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/.

Vowels
All vowels can be lengthened, and they are orthographically made by doubling the vowel.

Phonotactics
The maximal syllable structure is CVVCCC, where C is a consonant and V is a vowel. A high-mid vowel rarely appears in syllable-final position. [ŋ] is restricted to codas (else it becomes [n]), and /p/ and /v/ do not occur in codas. 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.

Clusters that do not conform to these restrictions will be broken up by an epenthetic nonphonemic vowel in a syllabification that takes place from right to left.

Syllable hierarchy
In order to determining stress, A'Leamona distinguishes four syllable types:

Light


 * An open syllable containing a short vowel (CV)

Light-heavy


 * An open syllable containing a long vowel (CVV)


 * A closed syllable containing a short vowel followed by one consonant (CVC)

Heavy


 * A closed syllable containing a long vowel followed by one consonant (CVVC)
 * A closed syllable containing a vowel of any length followed by two consonants (CVCC, CVVCC)

Super-heavy


 * A closed syllable containing a vowel of any length followed by three consonants (CVCCC, CVVCCC)

Rules
A'Leamona is a non-phonemic stress language (does not have minimal pairs regarding stress position) and thus is considered to depend entirely on syllable structure. There are 5 rules governing stress in A'Leamona:


 * 1) A final vowel, long or short, may not be stressed.
 * 2) Only one of the last three or two syllables may be stressed.
 * 3) Given that restriction, stress may or may not fall on the rightmost light-heavy syllable.
 * 4) If the final syllable is heavy and closed (of the form CVVC, CVVCC or CVCC) it receives stress.
 * 5) If the final syllable is neither of heavy type, then it goes into the 3rd syllable.

Inflection
An A'Leamona noun has no gender nor definiteness. The template of a noun looks like this:

Case
Nouns in A'Leamona have 6 cases:


 * 1) Absolutive
 * 2) Ergative
 * 3) Dative
 * 4) Genitive
 * 5) Instrumental
 * 6) Comitative