Old Nambāno

Old Nambāno, also known as Early Nambāno or Proto-Nambāno, is the ancestor of most language varieties within the Nambāno dialect cluster, believed to be the oldest Koyanic language spoken in Qnōp'.

Phonotactics
Old Nambāno had a maximal BRVRB syllabic structure, where B is any obstruent or nasal and R is any sonorant, though obstruents never occurred at the end of words.

Various morphophonological processes of assimilation limited the possible *-BB- clusters that were possible that could occur across syllable boundaries. These processes can be sorted into progressive and regressive assimilation:


 * Progressive assimilation
 * The dorsal fricative *h assimilates to any preceding consonant, e.g. *-th- *-rh- *-ŋh- > *-tt- *-rr- *-ŋŋ-.
 * Regressive assimilation
 * Plosives assimilate to following nasals of the same place of articulation, e.g. *-pm- *-dn- *-kŋ- > *-mm- *-nn- *-ŋŋ-
 * Labial stops *b *p *m assimilate to following dorsal stops, e.g. *-bg- *-pk- *-mg- > *-gg- *-kk- *-ŋg-.
 * Lingual nasals *n *ŋ assimilate to the place of articulation of any following stop, e.g. *-nk- *-ŋm- *-ŋt- > *-ŋk- *-mm- *-nt-. Note that *m only assimilated to velar consonants as per the rule above, thus sequences like *-mt- and *-ml- were allowed.
 * Lingual plosives *d *t *g *k assimilate to the place of articulation and voicedness of any following plosives and *s, e.g. *-dp- *-tg- *-gs- > *-pp- *-gg- *-ss-

A full table of possible intrasyllabic clusters of two consonants subject to these rules is shown below:

Nouns
Nouns could either be countable or uncountable. Countable nouns distinguished singular, plural and uncounted forms while uncountable nouns were always uncounted. This separation ultimately derives from Proto-Koyanic's two animacy categories, though the countability of a noun was fairly unrelated to its animacy by the time of Old Nambāno.

The case suffixes present in Old Nambāno are shown below: