricate onset. They are not affected by lenition.

Consonant Assimilation
Nāmic possesses a progressive consonant assimilation word-internally, based upon phonation, or voicedness.

The consequence is that a consonant, a cluster, or an affricate, is pronounced differently, depending on whether it is preceded by a voiced or voiceless consonant. There are exceptions to this rule, since the alveolar trill [r] and the retroflex tap [ɽ] do not differ between voicedness.

The nasal stops are affected quite differently, with a complete nasalisation of the preceding vowel - and loss of the stop - if the initial or first consonant is voiced. However, nasals are perceived as neutral in nature, and does therefore not affect voiceless nor voiced phonemes.

There are, however, two dialects of Nāmic;


 * Staṇya, which means "current, dominating".

The Staṇya dialect will be featured in this article, and is the main dialect that distinguishes consonant assimilaton upon voicedness.
 * Ḷestra, which means "golden, posh".

Vowels
The representation of Nāmic's vowels. There are are fifteen vowel phonemes, yet only 7 graphemes, thus, it may be assumed some are allophones during certain circumstances. It is obvious that many of the vowel graphemes are recycled, since many phonemes are allophones. The background is covered in the Metaphony section.

Diphthongs
There are a limited number of diphthongs in Nāmaς, with the same amount rising as falling diphthongs. [ɪ̯] is most often equivalent to [j], and [u̯] is often just [w]. The left diftong is its front value, and the right one is the back value. All other vowel clusters are diaeresis. The main phoneme in all diphthongs may be geminated.

Diphthong Allophony
No falling diphthongs occur inter consonants, as a nucleus, nor do the falling diphthongs appear geminated in open coda position. They are transformed into geminated, or short monophthongs - and are inconsistently written as monophthongs, however it isn't compulsory. The allophony according to this schedule:

Front diphthongs on the left, back ones at the right.

Vowel Metaphony
The Naṃkrthāvāka suffers from a certain kind of vowel harmony, called progressive vowel metaphony. This urges all vowel phonemes in a lexeme to be of the same kind of the preceding one. That is: Va = type-a vowel, Vb = type-b vowel, C = consonant: VaVb Vb > VaVa Va

There are tqo exception, causing the metaphony to be regressive instead; when a word is initialised by an [ɛ], or an [ә]. The [ɛ] and [ә] the gets assimilated by the succeeding consonant: Vb Va Vb > VaVa Va

These modified [ɛ-ә] -sounds will occurr later in text, and will be referred to as "affected" /ɛ-ә/.

The metaphony is present, and affect for example the plural endings of many case declensions, where the coda vowel gets completely assimilated by the former. However, if the preceding vowel has the same front-back value, it's just diphthongised.


 * Horse - thētosya (abs. sing.) > thētosyoı (abs. plu.)


 * But not; "fire" - kēma (erg. sing.) > *kēmeı, but rather kēmaı (erg. plu.)

Nāmic's metaphony is based upon backness, with eceptions being when /e/, /y/ and /o/ are followed by an [r], which ignores the harmony, and modifies the phoneme.

Vowel Quality
There are no less than six different vowel qualities: The vowels will be represented by a default /a/. Please note that any nasal can nasalise the preceding vowel, however in non-voiced environments, only the letter "ṃ" may.
 * Short and geminated Oral
 * Short and geminated Nasal
 * Short and geminated Murmured

Nota Bene

When /h + vowel/ is preceded by a vowel, a glottal stop is inserted.

Other
Some phonemes develop new pronunciations when adjacent to eachother:
 * [h] + [r] = [xr]
 * [s] + [r] = [ʂr]
 * [s] + [u] + [vowel] = [su̯V]
 * [s] + [u] + [ı] = [sʍı]

Phonotactics

 * Any consonant - C
 * Sonorant - S
 * Fricative - F
 * Nasal - N
 * Vowel, also diphthong when final - V

A Nāmic syllable have two different maximal syllabic structures, the by far most common structure is (F)(C)(C)V(C)(F/N) initially, and (F)(C)CV(C)(F/N) medially and finally. The conclusion is that a syllable's maximal consonant cluster is FCC, that a medial and final syllable minimally must look like CV, and that all syllables must terminate in either a F, fricative, a nasal- N, or a vowel - V. Since most lexemes in Nāmaς are disyllabic, a common lexeme might look like this: FCVN.CV, like stānta - "state" [ˈstaːn.ta]. It should herefore be noted that ēkva - either, is pronounced [ˈɛː.kʍa], and not [ˈɛːk.ʍa].

