Xiri phonology

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

Moraic consonants
Xiri is a strictly mora-timed language, with stress placement also based on morae.

Monophthongs
The vowel inventory of Xiri underwent several diachronic changes which characterise its three historical stages, but maintains 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 retained from Proto-Xiri. The mid vowels (e ē o ō) developed from Proto-Xiri diphthongs: (*ai *āi *au *āu). Vowel length was present only in the earliest Xiri, and very few surviving texts show evidence of its transcription in writing.

Diphthongs
In addition to the monophthongs, new diphthongs developed via the loss of a schwa after a glide:


 * aye awe → ay aw
 * eye ewe → ey ew
 * oye owe → ey ew
 * iye iwe → i ew
 * uye uwe → ey u


 * ńaʼay /ŋa.ʔaj/ + eru /e.ru/ → ńaʼayeru /ŋa.ʔa.je.ru/ [ŋaʔajeɾu] "tattoo-person"

Before another consonant, the cluster undergoes metathesis:


 * ńaʼay /ŋa.ʔaj/ + *pozi /po.si/ → ńaʼapyozi /ŋa.ʔa.pjo.si/ [ŋaʔapjozi] "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.)

At the end of a word, the offglide becomes moraic, so acts as a vowel:


 * ńaʼay /ŋa.ʔaj/ [ŋa.ʔa.i] "tattoo"

By the time of the Xiyeru exodus, the diphthongs had monophthongised, but remained bimoraic: These double vowels operate as a single bimoraic segment, unique in allowing two adjacent identical vowel qualities. In fact, the phonetic realisations of the two vowels are always different, since one is always strong while the other is weak.
 * ay /a.i/ → ai /e.e/
 * aw /a.u/ → au /ɒ.ɒ/
 * ey /e.i/ → ei /i.i/
 * ew /e.u/ → eu /ø.ø/

In the Middle Xiri era (around 400 AGS), short vowels in unstressed syllables took on distinctive weakened realisations, but which were not yet phonemic. Stress is often marked on short vowels with an acute accent in romanisation to highlight the difference in vowel quality, though the native script did not make such a distinction.

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".