Common Caber
Common Caber is the ancestral language to the Caber languages, notable for its logographic system of writing.
Contents
Phonology
Consonants
| Bilabial | Alveolar | Palatoalveolar | Velar | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | m | n | ||
| Stop | p b | t d | k g | |
| Affricate | ts dz | tɕ dʑ | ||
| Fricative | f | s z | ɕ ʑ | x |
| Resonant | w | ɾ |
- /ts dz/ are written <č ǧ>.
- /tɕ dʑ ɕ ʑ/ are written <ć ǵ ś ź>.
- /k x/ are written <c h>.
- /ɾ/ is written <r>.
- All other consonants are written as in the IPA.
Vowels
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| High | i | ɨ | u |
| Mid | ɛ | ə | ɔ |
| Low | a |
- /ɔ ə ɨ ɛ/ are written <o ơ ư e>.
- All other vowels are written as in the IPA.
Word order
Common Caber is rigidly SVO (Subject-Verb-Object) in word order. It has no case-marking system. Adjectives and adverbs tend to appear before the words they modify, as do prepositions. Unusually for an SVO language, adverbial subordinators usually appear following the clause they modify.
Morphology
Inflectional morphology
Common Caber has little in the way of inflectional morphology—nouns could take a suffix to indicate a plural or a collective plural, and verbs could inflect for the past tense.
The plural marker on nouns took one of three forms: -a if the noun ended in a velar consonant; -c if the noun ended in -o; and -oc otherwise. The collective plural was -(V)r, where V is an echo vowel appearing if a final cluster would be created.
For most verbs, the past-tense marker was -če; a verb-final affricate consonant was replaced with that of the ending. A few verbs, such as me 'go, leave', ci 'arrive, get somewhere', iści 'mix', and repću 'speak, say', instead used a marker -t to indicate the past tense—further, in some dialects, the verb robe apparently originally had a past tense in -t, which was normalized to -če in the Northern, Central, Eastern, and Wandering dialects.