The second structure is very uncommon, but does occur: (C)CS(C), and sometimes (C)CVS(C), where a sonorant occupy the syllable nucleus. Most of the syllables are free, that is, without the coda. Examples include vṙkas - wolf [ˈʍr̩ˑ.kas], and ēktrva - any of them [ˈɛː.ktr̩ˑ.ʍa]. Interestingly, all syllabic sonorants are half-geminated.

Lexical Stress
A pecurious detail of Nāmic is that it is possible to manipulate the stress to convey different meanings. In Nāmic linguistics called stress apophony.

The lexical stress of the Nāmic language is completely irregular in the lemma forms. Declension, conjugation and prosodic stress may manipulate the stress however. All stressed syllables in Nāmic are geminated, but note that all geminated syllables are not stressed. That is, a lexeme can contain several geminated syllables. If so, the second one is stressed.

Stress must always be marked in all polysyllabic words - except verbs in the infinitive, or rather lemma, to avoid confusion in the vocabulary.

The alternative set of diacritics, the acute (´) and grave (`) accents, are not commonly used, but provide information which syllable to stress - both being geminated, but with the acute accent signifying stress in polysyllabic lexemes.

Intonation
The intonation of the Nāmic language is phonemic, and is primarily used to distinguish grammatical moods. There are three common pitches used in Nāmic, and one for further emphasis. These, or similar, should be used to keep a native pronunciation.
 * Rising [↗] Intonation.
 * Falling [↘] Intonation.
 * Rising-Falling or Peaking [↗↘] Intonation.
 * Falling-Rising or Dipping [↘↗] Intonation.

The intonation is used to emphasise certain words - that is, if you want to stress a certain action, location or noun in the sentence. It is very similar to the case in English. If not necessarily sad, the pitch is normaly rising [↗].

For the grammatical intonation, certain moods are associated with certain intonation, which may vary by dialect and accent. The standard however dictates a rising pitch [↗] during interrogative moods and the interrogative words, followed by a dipping intonation in the end [↘↗]. The conditional mood however - the subjunctive mood when used in main clauses - is characterised by a peaking [↗↘] intonation.

Prosodic Stress
The prosodic stress and intonation

In many of the pro-adverbs, a question may be abbreviated from "Shall I put it here?" Vērem dās sdıses hyāra? [ˈfɛːr.ɛm daːz ˈstis.ɛs ˈçɛː.ra] into "Here?" in English and "Hyar ā?", not "Hyā ra?" in Namian. By moving the stress to the ultimate syllable in adverbs and nouns, you may produce an interrogative meaning. Concerning nouns in the nominative case, all stress is irregular, and a multitude of minimal pairs exist: such as "burden" nāutos [ˈnœːθ.œs], and "meaning" nautōs [nœˈθ.œːs]. Only in certain cases is the stress moved from one syllable to another - "snake" nāga [ˈnaː.ɣa], in the nominative, becomes in the genitive; naganēs [na.ɣa.ˈnɛːs] "snake's".

In verbs, the stress plays an important part in the conjugations: Stress is for example never marked in the infinitive, and always occurs on the first syllable. It also denotes the transition from present tense to the preterite, in all aspects: "We say" means kāham [ˈkaː.ʔa̤m] in Nāmic, while "We said" is called kahām [ ka.ˈʔa̤ːm]. The stress on all verb conjugations are always regular.

Syntactics
Considering the fusional nature of the Naṃkrthāvāka, the word order's rather free. It does possess tendencies towards SOV and SVO. It sould however be noted that the word order may alter depending on transitivity. Only SOV, VSO and SVO orders will be presented here.

Transıtıve Orders
SVO with ergative verbs is rather common, similarly to English.

Since focus lies on the patient, the verb phrase often moves further back.

Intransitive Orders
The intransitive order SV(O) is not very common, but it does occur.

Since focus lies on the verb in the Nāmic languages intransitive orders, the VS(O) is much more common. Please note that the pronoun may be dropped, but it is not custom regarding intransitive verbs.

Noun Phrase
The Naṃkrthāvāka does not possess particular positions for the adpositional phrase, thus it will be prepositional for the sake of simplicity. It is quite similar to English.

Possessive noun phrases can be formed by the means of a possessive pronoun, or a dative construction. Nevertheless, they remain after the noun.

Verb Phrase
In the Naṃkrthāvāka, adverbial phrases always precede the modified verb. The noun phrase may be freely positioned,or it may depend on transitivity - see further up.

Nouns
The nouns of Nāmic