Haswaraba

Haswaraba is a language family located at the northern edge of Outer Poswob territory on the large tropical island of Nī around the year 200 BC. Its speakers have bled out into Paleo-Andanese lands and influences have gone in bhoth directions. Haswaraba is the name of the parent language; its descendants are called Haswarabic languages. The form of the language was essentially unchanged when the asteroid strike hit and the people began migrating to Rilola. However, even though the boats were leaving from Haswaraba country, the ancestors of the Pabaps and Poswobs abandoned this language very early on for the Tapilula language, which was already the native language of the upper class paleo-Poswobs living further south.

Phonlogy

Haswaraba is notable for the collapse of all short vowels (which were much more commonm than long vowels) into /a/ and the loss of length distinctions. Haswaraba had three major vowels: /a i u/, of which /a/ was far more common than the other two, and some marginal vowels: /â/ (seen as /aa/), and /wo/ (which comes from POP3 /oo/). The language is toneless and entirely CV, although it has a lot more elision of its vowels than Tapilula, and therefore sounds very different from Tapilula.

Consonants

The consonants systsem is very asymmetrical. /p b bʷ m mʷ w t d dʷ n nʷ l ʎ r s sʷ č š ñ ć ś j k ġʷ h hʷ/

The dot over the "g" is to emphasize that it is a true stop, not the voiced velar fricative that is muich more common in this area.

Vowels

/a i u/. /a/ could be considered non-phonemic, since this is a CV language and therefore any /a/ can be elided in fast speech. e.g. the name /hasʷaraba/ can be analyzed as /hsʷrb/ since it cannot be anything else. However the vowrel â, respresenting a sequence of two /a/'s, cannot be ommitted. It could be just as well treated as a conosnants, though, such as /ʕ/, and so can intiial /a/. Likewise /apapupa/ "border, frence" is /ʕppup/.

Since in a previous stage of the language, all word-final vowels had become short, and later all short vowels became /a/, all words end in /a/ except monosyllables and compounds whose final element is a monosyllable. This final /a/ was generally elided already in the proto-language, even before a word beginning with another vowel. However, loans from Haswaraba into Tapilula generally include all of the elided /a/'s, because Tapilula is also CV except for its occasional syllabic nasals.