Category: conlanging

In High Kyol, while there’s root-pattern morphology, it’s not particularly complicated yet. Given the massive vowel deletion that’s happened, there’s generally going to be one or fewer vowels within the root stem. In New Kyol, the descendant language, the complex consonant clusters in High Kyol will be broken up. 

Syllabic Consonant Lenition

The first thing that’s going to go is the syllabic consonants. These will soften into new vowels! Syllabic /ʎ/, and /ʝ/ will become /i/. Syllabic /ɣ/ will probably become /ɯ/ (the closest vowel). We can say that some other consonants also become /ɯ/: /l/, which has a tendency to become back vowels, and /m/, which has a tendency to become close vowels. Other syllabic consonants, /ŋ/, /n/ and /r/, will probably become /ə/.

In summary:

• {ʎ,ʝ} [+syllabic] → i
• {ɣ,l,m} [+syllabic] → ɯ
• {ŋ,n,r} [+syllabic] → ə

This produces an interesting consequence: Last post, we discussed how a combination of metathesis and vowel assimilation can replace a vowel in a word with /ɣ/. That /ɣ/ will turn into /u/, producing a new potential form. Applied to our root, this gives us ksut as a form, alongside forms like ksatga and kəstarga.

Epenthesis

After syllabic consonant lenition, some of the complicated word-initial and word-final clusters can get broken up. Complex word-initial clusters are broken up with a copy vowel. (That is, the vowel of the tonic syllable is copied in the pretonic syllable.)

• ‘ksagt → ka.’sagt

Notably, this will also affect our new u-form:

• ‘ksut → ku.’sut

Sometimes forms that would normally be affected by this change are modified by a prefix that makes them unaffected.

• shə-.‘ksagt → shə-.’ksagt (no change)

Complex coda clusters will get broken up with ə. This will transform the -g- infix created by metathesis into something more substantial.

• ka.’sagt → ka.’sag.’ət.

A -gə- infix is thus produced.

Conclusion

Let’s take a look at the final root forms produced by these sound changes:

kosatga → ksagt → kasagət

shokosatga → shəksagt → shəksagət

kosatagra → kəstagr → kəstagə

kosatghi → ksght → kusut

ankosat → anksat → ankəsat

For fun, let’s also apply them to another made-up root with different vowel layout: tikoz.

tikozga → tkogz → tokogəz

shotikozga → shətkozg → shətkogəz

tikozagra → təkzagr → təkzagə

tikozghi → tkghz→ tukuz

antikoz → antkoz→ antəkoz

This can be generalized into some root-pattern forms. (The symbol @ will be used here for thematic vowels.)

1@2@gə3, shə12@gə3, 1ə23agə, 1u2u3, an1ə2@3

With that, we’re done with the sound changes for High and New Kyol! (For now – I may revisit them at some point.) I’ll probably post a list of all the sound changes without my thought process so you can see everything chronologically. After that, it’s time for brainstorming some grammar!

Today I’m going to be tackling prosodic sound changes in this conlang. (That is, sound changes based on stress.)

These sound changes are going to be important. So determining the stress system is going to be very important. Stress in the protolanguage always falls on the last closed syllable that isn’t the final syllable. (Closed syllables are syllables that end in consonants.) In words with no closed syllables, stress falls on the antepenultimate syllable.

Notably, this allows us to manipulate stress with affixes. Let’s make an example root, *kosat.

In base unmodified form, it has stress on the first syllable:

• ˈko.sat

Add a simple affix like -a, it still has stress on the first syllable:

• ˈko.sa.ta

But add a suffix like -ga, and the second syllable becomes closed, and the stress shifts:

• ko.ˈsat.ga

We can even shift the stress off the stem entirely, with an affix like -agra:

• ko.sa.ˈtag.ra

Using a prefix like an-, we can also shift the stress before the stem.

• ˈan.ko.sat

While I’m not committed to any of these affixes yet (and currently they don’t have any meaning), they cover most of the possible stress shifts that can happen to a verb in this language. I’m going to use these four examples to demonstrate our stress shifts.

Let’s look at the stress-based sound changes I’ve got from the protolanguage to Old Kyol.

Firstly, pretonic vowels are lost. (That is, the vowel directly before the stressed syllable.)

• ko.ˈsat.ga → ˈksat.ga
• ko.sa.ˈtag.ra → kos.ˈtag.ra

The new pretonic vowels then go to /ə/.

