2023-07-28T15:30:50Z

Aaannestad: /* Stress assignment */

This page gives a basic overview of Mirja's phonology. See the referenced pages for more detailed descriptions of individual phenomena.

== Segmental phoneme inventory ==

Mirja has the following segmental phonemes.

=== Consonants ===

Sounds in parentheses appear only as the result of phonological or morphophonemic processes, and do not appear in the underlying representation of any morphemes.

{| class="wikitable"
! colspan="2"| !! Bilabial !! Labiodental !! Apical !! Palatal !! Velar !! Glottal
|-
! rowspan="3"|Obstruent || Voiceless stop
| h<ref group="n">Underlyingly /p/ for some purposes, but surfaces as [h] in isolation</ref> || || t || || k ||
|-
! Voiceless fricative
| (ɸ~w̥) || (f) || s (θ) || || x || h
|-
! Voiced
| || v || d~ð || || g~ɣ ||
|-
! colspan="2"|Nasal
| m || || n || || (ŋ) ||
|-
! rowspan="2"|Liquid || Lateral
| || || l ɬ || || ||
|-
! Rhotic
| || || ɾ ɾ̥ || || ||
|-
! colspan="2"|Approximant
| w (ɸ~w̥) || || || j (j̥) || ||
|}

<references group="n"/>

/r̥/ is often pronounced closer to something like [ʂ], and /j̥/ is likely best understood phonetically as [ç].

==== Consonant mutations ====

There are three processes that can change one consonant into another. The most straightforward is a dissimilation process with /s/: the second of two consecutive syllables with /s/ will replace the /s/ with /θ/:

{{interlinear|top=''su'''th'''y vata''
|su-'''s''' va-t
|3sg-TOP do.it-PAST
|'They did it'}}

The second is a merger process when two sufficiently similar consonants come together. Usually, when two consonants come together underlyingly, the result is either gemination (if they're identical) or the insertion of an epenthetic vowel between them (if they're different). However, certain pairs of different consonants merge into a geminate when they come together. In the table below, these otherwise unexpected mergers are given in bold. (Expected geminates are non-bold, and epenthetically separated pairs are indicated by '--'.)

{| class="wikitable"
! Second phoneme → !! rowspan="2"|t !! rowspan="2"|l !! rowspan="2"|n !! rowspan="2"|k
|-
! First phoneme ↓
|-
! t
| tt || '''ll''' || '''nn''' || --
|-
! l
| '''ll''' || ll || '''nn''' || --
|-
! n
| '''nn''' || '''ll''' || nn || '''ŋŋ'''
|}

An example of this is given below.

{{interlinear|top=''do'''ll'''a''
|do'''n'''-'''l'''
|drink-NEG
|'didn't drink'}}

TODO: when three come together (e.g. ''don-l-t'')

The third and most significant process that transmutes phonemes is [[Topic marking|topicalisation]]. Mirja's basic topic marker is a feature bundle that docks to the final consonant of a word and transforms it into a voiceless continuant:

{{interlinear|top=''no'''rh'''o karu''
|no-rV-'''*''' karu
|1sg-OBL-'''TOP''' is.visible
|'I see it'}}

=== Vowels ===

{| class="wikitable"
! rowspan="2"| !! rowspan="2"|Front !! colspan="2"|Non-front
|-
! Unrounded !! Rounded
|-
! High
| i || ɨ || u
|-
! Low
| e || a || o
|}

In addition to the above vowel phonemes, Mirja has two different kinds of automatic vowel insertion. One is simple epenthesis - /a ɨ/ are inserted to break up consonant clusters that can't be resolved by the above merger processes (/a/ if the preceding vowel is low; /ɨ/ if it's high). The other is 'empty vowel slots' - certain morphemes have segments specified for being A Vowel, but with no information about which vowel. In these cases, the previous vowel is copied entirely.

Diphthongs must share rounding and height across both elements; as a result, /ɨi ae/ are the only two valid diphthongs. When morphology causes any other vowels to come together, the result is a long version of the second vowel:

{{interlinear|top='''''ii'''ma''
|'''e'''-'''i'''ma
|eat-morning
|'eat (some) breakfast'}}

== Suprasegmentals ==

Mirja has both phonemic tone and an active (non-phonemic) stress system, which interact in complex ways. In general, tones are assigned starting at the left edge of the morpheme they belong to, then stress is assigned in ways that partially depend on tone (but also on syllable weight), and then tones can be moved to better line up with the resulting stress locations.

Mirja has four phonemic tone melodies: /L H LH HL/. MORE.

=== Stress assignment ===

Mirja stress is assigned in a word-initial trochaic fashion; in other words preferring heavy-light feet with primary stress in the first foot in the word. Given no further complications, a word will simply have primary stress on its initial syllable. However, the stress assignment algorithm is also weight-sensitive and tone-sensitive, and this can cause the primary stress to be on the second syllable instead.

The algorithm largely works this way:

* Check the weights of the first two syllables. If the second is heavier than the first, assign stress to the second.
* If that didn't assign stress, check the tones of the first two syllables. If the second has a high tone (or is a contour) and the first has only a low tone, assign stress to the second syllable.
* If that didn't assign stress, assign it to the first syllable.

After that point, the primary stress projects a grid of trochaic feet until the end of the word. Notably, Mirja does not allow feet in which both syllables are heavy, and thus a heavy syllable simply is its own foot if it's followed by another heavy syllable. At times the footing process creates unfooted syllables on one or both ends of the word; this is fine and Mirja simply accepts it.

