Akachenti

Akachenti is the most commonly spoken major dialect of the Kachan language, spoken by the Ogunn people. It is an incorporating fusional polysynthetic language with fluid-S active morphosyntactic alignment and relatively free word order with default OVS.

Other Links

• Akachenti on CALS

Phonology

Orthography

The phonemic inventory of Pre-Modern Akachenti was somewhat captured at the adoption of the Tongchan writing system, a series of glyphs for the perceived phonemes of the language. In particular, the current ae diphthong was considered a vowel, length was distinguished for five of the six vowels, and several current consonantal phonemes were and are considered consonant clusters.

• Vowels: a, a:, o, o:, u, u:, ae, e, e:, i, i:
• Consonant "Clusters": nl, hl, tl, dl, ngl, khl, kl, gl

The above are all clicks with pre-glottalized allophones in glottalic tone syllables.

Vowels

The phonemic vowel inventory contrasts five qualities, three heights, and length.

Vowels

	Short Vowels			Long Vowels
	front	central	back	front	central	back
close	i		u	i:		u:
mid	e		o	e:		o:
open		a			a:
PHONEMIC DIPHTHONG	aɛ - aɪ

Long vowels are pronounced with a low tone. The phonemic diphthong in the bottom row is the only one treated as a phonemic vowel in Akachenti's orthography and is romanized as ae. Other diphthongs are treated orthographically as vowel clusters.

Diphthongs

	Front~Central		Back
	unrounded	rounded	rounded
close	iɪ - ij		ui
mid	ie	ue
open	ia		ua

The close diphthongs in the top row are typically falling diphthongs, with the first vowel more prominent, though iɪ can realize as rising "diphthong" jɪ. The remaining four diphthongs are typically rising, with e and a being prominent.

Consonants

Akachenti has 25 consonants.

Phonemic Consonants

		Labial	Alveolar		Post-Alveolar		Velar	Glottal
			Pulmonic	Click	Pulmonic	Click
Resonant		m	n	ᵑǃ	ɾ~ɹ	ᵑǁ	ŋ
Stop	Fortis	b~p	t	ǃ		ǁ	k	ʔ
	Lenis		d	ǃs		ᶢǁ	g
Affricate	Fortis			ǃx	tʃ	ǁx
	Lenis				dʒ
Fricative		v~f	s		ʃ		x	ɦ (ç)

Romanization

Consonant Romanization

resonants	IPA	m	n	ᵑǃ	ɾ~ɹ	ᵑǁ	ŋ
	letter	m	n	nl	r	ngl	ng
fortis stops	IPA	b~p	t	ǃ	ǁ	k	ʔ
	letter	b	t	tl	kl	k	'
lenis stops	IPA	d	ǃs	ᶢǁ	g
	letter	d	l	gl	g
affricates	IPA	ǃx	dʒ	tʃ	ǁx
	letter	hl	j	ch	khl
fricatives	IPA	v~f	s	ʃ	ɦ~ç	x
	letter	v	s	sh	h	kh

Clusters

Consonant Clusters

	n	ŋ	ɹ	ɦ	x	d
nonlabial click/stop/affr.	n(C)	ŋ(C)	∅	∅	∅	∅
labial (m, b, v) + g	∅	∅	(C)ɹ	∅	∅	∅
v	∅	∅	(C)ɹ	(C)ɦ	(C)x	∅
ʃ	∅	∅	∅	∅	∅	(C)d

Regional dialect variations may allow sɹ, ʃɹ, dɹ, or ɹɦ and ɹx, but this is disfavored in most Akachenti dialect regions.

Prosody

Register

Tone goes hand in hand with variations in quality, duration, and phonation of affected syllables.

Affixation and Derivation

Compounding and Incorporation

Akachenti is an incorporating language and frequently creates compound nouns, compound adjective-nouns, compound serial verbs, and incorporated "compound" noun-verbs.

Rules of Compounding

1. Identical or near-identical adjacent syllables are merged, e.g. a + kacha + chan + enti = Akachenti, not *Akachachanenti

Inflectional Affixes

Inflectional affixes appear to all be postpositions, in keeping with an OVS language and verbs tending to fuse at the end of a word. Unlike evening constructions, inflectional affixes have fused sufficiently that they no longer attract glottalic tone to their first and last syllables. Inflectional affixes serve as a compounded extension of the root.

The Verb Base

There are two primary verb bases, demonstrated below.

Synchronic Examples

unmarked	+ agentive affix	optative	+ agentive affix
baga:	baga:v(a)	baga:sha	∅
ashi	ashik(a)	ashiv(a)	∅