• kos.’tag.ra → kəs.’tag.ra

Then, posttonic vowels are lost. (The vowels directly after the stressed syllable.)

• ˈko.sa.ta → ˈkos.ta
• ko.ˈsat.ga → ˈksatg
• kos.ˈtag.ra → kəs.ˈtag.r
• ˈan.ko.sat → ˈan.ksat

That gives our final four forms:

ˈkos.ta, ˈksatg, kəs.ˈtag.r, ˈan.ksat

Something notable emerges here. Our old stem had a vowel pattern of CoCaC. But looking at the last three forms, we can’t tell that the first vowel was o. If the first vowel was a or i in the protolanguage, it would produce the same forms.

This is actually really good. If you had to know all three consonants and both vowels of the original root, it wouldn’t really be triconsonantal – you’d still have to know that the old root was *kodag. But if you don’t have to know that first vowel, the root can be reanalyzed as k-d-g with a thematic vowel a. Now, we could still analyze this as a root form ksat with a bunch of vowel changes, like some analyses of the Berber languages. But later changes will make it more difficult to analyze it this way. 

Of course, we still have that first form sticking around, but it’s honestly fairly easy to have all the affixes you can apply to the verb shift the stress away from the first syllable. Perhaps a couple forms still preserve the “o” of the old stem. If so, they’re treated as irregular.

With the stress-based changes done, next time I’ll fill out the rest of the changes from Old Kyol to High Kyol that encourage the triconsonantal root structure.

Let’s talk about triconsonantal roots.

In the real world, triconsonantal root systems are very unusual – being exclusive to languages in the Semitic language family (Hebrew, Arabic, etc.) However, they’re also in my conlang. So let’s discuss them and how they arise!

What are triconsonantal roots?

In most languages, words have stems – a string of sounds which carry the word’s lexical meaning. This word’s meaning can be changed by adding prefixes and suffixes to the stem.

Example (English): happy, happier, happiest

Word stem: happy

Affixes: -∅, -er, -est

Occasionally, the sounds within a stem can be altered to convey meaning (a process known as apophony).

drink, drank, drunk

In languages with triconsonantal roots, however, instead of analyzing most words as stems and affixes, we can analyze them as roots and patterns.¹If you know about Semitic languages and are wondering “but what about derived stems?” I’ll get to them another time. The language that I’m working on has a derived stem system, and I’ll go into more detail on that then. Roots are unpronounceable strings – generally of three consonants (hence “triconsonantal”). To inflect them, you put patterns of vowels (and sometimes other consonants) between the roots.

Example (Arabic): kataba, yaktubu

Root: K-T-B

Patterns: 1 a 2 a 3 a, ya 1 2 u 3 u

But this distinction isn’t as split as you might think. In The Origin and Development of Nonconcatenative Morphology²This work is the primary source I’m using here, and one that I’ll frequently use throughout this work. While others have previously come to the conclusion that triconsonantal root systems are simply extended forms of apophony, Simpson’s is one of the most commonly called upon that I’ve seen – probably because it goes into such depth., Andrew Kingsbury Simpson argues that Semitic triconsonantal root systems arise from extremely extended forms of apophony. In other words, the vowel patterns derived from triconsonantal roots have their origins in prefixes and suffixes that have been affected by sound changes. Simpson finds two types of change are at play here – segmentally and prosodically conditioned alternations.

Let’s make up an example verb to see how this works. (I’m not using one from my language, or from a real-world language, as I want some fairly streamlined sound changes to show how this works.)

We’re going to start with a protolanguage that isn’t using a triconsonantal root system – instead, it relies on prefixes and suffixes to inflect its verbs. Let’s say that we have a verb, kadag, and a prefix you can apply to that verb: i-. 

kadag, i-kadag

Now, let’s apply a prosodically conditioned alternation. Vowels in pretonic syllables (syllables directly before the stressed syllable) are ellided unless this would create a word-initial consonant cluster; when this is the case, they are reduced to /ə/.

kədag, i-kdag

(We’re assuming for now that the stress always falls on the last syllable.)

Now, let’s apply a segmentally conditioned sound change. If /i/ pulls non-high vowels in adjacent syllables to /e/, we end up with these forms:

kədag, i-kdeg

This looks a lot like a triconsonantal root system, especially when we compare these forms on other verbs:

*solok → səlok, islek

*noshaz → nəshaz, inshez

Over time, people stop thinking of these as mutations of an original root and instead start analyzing them as different forms of a triconsonantal root. This process is known as analogy.

