Cheunco

Cheunco language (English pronunciation: [ˈtʃ͡eʊ̯ŋko], Cheunco: chéuncowemansa [cʰǿuŋ̩coweman̩sa]) is the mother tongue of Cheunco people in Cheunca. Due to its abugida writing system, I (probably) won't publish pictures nor font files of Cheunco script. I can say that it's influenced by Gujarati script (headless Devanagari).

I'm pretty busy right now, so I would update this page in a slow pace.

Consonants
Below is a table showing all phonemes of Cheunco. Suggested by this table, Cheunco makes a three-way distinction of plosives: aspirated, unaspirated voiceless, and aspirated voiced.

Vowels
There are 9 phonemes in Cheunco and a length distinction for each of them.

Vowel Harmony
There are three classes of vowels in Cheunco: rounded, unrounded, and neutral. Only /a/ and /aː/ are considered neutral. The harmony can also be seen in the diphthongs Cheunco have: neutral vowel can precede / follow both rounded and unrounded vowels, but rounded vowels can never appear with unrounded ones.

Two kind of words would violate the harmony: compounds and loan words. Though each part of a compound follows the harmony individually, they can violate the harmony in the same word.

Syllable Structure
Syllables in Cheunco are simple and can be denoted as (C)V(N) where N is the only nasal onset -n. The letter nga at the beginning of a word refers to the absence of initial.

Mora
The most basic unit of timing of Cheunco is mora. Each mora contains a vowel. In the case of long vowels, diphthongs, and the presence of the only onset -n, there are two morae. Syllables in Cheunco can have at most three morae.
 * Monomoraic: i, iu, ui, u, e, eo, oe, o, a
 * Bimoraic:
 * Long vowel: ii, iuu, uii, uu, ee, eoo, oee, oo, aa
 * Diphthong: ai, eu, au, ei, ia, oi, ou
 * Trimoraic: ain, eun, aun, ein, ian, oin, oun (long vowels can not receive the onset.)

Pitch Accent
Since Cheunco is mora-timing, only one mora in a word can be accented. This mechanism resembles Ancient Greek rather than Japanese. In orthagraphy, the accent is not marked, but the romanization adopted acute (á) to indicate the accented vowel.

One of both morae in bimoraic syllable can be accented, which causes pitch contour (rising or falling). However, the nasal mora -n can never be accented. Pitch accent is crucial in Cheunco because it can be used to refer to different grammatic roles of a word. For example, both masculine nominative and vocative of eo-stem nouns receive accent on their last mora (-eoón), but accusative on the penult mora (-eóon).

Cases
There are totally 8 cases in Cheunco: nominative, vocative, accusative, dative, ablative, instrumental, locative, and genitive. This case system resembles Sanskrit (huh).

Nominative are used in circumstances where the noun is the object of the verb or something that equals to the object (connected by copula). Whereas accusative indicates the subject of verbs.

Dative, ablative, and instrumental are often regarded as indirect arguments of a verb and receive the same ending in dual form. They can only precede some particular postpositions.

Genitive and locative have their own wide usages. We'll talk about that later.

Genders
Most (inanimate) nouns in Cheunco are neuter, while animate nouns can be either masculine or feminine, hence 3 genders at total. There are also suffixes that can convert nouns to another gender.

Number
To refer to plural, reduplication is introduced. The last consonant and the last mora will be copied and made follow the noun, like éthasasa ("birds") is derived from éthasa ("bird"), with s being the last consonant and a being the last mora.

Some exceptions exist in personal pronouns, like "we" in Cheunco is hjií instead of hjíhji, which is the form we predicted.

Noun Declension
To put it simple, the declension system of Cheunco is composed of 8 suffixes that follow nouns to modify them and mark their case. The form of these suffixes can be affected by the vowel of the nouns (vowel harmony) and the ending consonant of them. Some suffixes above are accented, which means that the position of the accent of a word could move to the suffix.

Verbs
Cheunco features a number of infixes, but prefixes and suffixes also exist. Most verbs contain two syllables, like ogha ("I see"). Infixes can only follow the first syllable of the verb, so that when a verb receives prefix, infix, and suffix, it would be like: Take the word sxezephaphathía "was hit again and again as I expected" for example, the word consists of several parts but is derived from the verb phatha "to hit".
 * (prefix for voice) + (prefix for tense) + first part of the verb + (infix for aspect) + -n#- (negation) + last part of the verb + (suffix for mood) + ...
 * sxe: passive voice.
 * ze: past tense.
 * pha: first part of the verb phatha
 * pha: frequentive aspect.
 * thí: benedictive form.
 * a: optative or potential

Stative and Dynamic
An important idea of Cheunco verbs is that a verb can be either "dynamic verb" or "stative verb", similar with Korean and Japanese.

A stative verb describes the stative of an object or a person, like dóntha which means "to be red", whereas a dynamic verb indicates the action done by a person, like oétha "to go".

Nonetheless, some verbs have the two characters at the same time, resulting different usages according to its context. The verb yúca "to think" can be a good example, where it can describe someone's pondering or refer to someone's consideration about something.

What affixes the verbs can receive depends on their character. Some affixes are reserved for stative verbs, and some for dynamic verbs.

Tense
There are only two tenses in Cheunco: past and non-past. The non-past is not marked though, verbs in past tense would receive a prefix z-/ze-/zeo-
 * Hji ógha éthasase. ("I see birds")
 * Hji zógha éthasase. ("I saw birds.")
 * Teo chánmee dóntha. ("The flower is red.")
 * Teo chánmee zeodóntha. ("The flower was red.")

Mood
The concept of grammatical mood is quite ambigeous, but together with other auxiliary verbs attaching to them these moods, take the verb oetha (to go) can be expressed:

Aspect
Most aspects in Cheunco is realized by infixes. Aspects refer to the state of the verb, like whether it's going on, whether it's over, etc. Some affixes can only be used for dyamic verbs. Some affixes are reserved for stative verbs as well.

Verb Conjugation
Basically, a verb has 5 forms, each of which has its own usage. All these forms are derived from the stem.

Relative Clause
Most learners found it difficult to get famaliar with is the relative clause in Cheunco on account of its ambiguous rule. But, to put it simple, the relative clause is "a series of words surrounding a center, which is the verb in modifying form". Let's compare some sentences, in the following sentences, the relative clause is underlined.