Na'awasa

Na'awasa, [näˈäwäʃä] ("aetherling whisper", or "language of the people") is an a priori funlang with an extremely minimalist phonetic library and vocabulary, made by FrathWiki user Fizz, inspired by their friend.

Na'awasa is an artlang spoken by aether beings - angelic, genderless wisp spirits, invisible to humans but ever observant. In concept, their language can be heard as wind or whispers of natural environments.

Phonology and simplified transliteration

Na'awasa only has four consonants (/v, w, ʃ, n/), and only three vowels (/æ, ä, u/). These sounds were chosen for their qualities of sounding like the wind.

For simplicity, these are the letters used for Latin transliteration: ⟨/v/⟩ → ⟨v⟩, ⟨/w/⟩ → ⟨w⟩, ⟨/ʃ/⟩ → ⟨s⟩, ⟨/n/⟩ → ⟨n⟩, ⟨/æ/⟩ → ⟨e⟩, ⟨/ä/⟩ → ⟨a⟩, ⟨/u/⟩ → ⟨u⟩.

Grammar

The basic word order is object-verb-subject, however, this is rarely used and most sentences are directly compounded and simplified into single words.

Na'awasa features an extreme amount of abstraction in speech, as aetherlings try to communicate their thoughts and conversations as fast as possible as to not be detected easily by mere fleshy beings.

Word structure

The language's word structure is composed of a simple consonant-vowel-(duplicate vowel), CV(V) syllabic system. Each word is composed of syllables that are exclusively composed of a consonant, then a vowel, and sometimes a stressed duplicate vowel if the word derives from a different word. There are no vowel dipthongs in this language. The last vowel of a word indicates if it's a (pro)noun (-a), verb (-e) or adjective (-u).

Example: na'a is a derived noun, as it ends with a duplicated a vowel. Since it is duplicated, that means it derives from a different word, in this case, na'a - which means "speech", or "whisper", - comes from na, "wind".

Basic word order and abstraction/compounding

• "The wind blows me" - "Wa ne na" (The wind blow(s) [me]).

Vocabulary

See Na'awasa/Vocabulary.