CəCVC, iCCeC

Words that don’t match this pattern are regularized:

*mot → mot, imet → məmot, immet

Or, if they’re common enough, stick around in their irregular forms:

*kaz → kaz, ikez

You might notice that even in the regular roots this pattern isn’t perfectly consistent. Depending on the second vowel in the root, the first form will have a different second vowel. (Hence CəCVC.) If the second vowel is an /i/, things get even more complicated:

*takir – tekir, itkir

(Note that /i/ won’t affect subsequent /i/, as it’s already as fronted and closed as it can get. Also, note that the prosodically conditioned sound change happens before the segmentally conditioned sound change, so takir → təkir → tekir.)

Because of differences like these, Semitic languages divide verbs into conjugations. These are often based on “thematic vowel”. For this example  language, we’d probably have at least three conjugations based on thematic vowel:

Thematic vowel a: CəCaC, iCCeC

Thematic vowel o: CəCoC, iCCeC

Thematic vowel i: CeCiC, iCCiC

If you want to learn more on this subject, I’d highly recommend this video by Biblaridion. It’s an excellent resource on both triconsonantal roots and nonconcatenative morphology in general.

Before we get into the morphology, I think now is a good time to talk some about my morphological visions for the 1a and 1b language lineages. We’ve already established protolanguage 1 as an agglutinative, heavily inflected language. The 1b lineage slowly shifts towards simpler inflectional morphology – while it still relies on the direct-inverse system and polypersonal agreement, many other inflections are replaced by periphrastic constructions. We’ve already seen this at work as the aspect system in protolanguage 1 replaces the tense system in language 1b, meaning that perfect and prospective meanings will have to be created with adverbs, time clauses, or some other construction that is yet to be determined. Language 1a, on the other hand, will not only keep much of the morphological complexity of the protolanguage but also develop new morphology.

We’ve already discussed how the affixation of light verb constructions led to the development of aspect morphology in protolanguage 1. However, we’ve only scratched the surface of what this process could do. Protolanguage 1 could have developed other aspectual affixes, and even modal ones – affixes that would be lost entirely in language 1b, but retained in language 1a. 

Furthermore, let’s say that this process happened a second time, after the sound changes that led to language 1a. A new set of verbs, which could themselves take the aspectual and modal prefixes of protolanguage 1, became light verbs and then prefixes on the stem. Keep in mind that these prefixes don’t take vowel harmony. In fact, they block it, transmitting their own vowel harmony to the previous prefixes. This results in two classes of aspectual/modal prefixes (harmony-blocking and non-harmony-blocking). Up to one prefix from each class can be attached, with the non-harmony-blocking prefix coming before the harmony-blocking prefix. 

Now, we need to decide what these prefixes are. This was a fairly simple process. First, I came up with a list of the aspects and moods I wanted to be conveyed this way. Then, I divided them up in a way that maximized the utility of the potential combos. Here’s what I came up with:

I’m calling these affixes preverbs for now, although I’m not particularly happy about it. “Preverb” isn’t a widely accepted linguistic term, and although it is discussed in the context of Caucasian and Algonquinian languages (two major inspirations for this language), it’s used there primarily for location/direction meanings, with the aspectual & modal information that they could convey being secondary. However, I’m calling them preverbs until I can think of something better, because “Harmony-blocking and Non-harmony-blocking modal and aspectual prefixes” was proving far too clunky.

So that’s the preverbs done! This isn’t the end of verb inflection, but the conlang is slowly forging ahead. I haven’t done any further reading recommendations in a while, so now might be a good time to mention the World Lexicon of Grammaticalization. It’s available online, and is an excellent resource for anyone interested in conlanging. It gives a list of common lexical sources for grammatical meanings, as well as the ways that grammatical meanings can change over time. It’s fairly comprehensive, and has a handy glossary at the beginning.

So I was playing around with the language family when I realized that I really liked the sound of Language 1b partway through its evolution. If you allow the language to develop back harmony and vowel coalescence, but stop it before it develops rounding harmony, the result has a fun and distinctive phonaesthetic. I picture this ancestor language being kept around primarily as a liturgical language, while the later language 1b is used in day-to-day speech. I’ll call the ancestor language Ancient 1b, and its descendant Common 1b. (Better names coming soon.) That by itself would not be a full blog post. However, there are a few changes that I want to make to alter (and hopefully improve) the phonaesthetic.

