Hoskh

Typology:

☀http://cals.conlang.org/language/hoskh/feature/

Consonants
* Only found in ideophones, interjections, and onomatopoeia; however, these words are relatively common

/ʜ/ is considered a fricative phonologically.

Diphthongs:
[aɪ̯], [aʊ̯], [ɔʏ̯], [ɔa̯], [εi̯], [uo̯], [œʏ̯], [ea̯] all diphthongs can also be pharyngealized or strident.

Diphthongs (except /ɔʏ̯/) come from the breaking of long vowels (some of which were later reintroduced), most diphthongs being relatively recent innovations:

/ iː/ -> /aɪ̯/

/uː/ -> /aʊ̯/

/o ː/ -> /uo̯/

/ɔ ː/ -> /ɔa̯/

/ɛː/ -> /εi̯/

/æː/ -> /ea̯/

/œː/ -> /œʏ̯/

umlaut of /aʊ̯/ -> /ɔʏ̯/

Phonotactics
Syllable structure is very complex, but has many limits on what can occur.

(S)(T)(F)(R)(J)(V)(L)(L)(N)(A)(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)

S is a sibilant fricative

T is a stop, affricate or /ɣ/

F is any fricative

R is any sonorant

J is /j/ or /v/

V is any vowel (diphthongs and long vowels are single vowels)

L is any sonorant other than a nasal

N is a nasal

A is an affricate or fricative

O is any obstruent

Morphemes can only end with 2 obstruents, but up to 4 more can be added when dependent morphemes are added to roots. Long vowels and diphthongs can only occur in stressed syllables, and lax vowels cannot occur in closed syllables. Syllables without vowels must have at least one sonorant. Words do not actually begin with vowel sounds phonetically, and a glottal stop is added before them, as well as between two vowels in hiatus, which is not permitted.

Nouns
Genders

There are four genders, masculine, feminine, animate, and inanimate. While the first three also contain many inanimate objects, the inanimate gender barely contains any animate beings. Genders are not predictable from a word's appearance but determine agreement for verbs, pronouns, adjectives, and determiners, as well as the plural forms. Regular masculine, feminine, and animate plurals are formed through stem changes, while regular inanimate plurals show no change in the morphology of the word but only in agreement. Some words can appear exactly the same an be in different genders. Sometimes this is accidental homophony, but sometimes they are related terms, such as fish the animal being animate and fish for eating being inanimate and the words otherwise being identical. Semantically related concepts tend to be grouped into the same genders. The default gender for people is animate, and the animate plural pronouns have developed into 2nd person formal.

Cases

Nouns have five cases: agentive, patientive, dative, genitive, and vocative. Agentive is used for the subject of transitive sentences or a more agent-like argument of intransitive sentences, and patientive is used for the direct object of transitive sentences or a more patient-like argument of intransitive sentences. All nouns have obligatory determiners to mark their case, including names of people. The vocative is formed by removing the obligatory determiners from nouns. Case marking is heavily syncretic.

Compounding

Nouns can be compounded together an unlimited number of times, like in Germanic and Finnic languages and Sanskrit. Morphologically, there are two types of compound nouns. The first is one with two heads, which covers copulative and appositional compounds, and these are formed by combining the words into a phonological word with no other changes, and can be made with any number of words. The second is one where one noun modifies another noun, which can only be made with two words, although either or both of the words can also be a compound of either type. These are also combined phonologically into one word, but either the interfix  is added to a word that ends in a consonant, an  is added to a word that ends in a tense vowel, or a final unstressed vowel (schwa) is deleted.

Verbs
Agreement

Verbs agree with their subject, object, and indirect object. There is no syncreticism with verbal person agreement, unlike with noun case agreement, so as long as the nouns have different numbers and genders, the verb will differentiate what would otherwise be ambiguous. In intransitive sentences, agreement is determined based on how agent-like or patient-like the subject of the verb is, with it being marked the same as the subject of a transitive sentence if it is more agent-like, and the same as the object of a transitive sentence if it is more patient-like. Personal agreement is also fused with tense.

Incorporation

Verbs can productively incorporate their direct objects. This makes the sentence formally intransitive, so the subject can be either A or P.

Root Serialization/Verb Compounding

Hoskh has a type of verb serialization that consists of compounding verb roots into one morphological and phonological word.