Arrakum [ˈarːaˈkum] is one of the major languages of the Arrish branch of the Ar-Mazdri family. It is spoken by several million people, primarily of the Arrāk ethnic group, in and around the region of Ūrusa-Bai in southwestern Emedua, and is the majority and prestige language of that region.
Its phonology is strongly inspired by Akkadian, but morphophonologically it is influenced by (= it blatantly rips off) Aymaran languages (particularly Jaqaru) as well as one particular quirk from Piro and a bit of influence from Malagasy. It is in its barest grammatical infancy, but current plans are to have it be influenced by Aymara (help me I can't stop) as well as Australian languages (I'm especially looking at Kuuk Thaayorre right now). It is a primarily-to-exclusively suffixing, generally head-final language. Like Aymara, it is relatively non-configurational, but in practice is generally SOV. Unlike Aymara, it's going to be pretty damn ergative or some sort of active-stative. It definitely has grammatical gender, but the genders are currently yet to be decided.
Phonology:
Phonemes
The phoneme inventory of Arrakum is as follows:
Code: Select all
labial alveolar palatal velar uvular glottal
nasal: m n ŋ
stop: p b t d k g q ʔ
ejective: t' k'
fricative: v s z ʃ x
l. fric: ɬ~θ
trill: r
approx: l j w
vowel: a e i u a: e: i: u: ai au
Orthography:
In my romanization, everything is as it is in IPA except:
/? S ɬ~θ x j a: e: i: u:/ → <' š ł h y ā ē ī ū>
Geminate consonants are doubled.
In-world it is written in the Īsumai script, now explained in a post below.
Allophony:
I tend to find allophony the most boring aspect of phonology (don't hurt me), so just moving on. Something something high vowels lower next to the uvular stop, though, and /r/ is tapped intervocalically unless it is geminated, in which case it is trilled. /n/ assimilates to following stops, the other nasals don't.
Phonotactics:
The maximal syllable structure of most syllables of Arrakum is CVC, with CV, VC and V also allowed. Word-final syllables occasionally allow final clusters, and I'm still deciding what those clusters are. Words minimally have two vocalic moras; a few monomoraic stems exist, but they obligatorily undergo the addition of a vowel mora when occurring independent of suffixes.
Prosody:
It has iambic rhythm, with stress falling equally on the strong beat of each iamb. Feet where the first syllable is heavier than the second are disallowed. There are three syllable weights: light, heavy and superheavy, where light syllables consist of 1 mora (μ), heavy syllables are 2μ, and superheavy syllables are 3μ. Both long vowels and consonant codas contribute to syllable weight, even though codas are not counted in the morphophonology. Light syllables are (C)V. Heavy syllables are either (C)V: (where V: is a long vowel or a diphthong) or (C)VC. Superheavy syllables are CV:C. Geminate consonants contribute one mora to the weight of the syllable preceding them.
Feet are right-aligned within a word. A foot must minimally contain two vowel moras (it would be really useful here to have a separate term here specifically for vowel moras...). They are maximally disyllabic, and the second syllable must outweigh or be equal in weight to the first syllable in number of moras. When two syllables would generally be footified together but the second syllable is lighter, the second syllable becomes extrametrical and remains unstressed (and is deleted in some dialects, maybe), such as in the name of the region where the Arrāk live, Ūrusa-Bai, which is divided into feet as [Ū]ru[sa-Bai].
Morphophonology post next. Already having way too much fun with that shit, so be warned.