The primary change I made was putting velar-uvular harmony in this language too. I like the uvulars for this language, especially combined with /ɯ/. It gives it a very Turkic sound that reminds me especially of languages of the Kipchak family, such as Kazakh and Kyrgyz. We can say that the uvularization of emphatic velars was an allophonic feature in protolanguage 1 before language 1a and 1b diverged. The uvulars will still be ditched by Common 1b – I don’t like them as much there aesthetically, and it provides another point of divergence between 1a and 1b.

I also changed around the ordering of sound changes. I wanted this language to keep the voiced stops, so I moved voiced stop changes to happen after rounding harmony, which I hadn’t initially planned for. This means that the voiced uvular stop, /ɢ/, will be present in this language. I’ve already talked about /ɢ/ and its rarity compared to other uvulars. However, I like it for this stage of the language – it gives a very distinctive sound, and separates it from the Turkic languages. This gives us this final list of sound changes:

Protolanguage 1 to Ancient 1b

kˤ, xˤ, gˤ, ɣˤ → q, χ, ɢ, ʁ

short i, u → j, w / V _

short i, u → j, w / _ V

a → ∅ / _ V(+long)

uj, aj → yː, ɜː

a → ɜ

iˤ, ɜˤ, yˤ → ɯ, ɜ, u

iw, ɯw, ɜw, ɑw → yː, uː, ɞː, ɒː

Emphasis distinction lost

Ancient 1b to Common 1b

q, χ, ɢ, ʁ → k, g, x, ɣ

Rounding harmony: i, ɯ, ɜ, ɑ → y, u, ɞ, ɒ

C(+voiced)(+obstruent) → C(-voiced) / _ C(-voiced), C(-voiced) _, _ #

b, d, dʑ, g → β, ð, ʑ, ɣ

tɕ, ɕ, ʑ → tʃ, ʃ, ʒ

Here is the phonology and romanization for Ancient 1b:

Some things to note:

• For this language, I opted for vowel doubling to indicate length. I used a circumflex instead on ⟨ê⟩, because ⟨ee⟩ looks like /i/ to English speakers. Besides, I like the circumflex.
• As vowel hiatus isn’t a thing, I can use vowel letters for glides.
• I opted for historical spellings for ⟨eu⟩ and ⟨au⟩. They look cool and aren’t that uncommon for open front and back rounded vowels respectively.

That’s pretty much all the phonological information for Ancient 1b! Next time, I stop going on tangents and return to making morphology, setting templates for some morphological innovations in language 1a.

We’ve already established that protolanguage 1 had a direct-inverse system of alignment. (See the seventh post in this series, “A Sketch of Verb Agreement”). However, I don’t want that to be the case in protolanguage 0. Instead, I want protolanguage 0 to only have focus agreement in the verb, using the inverse as a kind of “patient trigger” to specify that the object’s being marked rather than the subject. I use the terminology “patient trigger” because this looks fairly similar to a rudimentary system of symmetrical voice, also known as Austronesian alignment. While symmetrical voice is extremely complicated, here’s the brief run-down:

• One noun is marked as the focus.
  • In Austronesian languages, this is typically done by placing the noun in the direct case. In protolang 1, it’d be done by subject agreement.
• The verb takes a marker to show how the focus relates to it. For instance, the “patient trigger” specifies the focus as the verb’s object.

In language family 2, my plan is for this to develop into a more robust symmetrical voice system. The patient trigger will fuse with various applicatives to form into other agreement markers. In protolanguage 1, on the other hand, the non-focus pronoun is incorporated into the verb as a suffix. This means that, when the patient trigger is absent, the suffix pronoun is the patient, but when the patient trigger is present, the suffix pronoun is the agent. Now, our patient trigger is starting to look a lot like an inverse marker, especially as protolanguage 0 preferred to make the higher-animacy argument the focus. The applicatives will then stick around as true applicatives.

Now is probably a good time to note that protolanguage 0 uses verb-initial word order. I have the vague idea that there was a pre-protolanguage 0 which was SVO, which explains why subjects were marked as prefixes. However, as the language shifted to a more symmetric-voice-like system, the subject moved after the verb, a better configuration for this type of alignment. Verb-initial word order isn’t something that conlangs often play around with, but I think it makes sense for this language. 

