Xiri

History
Xiri represents one branch of a small family of languages descended from the Proto-Xiri language, making it a sister language to the other languages of Udovuʼo. The history of Xiri is divided into three main stages: Early Xiri (some time after ~300 BGS), Middle Xiri (~100 - 400 AGS) and Exodus Xiri (after 655 AGS)

Early Xiri
The earliest stage of the language which is distinct from its sister languages, spoken some time after 300 BGS.

Middle Xiri
After first contact with T'ugü, Xiri underwent some changes which were partially influenced by continued contact throughout most of the Horizon period. The variety of Xiri spoken during this stage of history, primarily 100 - 400 AGS, is Middle Xiri.

Exodus Xiri
Exodus xiri was a particular variant of Xiri spoken by the refugees arriving in T'ugü after the Great Sickness in 655 AGS and subsequently throughout the Exodus Period.

Consonants
Some consonants had intervocalic allophones which are romanised separately for ease of reading, but which are not distinguished in the native script. /h/ was not present in Exodus Xiri, merging with /ʔ/ intervocallically and being lost elsewhere. /k/ is the only phoneme which technically cannot occur in intervocalic position, since it is neutralised into /ŋ/. The use of ⟨g⟩ to represent intervocalic underlying /k/ reflects the native script which usually spells such words using ⟨kV⟩.

Likewise, coda nasals are realised as nasalisation of the preceding vowel with no phonetic consonant but are still rendered as the underlying consonant in the romanisation and native script. For example, sām "if" and. fāń "moon" are realised as [sãː] and [fãː] respectively and may be analysed as /saːN/ and /faːN/.

Vowels
Most of the differences between the phonologies of the three historical stages of Xiri are in the vowel inventory, which underwent several characteristic shifts during the evolution of the language.

Early Xiri
Early Xiri had a simple five-vowel system with contrastive length retained from Proto-Xiri. The mid vowels, e ē o ō, developed from Proto-Xiri diphthongs. In addition to the basic vowel inventory, certain sequences of syllables in Proto-Xiri gave rise to coda glides which appeared only in four diphthongs: ay [ai̯], aw [au̯], ey [ei̯], and ew [eu̯].

Middle Xiri
Xiri's vowel length was completely lost by the time of Middle Xiri. The Early Xiri diphthongs monophthongised into three new long vowels:


 * ay [ai̯], ey [ei̯] → ē [eː]
 * aw [au̯] → ā [ɒː]
 * ew [eu̯] → ō [øː]

Short vowels in unstressed syllables took on distinctive more central realisations. Stress is often marked on short vowels with an acute accent in romanisation to highlight the difference in vowel quality.

Exodus Xiri
In Exodus Xiri, the unstressed vowel allophones were phonemicised by the merger of unstressed [ɪ ʊ] and stressed [e o] into /e o/. The resulting inventory contrasts three vowel heights in the series /i e ɛ/ and /u o ɔ/, where /i u/ only occur in stressed syllables. /ɛ ɔ/ may occur in stressed syllables due to a shift in the long vowels: /eː øː ɒː/ → /ɛ ø ɔ/.

The inventory of front rounded vowels was also expanded through contact with Alöbi, introducing /y/ which was always stressed like /i/ and /u/. Unrounded vowels [a ɛ e i] were rounded to [ɔ œ ø y] by preceding /w/, which was additionally lost in unstressed syllables. For example, Middle Xiri kwíkwi [ˈkwi.kwɪ] "(a lot of) yams" becomes Exodus Xiri kwükö [ˈkwy.kø], through an intermediate stage [ˈkwi.kwe]. [ø] and [œ] form a complementary distribution in stressed and unstressed syllables respectively. It is possible that the distinction was marginally phonemic, since stressed [œ] could theoretically have formed via [ˈwei̯] → [ˈweː] → [ˈwɛ] → [ˈwœ], but no such examples are known.

Syllable structure and stress
Xiri's maximal syllable structure is CGVF, where C is any consonant, G is a glide /j w/ and F is a glide, fricative other than /h/ or a nasal other than /ɲ/, i.e. any of /j w f s ʃ m n ŋ/. A medial glide is allowed only when the onset consonant is a nasal, a plosive except /ʔ/, or a sibilant fricative, i.e. any of /m n ɲ ŋ p t tʃ k s ʃ/. The palatal series /ɲ tʃ ʃ/ may only take medial /w/, not /j/. A coda glide immediately preceding any onset consonant within a word undergoes regular metathesis, where the glide becomes the medial G of the next syllable. In the circumstance that this forms an illegal onset cluster, e.g. /rw/ or /ɲj/, the glide is simply deleted. Additionally, instances of /sj/ merge into /ʃ/. Coda consonants do not form geminates with following identical onsets, instead merging into a single consonant, e.g. tefes "fish sp." from tef "bone" + fes "fish"

In Middle Xiri, nasal consonants assimilated to following consonants in all circumstances. This meant that nasal + glide onset clusters merged into a single nasal, i.e. /mj nj ŋj/ > /ɲ/ and /mw nw ɲw ŋw/ > /m/. In coda position, nasal consonants were neutralised into a placeless /N/ which nasalises the preceding vowel and appears as a nasal stop which assimilates to the place of articulation of a following consonant, or lengthens the vowel where no consonant is present. Stem-final nasals were retained as part of the underlying morphophonological structure, and may be realised as onset consonants if a following syllable had no onset, even across word boundaries. For example, the word pinémene (a rice dish) was realised as /pinemene/ [pɪˈn̪e.mɛ.n̪ɛ], but the root pínem (bitter fish sauce) as /pineN/ [ˈpi.n̪ɛ̃ː], without explicit /m/. This word must have been coined at the time of Middle Xiri, evidenced by the loan of Alöbi binem.

Xiri features predictable placement of a strongly stressed syllable in each word. Stress is placed on the first syllable of monosyllabic and disyllabic words, and on the second syllable on longer words. This stress rule is affected by inflectional affixes, compare: naʼa [ˈn̪a.ʔa] "mouth.ABS" vs. naʼayo [n̪aˈʔa.jo] "mouth-ACC"; kwi [ˈkʷi] "yam" vs. ukwi [ˈu.kwi] "PL-yam".

Active sound changes in Early Xiri
These sound changes occurred later in history, changing vocab diachronically and remaining active throughout the Early Xiri period, with newly coined words also exhibiting the changes. This means that an Early Xiri word which had historically undergone alveolar palatalisation, like *nyēre > ñēre, can still undergo glide metathesis: saw-ñēre > sañwēre.