Ruykkarraber

Introduction

Ruykkarraber is a language spoken by thousands of people in Ruykkarra, Duynaknayat, and surrounding areas. It's also spoken by most people who engage in trade there.
Ruykkarraber is lightly synthetic and has a small phonology. However, it has a complicated syntactic structure, which relies heavily on nominalization of verb phrases.

Ruykkarraber phonemically distinguishes, depending on the analysis, 9 to 11 consonants.

Labial Coronal Dorsal

Stop (p), b t, d k, ɡ

Fricative s

Nasal m* n (ŋ)

Liquid ɾ, (r) j

The phone [p] only occurs as an allophone of /b/ after [s].
[t] and [k] occur as allophones of /d/ and /ɡ/ after [s], as well as as independent phonemes.
The phoneme /m/ only occurs in loanwords (merra), babytalk (mama), and imitative words (mau), as well as words derived from these words (maru, remau). The phone [m] also occurs as an allophone of /n/ before [b] (dyambas).
- So few words contain [m] that there is, due to random chance, no known minimal pair with [n]; however, they may be considered separate phonemes despite being in complementary distribution.
The phone [ŋ] occurs as an allophone of /n/ before [k] or [ɡ].
The phone [r] is conventionally analyzed as a geminated form of /ɾ/. Some prefer to consider it an independent phoneme, but this is not supported by evidence.

All consonants can occur geminated except /j/ and /m/. /ɾ/, as mentioned above, geminates to [r]. Geminates are not different phonemically from a series of two identical consonants: /kː/ is not different from /kk/, and in fact it is conventionally transcribed as the latter.
- It is generally theorized that /m/ only lacks a geminated form due to its limited occurrence and that /j/ refuses gemination due to the fact that it is a glide. In fact, there is evidence that /jj/ was historically a valid form, but later merged with /j/: naday "sparse" and yesu "land" compound as nadayesu "desert," with a single /j/, rather than *nadayyesu.
When not geminated, /b/, /d/, and /ɡ/ may lenite to [β], [ð], and [ɣ]. This is typically a feature of the north.

Front Back

High i u

Low e a

-i -u

i- ∅ iw

u- uj ∅

e- ej [ɛj] ew

a- aj aw

The consonant /w/ does not appear phonemically in Ruykkarraber, so the backing diphthongs are conventionally phonemically transcribed (and romanized) with /u/: /au/, /eu/. However, the fronting diphthongs are transcribed (and romanized) with /j/: /aj/, /uj/.
When a vowel-initial suffix is added to a diphthong, unless the vowel is identical to the diphthong's offglide, the offglide of the diphthong becomes a glide, producing [j] or [w]. This is the only time that [w] occurs in Ruykkarraber, outside of diphthongs: biskeu ['bi.skew] "to catch," biskeuir [bi.'ske.wir] "caught."
The diphthong /ej/ is often pronounced as [ɛj], especially in the south, due to dissimilation.
Many suffixes begin with vowels, which become offglides when following other vowels, such as the plural -i/-y or the past tense -ir/-yr.
- When this would create the illegal diphthong */ij/, it dissimilates to /ej/; however, the illegal diphthong */uw/ simply becomes /u/.

The maximal syllable in Ruykkarraber is (C)(C)V(j, w)(C).
- The permitted onset clusters are as follows:
  - Obstruent + Sonorant (knayat, dyambas)
  - Nasal + /j/ (nyak)
  - /s/ + Consonant (sbur)
    - /sb/, /sd/, and /sɡ/, as noted above, devoice to [sp], [st], [sk].
Stress in Ruykkarraber is uniformly penultimate, including suffixes, with very few exceptions.
- The first exception is if a monosyllabic root receives prefixes and no suffixes, it retains stress.
- The second exception is in a few grammaticalized forms, such as denat, which almost certainly derive from the previous exception.
- Unstressed syllables are liable to undergo elision of vowels and even consonants, especially in grammaticalized forms: the second syllable of nattuk "person" is dropped in grammatical compounds such as runat "everyone."

As Ruykkarraber has a small phonemic inventory, its romanization is very intuitive. /ɾ/ and /j/ are the only sounds romanized with anything other than their IPA characters: r and y are the conventional spellings for these sounds.
Romanization is mostly phonetic and accounts for nasal assimilation; however, assimilatory devoicing is unwritten, and the [w] resulting from gliding is spelled u.

Ruykkarraber, though containing morphology, has moved away from what was likely originally a mostly agglutinative system to contain a significant number of analytic constructions, notably in the verb phrase complex.

Ruykkarraber requires the verb to be the final element of a clause (except auxiliaries; see below), but the other constituents may be shuffled around before it to emphasize certain elements; pronouns especially tend to be backed.
- To emphasize the verb, one may use the construction [3rd person pronoun(s)] [verb], [NP(s)]. The NPs are backed out of the main clause, leaving unstressed pronouns in their wake.