Now that we know how protolanguage 0 operated, we can start to figure out more about how protolanguage 1 will operate. Specifically, we can now begin to evolve some tense and aspect. The tense system in protolanguage 0 was very simple. A past tense suffix, /-ɬaː-/, was affixed, directly after the verb stem. Any tense other than the past was inferred by context or a time-specifying adverb or clause.

The past/non-past distinction from protolanguage 0 is kept in protolanguage 1. However, aspectual distinctions will begin to emerge. Two verbs begin to semantically weaken, becoming light verbs that serve to convey aspectual information. These light verbs take focus agreement, but the patient trigger still occurs on the main verb. I think this makes sense – after all, in English, we say “It has been broken,” not “It is had broken.” The past tense affix also goes on the main verb. Because of this, it’s easy for these light verbs to agglutinate to the main verb, with the weak verb root essentially becoming an aspect marker that goes between the focus marker and the main verb. Because this occurs before most of the impactful sound changes between protolanguage 0 and protolanguage 1, they’ll behave like normal verb prefixes. 

I’ve decided to keep the aspect system itself fairly simple, with two affixed aspects, perfect and prospective:

/-hu/ (own, v. protolanguage 0) → 

/-u-/ (ᴘᴇʀꜰ., protolanguage 1)

/-ri/ (go, v. protolanguage 0) → 

/-ri-/ (ᴘʀᴏsᴘ., protolanguage 1)

In language 1a, these affixes will stick around alongside the past tense affix. This provides a 3-aspect 2-tense system, kind of similar to latin’s 3-tense 2-aspect system, except with a future-in-the past and no future perfect:

The future-in-the-past is very volatile, and may gain some kind of modal or conditional meaning. I also need to figure out the distinction between past and perfect. I’m thinking that the simple past either becomes a past imperfective (like in Latin & the romance languages) or a discontinuous past. We’ll see what’s necessary once I start developing more morphology and periphrastic tense/aspect constructions in language 1a. 

In language 1b, however, I want the past/non-past distinction to dissolve, and have it be supplanted by the aspect system (with the perfect turning into the past and the prospective turning into the future). Aspectual morphology can be conveyed by periphrasis. A fun thing about language 1b is that the perfect aspect marker, /u-/, will take part in vowel coalescence. This means that you have to learn a separate set of personal prefixes for the past tense:

This ended up being much longer than I had intended, and I honestly have no clue how to finish it up neatly. But I think that this is all the work we need to do on protolanguage 0 for now. Next up, I go on another completely random tangent because this is how my brain works I guess.

Let’s finish the sound changes between protolanguage 0 and 1 by adding some vowel loss. This will help with some synchronic features – justifying the forms of the personal suffixes and adding some interest to verb conjugation. 

I’ve already established that word-final vowel loss happens between protolanguage 0 and protolanguage 1. This explains why an affix that shows up as prefixed /si-/ shows up as suffixed /-s/ and not /-si/. However, there’s a bit of a problem with that. Protolanguage 0 permitted words to end in consonants. That means, that if you have a root like /xat-/, and you suffix the ending /-da/, after vowel loss it’ll become /xatd/, which is extremely noncompliant with the phonotactics of protolanguage 1. We can insert the epenthetic vowel /a/ to clear up this issue, making /xat-da/ become /xatad/. This change will make long vowels short, rather than deleting them, and it will also happen before the disappearance of /h/ and /ʔ/, giving a contrast between word-final consonants, short vowels and long vowels.

However, that’s not the only vowel loss I want to implement. I really like verb roots that start with CCV in this language. However, to do that, right now you need a verb that starts with VCCV by default, which won’t be too common. However, we can get more CCV roots by generating them from CVCV. I’ll therefore make this rule:

V[-long] → ∅ / _ CVV // $ _, $ C _, CC _

In other words, short vowels are deleted in syllables directly before long vowels, if it wouldn’t cause an illegal syllable structure. I’ll also say that when an /i/ dissappears this way after an alveolar or velar obstruent, it’ll palatalize it:

{t,k}, {d,g}, {s,x}, {z,ɣ} i → tɕ, dʑ, ɕ, ʑ / _ CVV // $ _, $ C _, CC _

Combine these changes with the voiced obstruent shifts in languages 1a and 1b, and this produces some very interesting divergent forms:

/gitaːb/ → /gitaːb/ → /kitɑːv/, /ɣitɜːp/

/si-gitaːb/ → /sidʑkaːb/ → /siʝtɑːv/, /sitʃtɜːp/

I’ll also add a similar rule for vowels in syllables after long vowels, though there won’t be any palatalization occurring here:

V[-long,-stress] → ∅ / VVC _ // _ CC, _ C $

(I added the stress exception so that the prefix diː- and other prefixes with long vowels can’t trigger this in the stem.)

