Rynan Nehch

Rynan Nehch, stylized usually as rynan nehch and meaning "the people's speech," is a language of the rynan language family spoken on the rynan homeworld and offworld among many rynan.

Notes

I've worked on this language in particular extensively in a few different forms and versions; I wanted to mess around with ergativity, but ended up not understanding the concept enough at the time to properly implement it.

I am, however, extremely proud of the series of sound changes I've developed while working backwards to evolve it from its recently devised parent language, proto-rynan nehch, to the modern daughter language rynan nehch that it is. Most of the sound changes for rynan nech were devised back in around mid 2020, with some edits made in 2021 and then in Aug 2024 to bits and pieces I realized needed tweaking before my uploading it to this webpage. To stay consistent, you know? And even still it's slightly incomplete near the end when it comes to the vowels. It'll likely be added in the coming days (weeks?) after I sit down with it a bit more and develop it.

If I've used my // and [] notations wrong, my bad; my memory is a bit rusty on which ones go where, haha!

Work that still needs to be done:

• Finalizing evolution from proto-rynan nehch to rynan nehch,
• Revamping grammatical things,
• And building up the lexicon.

Last updated 8/9/2024. (Typo corrected 8/16/2024.)

History

rynan nehch is traditionally a solely oral language, though some speakers nowadays have adapted the yamagad script to informally communicate rynan nehch in the field. Others have tried devising their own scripts for rynan nehch but seem only to create scripts that compete with each other for popular usage.

Phonology

rynan nehch possesses a series of voiced and unvoiced stops (yet lacks a [p] and [k]), a large series of retroflex consonants, and a good amount of allophony.

		bilabial	dental	alveolar	post-alveolar	retroflex	velar	glottal
nasal	voiced	m [m]		n [n]		nn [ɳ]
stop	unvoiced			t [tʰ]		tt [ʈʰ]
	voiced			d [d]		dd [ɖ]
affricate	unvoiced				ch [t͡ʃ]	cc [ʈ͡ʂ]
fricatives	unvoiced		th [θ]	s [s]	sh [ʃ]	ss [ʂ]		h [h]
	voiced	v [v]
approximant	voiced	w [w]		r [ɹ]			(w [w])
trill	voiced			rr [r]

	front	central	back
closed	y [i]		w [ɯ]
mid	e [ɛ]	u [ə~ʌ]
open		a [ä]

While riddled with retroflexes, the majority of the phonemic inventory would be familiar to an English speaker. It is the usage of these phonemes that shows rynan nehch's sound off, particularly when it comes to the consonant clusters.

Allophony

ts [t͡s] is a form of th /θ/ found solely at the beginning of words when isolated from any other consonant, as in tsawah [t͡sä.wäːh] "canopy; land, country; planet, world."

w [w] is considered among native speakers as indistinguishable from [ɯ] and [u], and as such acts as a sort of consonant-vowel hybrid depending on placement in a word.

w [u] (not to be confused with u [ə~ʌ]) is a variation of w [ɯ] found in codaless syllables such as ssw [ʂu] "on the contrary."

rr [r] has a basic form of [r], but becomes tap [ɾ] when clustered with a preceding th [θ], ch [tʃ], sh [ʃ].

rr [r] also, more often than not, becomes unvoiced when wedged between many sounds, as in nrrahrrshth [nräːhr̥ʃθ].

s [s] often becomes a syllabic ejective [s’] when appearing at the end of long coda clusters, such as in chwyrrds [tʃwird.s’].

rr [r] may also, at times, serves as a syllabic consonant, mimicking syllabic r [ɹ] and the "syllabic" form of w [u] but usually having an underlining [ɤ] between it and the preceding consonant if there is one.

Vowels with a following h [h] often tend to have longer pronunciation, which goes unnoticed by the untrained ear.

Phonotactics

[Subject to being a WIP]

Syllables are vastly formed with a (C)(C)V(C)(C)(C)(C) structure, in which C is any consonant and V is any vowel. C(C)V(N) is quite common, where N is any nasal. V(C)(C) and V(C)(N) are also somewhat common, but less so than the C(C)V(N) structure. Also of note is C(r,rr,w)V(C)(N).

Loanwords

rynan nehch has borrowed a number of technical and foreign-tech technological terms directly from yamagad.

Sound Changes

We start with the following phonology for proto-rynan nehch:

		bilabial	coronal	retroflex	velar	glottal
nasal		m [m]	n [n]	nn [ɳ]	ng [ŋ]
stop	unvoiced	p [p]	t [t]	tt [ʈ]	k [k]
	ejective	p' [pʼ]	t' [tʼ]	tt' [ʈʼ]	k' [kʼ]
fricatives	unvoiced		s [s]	ss [ʂ]	x [x]	h [h]
	ejective		s' [sʼ]	ss' [ʂʼ]	x [xʼ]
approximant			r [ɹ]
trill			rr [r]

	front	central	back
closed	y [i]		w [ɯ]
mid	e [ɛ]		u [ʌ]
open		a [ä]

And implement the following changes:

TBA.

Grammar

Nouns

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Verbs

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Syntax

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Translation Gallery

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Lexicon

TBA.