Cenyani grammar reference

• Contents
• 1 Letters
  • 1.1 Consonants
  • 1.2 Vowels
• 2 Stress
  • 2.1 Compound words

This page contains high-Unicode IPA characters.

See also:

• Native alphabet

Letters

The Cenyani alphabet in its Latin alphabet form contains rather a hefty amount of letters. To be precise, it contains 38 letters, one of which has one alternate form for use in some circumstances. In their Latin order, they are: a, á, ä, b, c, d, ð, e, é, ö, f, g, h, i, í, l, m, n, ŋ, o, ó, p, r, rr, rh, s, ss, š, šš, t, þ, u, ú, v, w, x, y, ý.

The letter y can be used as both a vowel and a consonant: if it is adjacent to a vowel, y is read as a consonant; otherwise, it is a vowel. If ever vowel y needs to be adjacent to a consonant y, the vowel is instead written as ü. This is a bit confusing, I know.

Note: ý does not change, even when next to y. However, to improve readability, it is acceptable to replace ý with (preferably) ű or ǘ.

Consonants

Consonants in Cenyani are almost completely straightforward in pronunciation, according to the table below. Some consonants can be combined with consonant y to form palatalised versions of their sounds. See the table below.

Consonants

	Bilabial	Labiodental	Dental	Alveolar	Palato-alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Uvular	Glottal
Nasal	m [m]		n [n]			ny [ɲ]	ŋ [ŋ]
Plosive	p [p] b [b]		t [t] d [d]			ty [c] dy [ɟ]	c [k] g [g]
Fricative		f [f] v [v]	þ [θ] ð [ð]	s [s] ss [s̩]	š [ʃ] šš [ʃ̩]	sy [ç]		x [χ]	h [h]
Approximant						y [j]
Trill			r [r] rr [r̩]					rh [ʀ]
Lateral approximant			l [l]			ly [ʎ]

The letter w, which does not fit into the table above, is pronounced [w]. Additionally, h is always pronounced [x] at the end of a word, and some dialects use that pronunciation everywhere instead of [h].

The letters rr, ss and šš are syllabic versions of their undoubled equivalents. Most other consonants can be lengthened (orthographically doubled): the only consonants that cannot be lengthened are the plosives, h, w, x and y. The Cy-consonants have only the C component doubled: sy becomes ssy, etc.

The sounds [n], [t], [d], [r], and [l] are dental by default, unless adjacent to an alveolar or postalveolar sound, in which case they’re moved to that place of articulation.

Cenyani also has some extremely strict rules (though not necessarily extremely restrictive; just strictly enforced) regarding consonant clusters, i.e. which consonants may be adjacent within a word. One rule that always applies is this: consonant clusters must be of the form CC or CSC (where S is any syllabic consonant). No consonant cluster may contain more than three consonants, no matter how many of them are syllabic. A separate page has been devoted to a collection of three tables which describe exactly which consonants may appear where and in what positions in a word, as well as how the clusters are pronounced, where the pronunciation is irregular. Please note that these tables are, if you’ll pardon my French, foutrement grandes.

Finally, the sounds [f] and [v] are not technically separate phonemes: there is no minimal pair where the only difference is the voicing of a labiodental fricative. For all intents and purposes, they are interchangeable, but most cenya will nevertheless complain if you use the wrong sound. That said, [v] is a lot more common than [f] in most accents and dialects.

Vowels

Vowels

	Case 1	Case 2	Case 3	Case 4
a	[ɑ, a]	[a]		[ɑ, a]
á	[ɑː]	[aː]		[ɑː, aː]
ä	[æˑ]	[æ]		[æˑ]
e	[ɛ]	[e]
é	[ɛː]	[eː]
ö	[øˑ]	[ø]		[øˑ]
i	[i]	[ɪ]		[i]
í	[iː]	[ɪː]		[iː]
o	[ɔ]	[o]
ó	[ɔː]	[oː]
u	[u]	[ʊ]		[u]
ú	[uː]	[ʊː]	[uː]
y	[ʉ]	[y]		[y, ʉ]
ý	[ʉː]	[yː]

Cenyani vowels are slightly less straightforward in pronunciation than the consonants. The pronunciation depends mainly on the vowel’s surrounding consonants, but some of them also change slightly depending on whether they are stressed or not.