=== Tonological processes ===

==== /H/ spread ====

A high tone will spread rightwards until it encounters some other tone or the end of its phonological word.

EXAMPLES.

==== /HH/ blocking ===

Mirja disallows two marked high tones from being adjacent to each other, and will insert a low tone between them to break them up. This can look somewhat different depending on the context it happens in. In an underlying non-final /HH/ sequence, the inserted L will push the H rightwards to create [HLH]. In an underlying /HØ...H/ sequence where the adjacency is due to the above spread rule, the L is placed to the left of the final H, resulting in an [HH...LH] sequence - in other words, the H spreads rightwards until it hits the automatic L in front of the next H. In an underlying /HH#/ sequence, where there's no room to reassign the H rightwards due to the word boundary immediately following, the H simply ends up off the end of the word entirely and is either outright deleted or left floating with no further evidence of its continued presence - in other words, resulting in an [HL#] sequence on the surface.

EXAMPLES.

==== Contouring and merging ====

STUFF

2023-05-30T14:59:32Z

Aaannestad:

Mirja mostly doesn't care about plurality on a large scale, but it does possess a collective plural marker, which is used to mark nouns as referring to all members of some contextually-inferrable group. This is one of Mirja's few [[templatic morphology|templatic morphemes]], and takes the form of a CVVCV pattern aligned to the right edge of a word; usually this involves simply lengthening the second-to-last vowel and shortening the last consonant if it isn't already short:

{{interlinear|top=''nali''
|nali
|person
|'person' ~ 'people'}}

{{interlinear|top=''naali''
|nali-**
|person-that-PL
|'people (in general)', '(all of this group of) people'}}

This change applies after other morphology is added:

{{interlinear|top=''naliku''
|nali-ku
|person-that
|'that person' ~ 'those people'}}

{{interlinear|top=''naliiku''
|nali-ku-**
|person-that-PL
|'those people (in general)', '(all of) those people'}}

[[Pronouns and proverbs#Personal pronouns|Personal pronouns]] behave a bit uniquely when pluralised with this marker. For one, since personal pronouns are short CV forms, in order to fit the CVVCV template they have to be reduplicated—so ''no'' '1SG' becomes ''noono''. Since this is effectively taking two segments and assigning them to five locations, changes to those segments affect them everywhere they appear—so when ''noono'' is [[topic marking|topicalised]], the result is ''nhoonhoo'', not *''noonho''. Additionally, for the first and second person pronouns ''no'' and ''ma'', their plural forms ''noono'' and ''maama'' are actual true plurals rather than collective plurals, and are used whenever you have first or second person referents that involve more than one entity.

Collective plural

2023-05-30T14:59:08Z

Aaannestad: Created page with "Mirja mostly doesn't care about plurality on a large scale, but it does possess a collective plural marker, which is used to mark nouns as referring to all members of some contextually-inferrable group. This is one of Mirja's few templatic morphemes, and takes the form of a CVVCV pattern aligned to the right edge of a word; usually this involves simply lengthening the second-to-last vowel and shortening the last consonant if it isn't already shor..."

Phonology

2023-05-30T14:47:04Z

Aaannestad: /* Segmental phoneme inventory */

Topic marking

2023-05-30T14:45:12Z

Aaannestad: /* The basic topic marker */

Topic marking is a fundamental part of Mirja grammar, and participates in some fairly fundamental systems. There are two main topic markers in Mirja—the 'simple topic marker' and the 'contrastive topic marker'—and a couple of other things (such as ''-si'' 'also') also behave like topic markers.

== Form ==

Both main topic markers are ultimately descended from ''su'', the third person pronoun.

=== The basic topic marker ===

Mirja's most basic and simple topic marker—glossed as simply 'TOP'—usually surfaces only as a modification to the final consonant of the word it attaches to. Specifically, it takes whatever the last consonant of that word is and converts it to a voiceless fricative. The specific results are shown by the table below.

{|class="wikitable
! Original !! Topicalised
|-
| m w || ɸ~w̥
|-
| v || f
|-
| t d n || θ
|-
| l || ɬ
|-
| r || r̥
|-
| j || j̥
|-
| k g || x
|-
| h θ s ɬ r̥ x || (segmental marker)
|}

In morpheme-by-morpheme glosses, this feature bundle is transcribed as '*'.

{{interlinear|top=''no'''rh'''o karu''
|no-rV-'''*''' karu
|1sg-OBL-'''TOP''' be.visible
|'I can see it'}}

Those sounds marked as requiring a segmental marker don't get transformed, but instead what is otherwise the contrastive topic marker ''-s'' is attached to the end of the word.

EXAMPLE.

=== The contrastive topic marker ===

The contrastive topic marker is a simple suffix ''-s''.

{{interlinear|top=''noro'''sa''' karu''
|no-rV-'''s''' karu
|1sg-OBL-'''CTOP''' be.visible
|'I at least can see it'}}

== Function ==

Crosslinguistically, a topic is a referent that is what the sentence it's in is "about"—with the [[Focus marking||focus]] (or remainder) providing new or at-issue information which is "about" the topic. Usually topics need to be already known to the listener, and more discourse-active referents are more likely to be topics.

Complicating this, Mirja is often content to drop references to referents that are easily inferable from context, and at times it may be difficult to determine which dropped argument was a topic and which wasn't.

== Topicality and inversion ==

{{Main|Inverse marking}}

In Mirja, the default assumption is that whatever is marked as the topic is going to be the subject. When this assumption does not hold, the verb is marked with the inverse marker ''-e''.

EXAMPLE.

Main Page

2023-05-30T14:45:04Z

Aaannestad: