Kelanian

Kelanian
Spoken in:
Timeline/Universe:
Total speakers:	???
Genealogical Classification:	(Proto-Language)
Basic word order:	OSV, free
Morphological type:	agglutinating > fusional
Morphosyntactic alignment:	fluid-S
Created by:
Andre	2007

Phonology

Consonants

Kelanian contains 21 consonantal phonemes. The majority, 13, of these are stops. It has labial, dental and velar aspirated and unaspirated stops, both voiced and unvoiced, as well as the glottal stop 3, as in "uh-oh". There is only 1 fricative, s. The remaining 7 are sonorants. It has three nasals, m, n, and ñ (pronounced as is "ring", not as in Spanish "piñata"). Each nasal is inherently linked to a certain group of stops- m with the labials, n with the dentals, and ñ with the velars. There are two liquids, l and r, and two semivowels w and y.

	Labial	Dental	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Stops, unaspirated	p b	t d		k g	3
Stops, aspirated	ph bh	th dh		kh gh
Fricatives		s
Nasals	m	n		ñ
Lateral		l
Trill		r
Semivowels	w		y

Allophony

r is realized as [ɾ] (an alveolar flap) when not initial or geminated.

Before or after voiced stops, s is realized as [z].

Vowels

There are 5 vowels, a, e, i, o, and u, which can all be short or long. Long vowels are written with a macron, ā, ē, ī, ō, ū. The two mid vowels, e and o, are tense when they are long, /e: o:/ and lax when they are short /ɛ ɔ/.

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i		u
Mid	e		o
Open		a

There are also 8 diphthongs, essentially treated as long vowels. They are formed when i follows a, e, o, or u and when u follows a, e, o, or i. The first element becomes long (the macron isn't written), and the second becomes a semivowel, ai ei oi ui au eu ou iu are /a:j e:j o:j u:j a:w e:w o:w i:w/.

Phonotactics

Consonants and consonant clusters are always viewed as syllable onsets. There may only be a coda on a final syllable. Word initial or medial syllables are of the form (C)(C)(w,y)V, though there are very strict rules for what clusters can be formed (see below). Final syllables are of the form (C)(C)(w,y)V(sonorant, fricative). Only a vowel or diphthong is required to form a syllable.

Consonant Clusters

There are rules for what consonant combinations form permissable clusters. All of the clusters formed by the following rules may be medial, but not all may be initial. The ones that can are marked so.

Note: 3 is a stop, but cannot be used to make clusters. All of the rules that refer to "stops" do not apply to 3.

Liquids can precede nasals and stops.

Anything but stops can be geminated.

s can precede or follow stops. (can be initial)

Stops can follow their matching nasals. (can be initial)

The semivowels w and y can follow a consonant or cluster. (allowed initial clusters followed by w and y are also allowed initially)

Accent

In Kelanian, the accent is always found on the word's root vowel. For words that have two or more syllables after the root vowel, every second vowel from the root vowel gets a secondary accent.

Words that don't have analysable roots, e.g. pronouns, prepositions,&c., are always three or less syllables, and are accented on the first.

A long accented vowel is written with a circumflex, a short accented vowel with an acute. A secondary accent is written with a grave.

Elision

If one word ends with a vowel and the next begins with one, the first vowel is dropped in speech if it is short. If it is long and the second vowel is short, that one is dropped. If both are long, neither is dropped.

Morphology

Morpheme Structure

Primitive Root Structure

The roots of Kelanian are of the structure (C)(C)(w,y)VCV. The initial cluster may only be one of the clusters outlined above as permissible initially. Other than this, there is only one rule concerning the consonants in a root: there must be one between the vowels.

There are two vowels in every root. The second is called the "determining vowel" of the root, because it determines what the first vowel, the "root vowel," will be. (It is not very common for two roots to differ only by the determining vowel.) If the determining vowel is e or i, the root vowel is e. If it is o or u, the root vowel is o, and if the determining vowel is a, in the majority of cases the root vowel will be e, though it may be o if the initial consonant cluster contains a w. The root vowel, as mentioned above, is the vowel that is accented in all words derived from a certain root.