Cenyani distinguishes between four different vowel “cases”:

Case 1:

followed by r (whether part of a consonant cluster or alone).

Case 2:

followed by a palatal consonant.

Case 3:

followed by a consonant cluster or a long consonant.

Case 4:

anywhere else.

Vowels whose pronunciation depends on stress are a/á and y:

• a is only pronounced as [ɑ] in case 4 if it is the stressed vowel of a word with at least three syllables. This applies to á as well.
• a is only pronounced as [ɑ] in case 1 if it is stressed, regardless of the number of syllables in the word.
• y is only pronounced as [ʉ] in case 4 if it is unstressed.

When the same vowel phoneme occurs in adjacent syllables, but they have a slightly different quality, they’re often altered to sound the same. Hence, mere is usually pronounced as [ˈmɛrɛ] rather than [ˈmɛre], because it’s easier. Similarly, naran is almost always spoken as [ˈnɑrɑn] instead of [ˈnɑran]. The stressed syllable usually determines what vowel quality to use for the other syllables.

Vowels retain their pronunciation even if the word is changed, e.g. by adding suffixes/prefixes, or making a compound word. For example, in a two-syllable word a stressed a is pronounced [a] even if the word is inflected to include an additional syllable, or if the word is used as a component of a compound word.

Finally, Cenyani also recognises five diphthongs: ao, au, áo, áu, ue. In the first two, the a-component is always pronounced [a], never [ɑ]. Same goes for the following two, but with a long a instead. In ue, the u is pronounced [w]. The second component in all five diphthongs is pronounced normally, according to the vowel table. All other combinations of vowels must have each vowel pronounced separately.

Stress

“Stress” is a term that is sometimes used synonymously with “emphasis”: rules of stress determine how to emphasise syllables in spoken language. Whereas some languages – for example French – have relatively weak stress, Cenyani is much closer to English: the stressed syllable in a word is always clearly emphasised. Note: the stressed syllable – only one syllable can be stressed.

As in English and many other languages, syllable stress in Cenyani is marked by a slight raising of tone. In the case of compound words, there may be secondary stress on some syllables, which exhibit a raising of tone slightly less than the primary-stress syllable. Non-stressed syllables tend to share the same tone throughout the word.

The stress in Cenyani is almost completely regular, and can fall on both vowels and syllabic consonants. Essentially, in order to determine where the stress falls in a word, each syllable is assigned a weight based on its various qualities. Syllables are weighed thus (higher number = higher weight), and the heaviest syllable in a word receives stress:

6.

Long vowel (with acute accent, that is: á é í ó ú ý).

5.

Syllabic consonant.

4.

ä.

3.

ö.

2.

Vowel followed by long consonant.

1.

First syllable.

For example, the syllables in the word onáldi (“boy”) have the weights 1-6-0, making nál the stressed syllable. Similarly, noxrrt (a common fruit) has the stress on xrrt, because rr is a syllabic consonant which has higher weight than the first syllable.

However, note that stress is retained when the word is inflected: ešet (“food”) has its stress on the first syllable, and so does its accusative form ešetöc, even though ö has higher weight than the first syllable.

Some words use acute accents to alter the stress without lengthening the vowel, because these stress rules would otherwise put the stress on the wrong syllable. One such word is sáxšä, which is usually pronounced [ˈsaχʃæ].

Also note that these stress rules exist partly for linguistic reasons, partly for orthographic reasons. There’s no real reason why ä and ö should have higher weights than other short vowels – or why ä should be heavier than ö, for that matter. In Cenyani, however, ä tends to be more frequently stressed than ö, which in turn is more often stressed than short vowels. These rules effectively make the orthography slightly simpler, slightly more regular, and closer to the language.

Compound words

The stress in compound words is slightly less predictable: there are plenty of exceptions to the rules.

There are two rules that apply in just about every single compound word:

• The original stress of each component in the compound is retained.
• One component of the compound word gets primary stress, meaning its stressed syllable is pronounced with a slightly higher tone than the stressed syllables of the other components, which receive secondary stress.

There are also, of course, rules for determining which component to give primary stress to:

• If any component of the compound does not have its stress on the first syllable, the primary stress falls on the first such component.
• If all components have first-syllable stress, in general, the primary stress falls on the component with the highest number of syllables. This rule has far more exceptions than the one above.