Re'eta langauge

[Omzinesý]

Re’eta language

Ré’ètà, Rê’èt in the pausa form, is the name I use of all of my analytic languages, which don’t normally last very long. This is, however, the latest Re’eta.
All morphemes/words are monosyllabic and the syllabic structure is CV(V). If pausa forms are used, the last consonant of a phrase can be dropped and the surface structure is CV(V)C.

Phonology

I skip the phoneme inventories because the language has 73 phonemes, if I calculated correctly. Presenting them here without a table is somewhat challanging.

Tones
There are three kinds of tones per syllable/word: high <á>, low <à>, and medial/neutral <a>. Phonemically, it appears that the high and low pitches are marked while the medial/neutral tone is just absence of tone. The syllabic lateral can bear a tone, as well.

Pausa forms
Words that appear before a pause can lose their last vowel normal topic-comment clauses have two pauses: one after the topic NP and another after the predicate VP. Using of pausa forms is part of idiolects. Women use them more often than men.

Floating tones
As said before there are two phonemic tones: the high and the low. The neural tone is phonemically just absence of tone. The tones tend to float rightwards. That is, the last tones takes place on the last syllable/word, the second to last tone takes place on the penultimate syllable. The last tone, however, still encodes the meaning of the last word that has a tone. E.g. word Reránò consists of words ré, ràn ‘folk’, and no ‘body classifier’. Because the classifier does not have a phonemic tone, the tones of the previous words float on it.
Pausa forms are, however, formed before the tones are attached. If the last vowel has been dropped, the tone can thus not float on it. Then the last phonemic tone is attached to the second to last syllable, which is the last after the pausa formation. Because neutral tones are quite common, tones without an own vowel aren’t left very often. That is however possible. In that situation, there two tones on the first syllable. If the first (from left) is high and the second is low, a lowering contour tone is formed. If the first is low and the second is high, a rising contour tone is formed. That actually, happens in the name of the language (Ré’ètà => Rê’èt) when a pausa form is used.

Morphology and phrase-internal syntax

There are two classes of words in Ré’èta: nouns and verbs, the word class can though be changed through conversion. The verbs are divided in three sub-classes: telic verbs, atelic verbs, and statives. Some series of the three form a semantic paradigm, but morphologically they are idiosyncratic, and all verbs do not belong to such a paradigm.

Verbs
Verbs do not have a lexical tone. All predicates have, however, a toneme expressing switch-reference. The low tone à stands for same subject/topic (SS) while the high tone marks different subject (DS). All clauses, also matrix clauses, have the switch-reference marking, so it has nothing to do with subordination. SS is used if the topic of the predicate has the same reference as the preceding topic, and DS is used if the reference of the topic is changed. DS is also used in clauses starting paragraphs.
As said before, the semantics of some verbs form paradigms of telic, atelic, and stative verbs.
xẹo ‘to shop, be bargaining a deal, trade’, kxai ‘buy, make a deal’, šu ‘own, have bought’
Nouns can be incorporated to verbs.
šạ́i ‘tea’ + mxẹ ‘to drink’ = šạ́imxẹ́ ‘drinks tea DS, tea-drinks DS’
Incorporation is not a very productive proces in Ré’èta, however.

Nouns
All non-generic nouns always have a classifier. There are some ten classifiers. Humans(, gods, and rational animals) have two classifiers. L̀ is used when they are seen as minds. No is used when they are seen as bodies. The bodily classifier has an actor form Kỵ́, which is used when the NP is an actor/agent.
Generic or mass nouns do not have a classifier, because their referents are not individuated.
Nouns can be, and very often are, compounded. The preceding noun somehow defines the following one. There are very lexicalized compounds and spontaneous ones. Inalienable possessors are also represented as dependent roots of the compound with their heads. The dependent root does not have its own classifier. It can be seen as an adjective, which are not an independent word class in Ré’ètà. Verbs, statives especially, can also appear as (parts of) dependent roots.
Ré’ètà itself is a compound word with a classifier. Ré is the name of the people who speak Ré’ètà (Reránò ‘Re folk’) and live in Re country (Rétśèyfị̀). ‘è means language. Tà is the classifier of abstract systems like languages, isms, and sciences. Rétà means Re society or state.

[Birdlang]

I want to see a table of the phonemes, because I want to know if the apostrophe is something other than a glottal stop.

[MrKrov]

A table is unnecessary, egads. Be to the point.