Zjugo

Zjugo
Pronunciation	[ˈʑɯ.gɤ̞]
Language family	Paleo-Hlabiglan
Early form(s)	Zjiogeo
Era	today
Writing system	Latin alphabet, Zjugohai
Official status
Spoken in	Hiso Zju'a
Speaker
Endonym	Zjugo (in Zjugo) Zjuan (in English)
Technical information
Language code	ZG

Zjuan /ˈʒuw.ən/ (ZG Zjugo /ˈʑɯ.gɤ̞/) is a Paleo-Hlambiglan language spoken in Hiso Zju'a. It is one of the three languages spoken there, each belonging primarily to one of the three most represented ethnicities residing there. Zjugo belongs to the [unnamed] group, native to Zju'an land and is the only language in Zju'a, which doesn't have a major speaking population anywhere else.

Phonology

Consonants

Zjuan consonants feature a full voicing distinction in all plosives and fricatives except for the velar fricatives. They also include a palatalization distinction for all plosives and fricatives and alveolar/palatal nasal consonants. Especially in recent times, labial and velar palatalized consonants are often articulated as consonant clusters with the palatal approximant.

		labial		alveolar	palatal	velar		glottal
		plain	palatalized			plain	palatalized
nasal		m		n	ɲ
plosive	unvoiced	p	pʲ	t	t͡ɕ	k	kʲ
	voiced	b	bʲ	d	d͡ʑ	g	gʲ
fricative	unvoiced	f	fʲ	s	ɕ	x	xʲ	(h)
	voiced	v	vʲ	z	ʑ
trill/approximant		w		r~ɾ	j
lateral				l

Vowels

Zjugo features a simple five vowel system. Main things to note is the lack of an open central vowel, as it is being replaced instead with the near-open front unrounded vowel, and the lack of rounding.

	front	back
close	i	ɯ
mid	e̞	ɤ̞
open	æ

Diphthongs

Any Zjuan vowel except /i/ and /ɯ/ may appear as the first vowel in a diphthong followed by /i/ (frequently articulated as [ɪ] when appearing like this).

Phonotactics

Any Zjugo syllable is made up of at least a vowel or diphthong, which may be proceeded by any consonant and/or followed by /n/. Note that a syllable ending with /n/ can be followed by a syllable starting with a vowel. This is phonemically distinct from a syllable ending with a vowel followed by a syllable starting with /n/, that is, for instance, /ˈme̞n.æi/ is distinct from /ˈme̞.næi/. Obstruents and /n/ get palatalized by default when followed by /i/, plain variants are not allowed in that position.

Phonetic variations

Due to the root system, which behaves as if they didn't apply, the following aspects of Zjugo's pronunciation are not widely considered phonemic.

The sequences ⟨wi⟩, ⟨wu⟩ and ⟨ji⟩ are never pronounced the way they're written. Specifically, ⟨wi⟩ is pronounced [i] word-initially and [hi] otherwise (this is the only phonetic occurrence of [h] in the language and is the reason for its inclusion in the consonant chart). ⟨wu⟩ is pronounced [ɯ] word-initially and [fɯ] otherwise and lastly ⟨ji⟩ is pronounced [i] word-initially and [d͡ʑi] otherwise.

Spelling

Latin alphabet

Here are the letters and digraphs used to spell Zjugo, when using the Latin script. Whenever a sequence of letters is ambiguous, an apostrophe must be used to clarify syllable boundaries. For example /ˈme̞.næi/ is spelled menai, meanwhile /ˈme̞n.æi/ is spelled men'ai. This is also done to clarify whether something is or isn't a palatalization digraph, for instance /ˈfʲæn.jæn/ is spelled fjan'jan, however fjanjan would be pronounced /ˈfʲæ.ɲæn/, except for that it isn't a real word. Consonant letters followed by i, not separated by an apostrophe are automatically considered palatalized.

Letter	Pronunciation	digraph	pronunciation
A	/æ/	Ai	/æi/
B	/b/	Bj	/bʲ/
D	/d/	Dj	/d͡ʑ/
E	/e̞/	Ei	/e̞i/
F	/f/	Fj	/fʲ/
G	/g/	Gj	/gʲ/
H	/x/	Hj	/xʲ/
I	/i/
J	/j/
K	/k/	Kj	/kʲ/
L	/l/
M	/m/
N	/n/	Nj	/ɲ/
O	/ɤ̞/	Oi	/ɤ̞i/
P	/p/	Pj	/pʲ/
R	/r~ɾ/
S	/s/	Sj	/ɕ/
T	/t/	Tj	/t͡ɕ/
U	/ɯ/
V	/v/	Vj	/vʲ/
W	/w/
Z	/z/	Zj	/ʑ/

Zjugohai

Zjugohai /ˈʑɯ.gɤ̞.xai/ is the original way used to spell Zjugo, although it has since begun to fall out of use in favor of the Latin script. It is a syllabary featuring characters for every combination of a plain voiceless consonant followed by a vowel (including the lack of a consonant). It's written top to bottom with its columns advancing right to left. Voicing and palatalization are spelled using other strategies, discussed later.

Voicing

Voiced obstruents are spelled by placing a diacritic to the left of the right syllable character. Voiced palatalized consonants still have this diacritic on the first character.

Palatalization

Consonant vowel pairs with a palatalized consonant are spelled as a digraph, including a character of the voiceless unpalatalized equivalent consonant with the i vowel. That is then followed by one of the four special palatalization characters; one exists for each vowel except i itself. Diphthongs following palatalized consonants are spelled by placing a diacritic, identical in appearance to the one used for voicing, onto the palatalization character. There are no palatalization characters for the i vowel as obstruents (and n) followed by i are palatalized by default and, in fact, are not allowed to be plain when in that position.

Diphthongs and syllable-final n

As discussed earlier, Zjugo only permits one consonant to appear phonemically in syllable codas and that is /n/. This is spelled with a special character. If syllable contains no such coda and no palatalized consonant, but it does include a diphthong, a reverse-S-like character is used to indicate that, meanwhile if a syllable contains the coda and also a diphthong, it is spelled with another special character, being a variant of the final n character, and lastly if the final n is included in a syllable with a palatalized consonant, a variant of the appropriate palatalization character is used and, naturally, the diphthong diacritic is also included on top of that if there is a diphthong in the syllable. This way any single syllable can be spelled with at most two characters, keeping the script fairly concise.

Numbers

Zjugo usually uses a base-6 system to count and there are 6 digits native to Zjugohai, used to spell these base-6 numbers. For base-10 numbers, the Arabic numerals get used and written vertically, just like the Zjugohai numerals.

Root system

Zjugo features a monosyllabic root system. Due to its strict phonotactics, there are only 456 possible syllables, 346 of which are used within the language. Each morpheme is one syllable and on top of that any single syllable can represent only one morpheme. Some of these roots are reserved for grammatical purposes (case endings, verb endings, certain grammatical affixes, the morphemes used to construct demonstratives), while others allow much wider usage, the latter case being referred to as "content roots", since they can usually function as most parts of speech.