Manaamibanashi Language

Contents 1 Overview 2 Orthography 3 Transliteration 4 Phonology 4.1 Consonants 4.2 Vowels 4.3 Phonotactics 4.4 Vowel harmony 5 Grammar 5.1 Syntax 5.2 Gender agreement

Overview

Manaamibanashi (Gyozyinya Mana; Kanji: 愛編噺) is an extincted language spoken by the Manaami (愛編), an ethnic group who resided in an isolated area deep inside the mountains of Taiga, Sol cluster. Due to its isolation from the rest of the world, Manaamibanashi had evolved separately and thus has absolutely no connection to Hymmnos or any other ethnic Ar ciel languages.

Since its last native speaker's death, Manaamibanashi has become an endangered language, with only a few people capable of speaking it fluently. Nevertheless, there have been efforts to revive the language, among with other endangered ethnic languages. Unlike most ethnic Ar ciel languages which remain mostly in spoken form, Manaamibanashi had developed its own writing system, which greatly helped in attempts to save the language from vanishing completely.

Without any relationship to other Ar ciel languages, Manaamibanashi is a mostly analytic language, though it exhibits an unique feature not seen even in the more complex synthetic languages neighboring it - gender distinction. Other than that, it is fairly similar to Standard Hymmnos in terms of grammars.

Orthography

The traditional Manaamibanashi script is mostly an Abugida - that is, each character in the script represents a consonant plus an inherited vowel, /a/. Different vowels, aspiration, glides and codas are represented as diacritics added to the consonant symbols. The script, however, also exhibits hints of an Abjad writing system, in that word-final vowels are usually not written, because they can be derived from vowel harmony and gender rules. There are exceptions when word-final vowels are written explicitly, but only in special words such as conjunctions and interjections.

Transliteration

Due to its complexity, the native Manaamibanashi script is rarely used. Instead, a transliteration system has been developed for the language, and despite using several digraphs and even trigraphs, it's perfectly regular - once the rules have been memorized, one can read and write down unknown words without any difficulty.

Thus, a so-called "alphabet" for Manaamibanashi would consist of the following 32 letters:

A   a	B   b	C   c	CH   ch	D   d	E   e	ER   er	F   f
G   g	I   i	L   l	M   m	N   n	NY   ny	O   o	P   p
PH   ph	S   s	SH   sh	SY   sy	T   t	TH   th	TS   ts	TSH   tsh
TSY   tsy	U   u	V   v	W   w	Y   y	Z   z	ZH   zh	ZY   zy

Phonology

Manaamibanashi has a few special phonology traits that are rarely seen in other languages of Ar ciel, including aspiration, retroflex consonants, rhotacized schwa and vowel harmony.

Consonants

In columns with two consonants, the ones on the left are voiceless, and the ones on the right are voiced.

		Bilabial	Labio- dental	Alveolar	Retroflex	Alveolo- palatal	Palatal	Labio- velar	Velar
Plosive	Plain	p   b		t   d					k   ɡ
	Aspirated	pʰ		tʰ					kʰ
Nasal		m		n			ɲ
Affricate				ts	ʈʂ	tɕ
Fricative			f   v	s   z	ʂ   ʐ	ɕ   ʑ
Approximant							j	w
Lateral approximant				l

Vowels

Manaamibanashi has a fairly simple vowel system of only six vowels. It is, however, noticeably special in having a rare rhotic (R-colored) schwa sound.

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i		u
Close-mid	e		o
Mid		ɚ
Open		a

Phonotactics

Manaamibanashi syllable structure is summarized as follows: C₁ C₂ V C₃

• C₁ and C₂ construct the syllable onset, with C₁ being any consonant and C₂ being either liquid /l/ or semivowel /j/.
• C₂ /l/ occurs only if C₁ is an unaspirated plosive. Thus, not even simple consonant clusters such as /fl/ or /sl/ exist.
• C₂ /j/ occurs only if C₁ is an unaspirated plosive, a nasal (except palatal /ɲ/), a labiodental fricative, or /l/.
• C₂ /j/ almost always merges with and palatalizes the preceding C₁, thus /kj/ almost always becomes palatalized /kʲ/. Also due to this palatalization process, /nj/ becomes /ɲ/.
• If C₁ is /j/ then C₂ obviously does not exist.
• V is the nucleus vowel, one of the six possible vowels.
• C₃ is the coda, which can occur after any vowel but rhotic /ɚ/. It can only be either /l/ or /n/, and possibly /m/ as an allophone of /n/ before a bilabial C₁ onset of the following syllable.

Vowel harmony

The six vowels of Manaamibanashi are divided into two groups - "front" and "back," even though two out of six are phonetically neither central nor back. This restriction decides which ending to be used for gender agreement. For example, the masculine ending for the stem cag- (to have) is -e, but the same gender ending for the stem mon- (I, me) is -o.

Refer to the Gender agreement section below for more information.

Grammar

Syntax

Manaamibanashi is often described as following the SVO (Subject - Verb - Object) word order, but in reality, it is a topic-prominent language, and has the tendency of right-branching. That is, adjectives and subordinate clauses are put after nouns, and adverbs follow verb. However, numeral modifiers and prepositions come before noun.

Being an analytic language, an important feature of Manaamibanashi is that words do not necessary have a fixed role. The same word can be either noun or verb depending on syntax, for example velvite can mean either "love" or "to love." It is also a null subject language, the subject is often dropped as long as it can be inferred from context.

Gender agreement

Despite its mostly analytic structure, words in Manaamibanashi still reflect gender - masculine and feminine. Changing gender can possibly alter all other words in the sentence. Compare:

• Mono ilye zyo epersyo: I am a human.
• Moner ilya zya epersyer: I am a human.

The above sentences are the same in meaning, but the first one is spoken by a male speaker and the second one by a female speaker. This simple difference in gender actually alters all words in the sentence.

Words that end in -o and -e are always of masculine gender, and words ending in -a and -er are feminine. Which ending to use depends on the penultimate syllable's vowel (following vowel harmony rules): i, e and a are "front" vowels, while u, o and er are "back" vowels. If the penultimate syllable has a front vowel then gender ending can only be -e or -a, and never -o and -er.

Thus, "to be" is ilye in its masculine form and ilya in feminine form. Meanwhile "human" is epersyo (masculine) and epersyer (feminine). If a word has only one syllable, -o and -a endings take priority.

With the exception of conjunction and interjection words, words in Manaamibanashi never end in i, u, l or n.