In practical terms, this means that every verb will have a maximum of three principal parts – one for when they only take a prefix, one for when they only take a suffix, and one for when they take both. (There’s no situation in this language where a verb takes no prefix or suffix.) Not every verb will have all of them, so I picture an English-like situation, where only as many as are necessary will be listed in the dictionary.

This may not truly be the end to the sound changes between protolanguage 0 and protolanguage 1, as they are looking far too similar for my liking still. But this is enough to go off of right now – we can back-implement other sound changes later. Next time, I’ll return to verb agreement. But this time, we’re looking at protolanguage 0 again, and seeing how its system of verb agreement evolved into the one in protolanguage 1.

Hello! This time, we interrupt our regularly scheduled programming of morphology for romanization! As a warning, this post is going to be fairly chart-heavy. I’m just going to show the completed IPA tables with their romanizations, and briefly discuss some of the choices I made in making them. Let’s get into it!

Some things to note:

• The use of ⟨ă⟩ for /ɐ/, inspired by the Romanian use of ⟨ă⟩ for /ə/.
• The use of ⟨rh⟩ for /ʁ/. As far as I know, this isn’t precedented. However, in the languages that have /ʁ/ as a dedicated phoneme, the prevailing standard seems to be ⟨ğ⟩, which I am not a fan of.
• The use of ⟨j⟩ instead of ⟨zh⟩. I just like it better for this language.

The vowel system’s romanization is very wacky, probably because the vowels themselves are pretty weird. That’s one of the shortcomings of romanization – it has issues when dealing with extremely non-latin-like phonologies. This may not be the final version, but it’s good enough for now. Some things to note:

• Acute accents for long vowels, including double acutes for long umlaut vowels – think Hungarian. I like this better than double letters, because ⟨oo⟩ and ⟨ee⟩ are weird for English speakers, and I just don’t like the look of ⟨öö⟩. 
• A digraph for /ɯː/. I just couldn’t figure out how to distinguish ı with an acute accent from í. Besides, ıı looks cool. However, it’s not great, and I may change it later.
• The very English-y ⟨o⟩ for /ɒ/.
• The digraphs for the approximants. Yeah, I could have used the single letters /b d g/, but the language is already non-intuitive enough.

So that’s the romanization! With that out of the way, we can get back to our next order of business: more morphology!

…Wait, we’re going to be making protolanguage 0 instead?

…Why are we doing that now?

…OK, I guess we’re doing it. Next order of business: making protolanguage 0!

Hello! Here, I’m going to show off what the verb agreement will look like in the descendant languages (which both keep the same basic system.) But to do that, we need a cleaner notation system. Therefore, let’s set a standard for these languages by talking about underspecified phonemes!

Underspecification is not something that I understand fully. But, when talking about harmony, an underspecified phooneme is a symbol used to refer to all potential versions of a phoneme in words with different harmonies. For instance, in language 1a, the underspecified phoneme /I/ corresponds to the phonemes [i] and [e]. These are helpful when writing out morphology – because instead of having to write each form of the affix, you can write it using the archiphoneme. To do that, however, we’ll need to set what these underspecified phonemes are:

(When one of the underspecified vowel phonemes is followed by a long mark, ː, that means that it’s a long version of whichever vowel the underspecified phoneme becomes.)

Same deal applies here. Note the underspecified phonemes Yː and Oː, which were formed when diphthongs with an off-glide [u̯] coalesced. We won’t see these here, but we’ll be dealing with them later. With that out of the way, let’s get to the actual affixes:

*(Note that the suffix form of the second person plural will always be close/velar, because the [ç] blocks backing harmony.)

And with that, the verb agreement affixes are pretty much done! Next time, I’ll show the romanization system of these languages, and discuss some of the choices I made.