Xiri phonology

The phonology of Xiri features 16 phonemic consonants, a typical five-vowel system of /a e o i u/ and, depending on the historical stage, additional vowel length or diphthongs. Xiri is described as having both a strict syllable structure and a mora-based timing, where a syllable may consist of one or two mora. Each word has one primary stressed mora, with secondary stress placed on every second mora after that, meaning secondary stress may be placed on a moraic coda consonant but not its host syllable's vowel.

The following article presents an overall view of Xiri's phonology throughout its history, covering three main historical stages:


 * Early Xiri — The earliest stage of the language which is distinct from its sister languages, spoken some time after 300 BGS.
 * Middle Xiri — The stage of Xiri spoken primarily 100 - 300 AGS, around the time of the first contact with T'ugü and the Öb.
 * Late Xiri — The later variety of standard Xiri, spoken around 500 - 700 AGS and by the initial refugees who arrived in T'ugü after the Great Sickness in 655 AGS.

Consonants
Xiri's consonant inventory remained largely the same throughout its history.

Moraic consonants
Xiri's mora-timed prosody features some moraic consonants. Vowels and coda consonants each constitutes one mora, so moraic consonants may only occur in the coda of a syllable, i.e. following a vowel. Stress placement is based on the moraic structure of a word rather than the syllable structure, meaning secondary stress may be placed on the coda of a syllable rather than its nucleus. For example, the bimoraic word tef "bone" is normally stressed [ˈte.f], but the compound ijitef "charred pig bones" is realised [i ˈdʒi.te ˌf]. Coda consonants are the result of the loss of the Proto-Xiri short schwa *e following a continuant (*m *n *ń *f *s *x *y *w), which may still have been pronounced in Early Xiri and devoiced after fricatives. For example, tef may have been rendered as [ˈte.fə̥] until around the first century BGS.

Monophthongs
The vowel inventory of Xiri underwent several diachronic changes which characterise its three historical stages, but maintained a common core set of vowels throughout. The history of the vowels begins in Early Xiri, which had a simple five-vowel system with contrastive length initially retained from Proto-Xiri. The mid vowels (e ē o ō) developed from Proto-Xiri diphthongs:


 * ai āi au aū → e ē o ō
 * ei ēi eu ēu → i ī u ū
 * ia iā ua uā → yo yā wa wā
 * ie iē ue uē → yu yē wi wē

Note that Proto-Xiri ⟨e⟩ represents a schwa, while in Xiri proper it is the front mid vowel /e/. Vowel length appeared to have still been present in Early Xiri, but was lost completely by 0 AGS. The Ugugo script did at some time have glyph variants which distinguished vowel length, present in very few surviving texts.

In the Late Xiri era (c. 500-700 AGS), vowels in weak syllables took on distinctive centralised realisations which were not yet phonemic. Stress is often marked on vowels with an acute accent in romanisation to highlight the difference in quality between the strong and weak vowels, though the native script did not make such a distinction.

Diphthongs
In addition to the monophthongs, new diphthongs developed in Early Xiri via the loss of Proto-Xiri schwa after a glide:

This change likely happened after the loss of contrastive vowel length, but there is not enough evidence to be certain of the chronology.
 * *aye → /aj/
 * *awe → /aw/
 * *eye, *oye, *uye → /ej/
 * *ewe, *owe, *iwe → /ew/
 * *iye → /i/
 * *uwe → /u/

At the end of a word, the offglide becomes moraic, so acts as a vowel: The offglide acts as a consonant whenever there is a following syllable in a word, in which the glide becomes part of the onset:
 * ńaʼai /ŋaʔaj/ [ŋa ˈʔa.i] "tattoo"


 * ńaʼai /ŋaʔaj/ + eru /eru/ → ńaʼayeru /ŋaʔajeru/ [ŋa ˈʔa.je ˌɾu] "tattoo-person"

In Middle Xiri, a glide landing before another consonant undergoes metathesis:


 * ńaʼai /ŋaʔaj/ + *pozi /posi/ → ńaʼapyozi /ŋaʔapjosi/ [ŋa ˈʔa.pjo ˌzi] "tattoo-knowledge"
 * Note that the surface form of *pozi is in fact fozi due to a sound change p → f / #_, indicating that this compound was coined before the shift and long before the metathesis rule became active.
 * sau /saw/ + ñere /ɲere/ → sañwere /saɲwere/ [sa ˈɲwe.ɾe] "summer-rain"
 * This word first appears in a poem composed in the 3rd century AGS, and must have been coined no earlier than Early Xiri, evidenced by the metathetic behaviour of /ɲ/ as a single consonant (from Proto-Xiri *ni-). This illustrates that the metathesis rule remained active for newly coined words throughout Middle Xiri.

By the time of the Xiyeru exodus at the end of the 7th century AGS, the diphthongs were typically pronounced with a single vowel quality, but remained bimoraic: These double vowels are phonemically distinct entities which operate as a single bimoraic segment, unique in allowing two adjacent identical vowel qualities. The continued romanisation of these vowels as ⟨ai au ei eu⟩ reflects the conservative native orthography. In fact, the phonetic realisations of the two vowels may always have been different, since only one may be stressed leaving the other weak, yielding realisations such as ái [e.ɛ̈] and aí [ɛ̈.e]. Not much is known about the nature of the double vowels, since they appear to have only existed towards the end of Late Xiri, at which time there was a relative lull in Xiyeru literature due to the plague, famine and exodus, before the bimoraic stress pattern collapsed into single syllables in the early development of Möxale.
 * ai /a.i/ → /e.e/
 * au /a.u/ → /ɒ.ɒ/
 * ei /e.i/ → /i.i/
 * eu /e.u/ → /ø.ø/

Syllable structure
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 /tj sj nj/ merge into /tʃ ʃ ɲ/. 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".

Prosody
Xiri is a mora-timed language, with vowels and coda consonants each constituting one mora. Stress placement is based on the moraic structure of a word rather then the syllable structure. On monomoraic and bimoraic words, the stress is placed on the initial mora, while on longer words it is placed on the second mora, and every second mora after the primary stress receives a secondary stress. Stressed morae are "strong" while the remaining unstressed morae are "weak". The phenomenon of strong and weak syllables is not unique to Xiri, also manifesting in various ways in its sister languages. In Xiri, the weak vowels underwent different diachronic changes to the strong vowels, and in many cases were eventually lost, resulting in a significantly different syllabic and prosodic structure in the language which would later become Möxale. This process is illustrated well by the Xiyeru word for ice cream, which was coined in Middle Xiri and survived into Möxale:


 * Middle Xiri — faʼawatwigibara [fa ˈʔa.wa ˌt̪wi.ŋi ˌba.ɾa]
 * Late Xiri — faʼáwatwígibára [fə ˈʔa.wə ˌt̪wi.ŋɪ ˌba.ɾə]
 * Exodus Xiri — ʼávtvűgbár [ˈʔav.t̪vỹŋ.baɾ] (Note removal of the prefix fa-)
 * Möxale — avtvinbal [ˈɑβ.t̪β̞ĩm.bɑl̪]

Stress placement is always predictable at the word level, meaning it 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".