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
Each noun was either countable or uncountable. Countable nouns in the absolutive and dative cases 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: