Jombrian language

The Jombrian Language (Halēti Jōmbri [hale:ti ʒʲo:mbri]) is a North Tombian Language descended from Nashki, and the official language of Jombria. It was a lingua franca among the Northern and Eastern coasts of the Inner Sea (along with Halovik, with which it is mutually intelligible), and eventually of much of the world after the Great Imperialist Age.

Jombrian is a synthetic language with a high degree of inflection, including fourteen grammatical cases, four genders, and three numbers (singular, dual, and plural). It is unique for its scarcity of prepositions, instead using grammatical cases, and it's complete lack of copula.

Jombrian is written in the Kalitan Jombran adaptation of the Kalitan Nashkan script, which was ultimately adapted from the Phangemese alphabet.

Phonology
Phonology varies significantly throughout history and regions. This article is about standard Jombrian (spoken in the capital of Jom City and throughout most of Maddika) during the Great Imperialist Age.

Vowels
Jombrian has five vowels, [a] [e] [i] [o] [u], and their long counterparts [a:] [e:] [i:] [o:] [u:]. long and short vowels are separate phonemes and can change the meaning of words. Vowel length is distinguished by their duration, with long vowels being roughly twice as long as short vowels. There is no difference in quality. A long vowel is slightly reduced when used before a geminate consonant, but not to the shortness of a short vowel.

Vowels are often nasalized after a nasal consonant and before a nasal consonant or a consonant cluster including a nasal consonant.

There are no diphthongs in Jombrian. Each vowel is a separate syllable. The semivowels [j] and [w] that were present in Nashki have been lost and replaced with the individual vowels [i] and [u] in most dialects of Jombrian.

Consonants
Jombrian has 19 consonant phonemes. Any consonant can be geminated into a long consonant, roughly doubling its duration.
 * 1) The alveolar flap [ɾ] becomes a trilled [r] when geminate.
 * 2) When geminate, voiceless stops [p] [t] and [k] are pronounced as a short pause between the cutting off of the airflow and the release. Geminate voiced stops [b] [d] and [g] are pronounced similarly, but with a very slight flow of voiced air while the airstream is cut off into the mouth cavity behind the place of articulation.
 * 3) The alveo-palatal fricatives and affricates are always palatalized.
 * 4) By the Great Imperialist Age, the voiced alveo-palatal fricative [ʒʲ] was often pronounced as the affricate [dʒʲ] in coloquial speech. The fricative would be completely replaced by the end of the age.

Prosody
Since vowels in Imperial Jombrian do not form diphthongs or glides, the number of syllables in a word is equal to the number of vowels it has. Jombrian has a stress accent that falls on one of the last three syllables in a word. The general rules for where the accent falls are as follows. There are a small number of words with irregular accents. (Out of universe, in Latin characters, irregular accents are marked with acute accent marks).
 * If all of the last three vowels are long, the stress falls on the second to last syllable.
 * If the second to last vowel is short and the third to last vowel is long, stress falls on the third to last syllable, regardless of whether the last vowel is long or short.
 * If the both the second to last vowel and the third to last vowel are short, and the last vowel is long, the stress falls on the final syllable.
 * If all of the last three vowels are short, the stress falls on the second to last syllable.

Grammar

 * Main article: Jombrian Grammar

Jombrian is a heavily fusional language, with fourteen grammatical cases, four genders, and three grammatical numbers, and 531 verb forms. Jombrian morphology uses a complex system of affixation, including suffixes, prefixes, infixes, circumfixes, and circum-infixes (a combined prefix and infix). The word order of Jombrian is very free. The words of a sentence can occur in almost any order. Adjectives, since they are inflected like nouns, can even occur on the opposite end of a sentence from the nouns they modify. Despite this, the more commonly used order is SOV, with other thematic cases occuring before the subject and prepositional cases occuring after the verb.

It uses a total of fourteen grammatical noun cases, including seven cases for conveying thematic roles (nominative, accusative, dative, genetive, vocative, instrumental, and abessive), and seven for conveying location (adessive, inessive, ablative, elative, illative, allative, and essive). Jombrian does not use prepositions, instead relying entirely on cases. More complicated prepositions can be made using additional nouns denoting locations (for example, akēti gintri "on/above the table", combining the adessive "at" case of kēt "top", and the genetive "of" case of gintra "table", making "at the top of the table"). The genders used are masculine feminine, neuter, and divine, the latter used for a select few nouns that were once associated with animist dieties of Nashk. The numbers include singular, dual, and plural. Each number and each gender is declined distinctly. Adjectives decline in the same way as nouns, and must match the noun they describe in case, gender, and number. Nouns referring to a person or animal often change gender to match the gender of the refferent.

Jombrian verbs also conjugate by three numbers, along with three personal conjugations (1st, 2nd, and 3rd person), four moods (indicative, subjunctive, optative, and imperative), seven tenses (present, progressive, perfect, future, imperfect, past perfect, and future perfect), and four voices (active, passive, causative, and causative passive). Nominative personal pronouns are never used along with verbs, only appearing as part of a coupling sentence. Jombrian does not use a copula, instead using a combination of declining by case and adding verb-like inflectional morphemes onto the predicate noun.