Leaper/Orange

The ʕʷàraḳapī language is a descendant of Khulls spoken in the northern part of the Poswob Empire, near territories that long ago were part of "Baywatch" country. It takes its name from discarded morphemes meaning navel orange, because it is an attempt to create from Khulls a language whose phonology and to a lesser extent morphology resemble those of Mandarin Chinese. It is part of a series of fruit-flavored languages that also includes Apple Pie, Lemonade, Strawberry Icecream, and Raspberry Wine.

It is unlikely that this language will resemble Mandarin Chinese in any meaningful way. I may have even superseded this project with Ogili II and then forgotten that I had. If so, this is in fact spoken in Baeba Swamp, not Play territory.

Phonology

Tones are kept and are more robust than anywhere else. The Khulls five-tone system could simply be transposed onto the Mandarin setup with a one-to-one relationship:

Khulls ā = Mandarin ā
Khulls á = Mandarin á
Khulls â = Mandarin ǎ
Khulls à = Mandarin à
Khulls ă = Mandarin neutral tone or create a fifth tone

But this is somewhat problematic because the ā and á tones of Khulls had already merged, except for sandhi, by the time of classical Khulls.

Most sound changes are unconditional, because most morphemes are one syllable long and many final consonants are dropped or assimilated. It may be that the language will not resemble Mandarin as much as certain other dialects, however, because it is unlikely that the entire array of 20 possible final consonants will collapse to just /n ŋ/ or even to /m n ŋ/. Still, syllabic nasals could help out here. All in all, this will be a more difficult project than the other Fruit languages.

Voiced stops may become nasals, although this would actually make the language sound less Chinese because it would mean the only non-aspirated stops are the ejectives, which are marginal. For example, /ṭ/ and /ṗ/ are in complementary distribution, as are /r/ and /b/. Essentially the labials are allophones of the coronals.