Repilian languages/Owl
The Owl language was spoken in 0 AD in the area that later became the Moonshine Crown. It was the proto-language of many others that survived for a few thousand more years.
Phonology
The phonology of Owl, like most related languages, was small, but its grammar was such that one coudl talk about two phonologies: the surface level and the grammatical one. In grammar, MR languages icluding Owl treat only a few hard consonants as proper consonants, and these are what the noun rotos are made of.
Consonants
Surface consonants are
HARD: t k s p ṇ SOFT: r ŋ v n m l y ʔ ʕ h
The nasals m n only appear in the coda, whereas ṇ behaves as a hard consonant and can appear in all positions, even in clusters like /tṇ/.
Note: it is possible that the position restrictions on /m n/ mean that they would never be distinct from each other. Even though Owl allows disharmonious clusters like /tp/, /kn/, etc, it is possible that the nasals would not be allowed to do this since they are "weak" and considered part of the vowel nucleus. If so, then /n/ is a hard consonant and /m/ a soft one, with no overlap.
Vowels
a i u ə
The schwa is spelled as /e/. The IPA /e/ vowel appears in some MR languages, and must be spelled with a different glyph, because even these languages also have the schwa.
Stress
Stress is probably word-final unconditionally at least on nouns. Verbs might have dynamic stress but final is the most common there as well.
Grammar
All nouns are consonant shells, and they take auxiliary verbs as infixes.
Nouns
All noun roots consist of four consonants, and there is no other information to set them apart. Any root whose surface form appears to have less than four consonants only appears so because the surface form contains a cluster such as /ttt/ which is pronounced as /t:/ rather than /t::/, and even these nouns will still separate the consonants in most of their inflectional forms.
Even the very simplest nouns, like "water", consist of four consonants. However, as above, some noun shells have the same consonant two, three, or even four times in a row, and the surface forms of these words merge the resulting clusters to make them sound as if they have no more than two stuck togther.
Because of the 4-consonant minimum, all words for nouns are quite long. Thus, many concepts are not expressed by nouns. For example, there are no pronouns; all of this is marked on the verb. Inalienable possessions are often not expressed by nouns either but by affixes of manner such as "by hand", "on foot", etc. To form a word for hand, foot, etc in isolation one would then need to put a further affix on this word, and this word would be as long as a 4-consonant noun would, but is not used often.
Consonants shells
Only hard consonants can be part of the shell. In Owl, these constonants were t k s p n. Any other consonant is treated by Owl's grammar as part of the vowel nucleus of the syllable; as well, /n/ has a second form that also occurs as part of the vowel nucleus.
Helper verbs
Nouns must agree with the verb they are the agent of, if there is one. This is done by sticking an infix into the noun; this also can happen when there is no verb in the sentence, and in this case it takes the meaning odf a simple tenseless verb. THis can be called an auxiliary verb. The infixes have very broad meanings mostly, but some are more specific such as "sleep".
Infixes
All infixes go in one of three specific slots.
Slot A
- C-a-CCC null (used on most animates)
Noun case inflections might go here.
Slot B
- CC-ev-CC male
- CC-vi-CC female
Slot B did not exist in the early days of the language. It only emerged when the four-consonant minimum emerged and primordial two-consonant roots got stuck to other ones. This is probably the most nounlike slot, but may also be the one that contains the auxiliary verbs. It may also contain body parts.
Slot C
- CCC-am-C progressive aspect (auxiliary verb)
Slot C is probably the most verblike slot. If the auxiliary ("helper") verbs are not in B, then they will be here.
Info
Thus for example, from the root KTSP "owl", one can say katevsp "male owl" and katvisp "female owl", using the animate infix and one of the gender infixes. The surface pronunciations of these are [katōspə] and [katʷispə].
