Alöbi

Alöbi was a Northern Upic language spoken by the Öb people in T'ugü in the first millennium AGS.

Name
The name Alöbi was likely formed long before the first attestation of the language in writing in the 1st century AGS, evidenced by the use of the archaic genitive -i, yielding al-öbi "tongue of Öb (people)".

Dialects
Alöbi is divided into two major dialect clusters, High and Low Alöbi, named after the altitude of the geographical regions they are spoken. High Alöbi, spoken in the southern hills of T'ugü, tends to be more phonologically conservative, but lexically more innovative, with many compound words replacing older vocabulary retained in Low Alöbi.

Post-alveolar consonants
The consonants c c' x are pronounced [tʃ tʃʼ ʃ] respectively, while the approximant y is palatal [j] but forms a natural group with the post-alveolars when considering phonotactics.

Dorsal consonants
In the Low Alöbi dialects, k k' h are uvularised to [q qʼ χ] next to a [ɑ] within the same syllable and [k kʼ x] elsewhere. High Alöbi has no phonemic glottal stop, instead featuring uvular plosives /q q'/, though still exhibits k k' > q q' next to a.

The consonant g is most typically a nasal following similar [ŋ~ɴ] allophony, though a fricative quality [ɣ] is found in some High dialects.

Vowels
In Low Alöbi, unstressed vowels are slightly centralised and, with the exception of a, more open than when stressed. Low Alöbi also slightly lengthens stressed vowels, while in High Alöbi the vowels i ü u are always pronounced long. A table of typical vowel qualities is shown below: Many common vocabulary words have dialect variants in which some instances of Low Alöbi i [i~ɪ] correspond to High Alöbi e [ɪ]. Such alternation originates from each groups undergoing different vowel mergers: *i *ī > i [i~ɪ] in Low Alöbi and *i *e > e [ɪ] in High Alöbi. Some examples are shown below:


 * PÖb *binem "bitter fish sauce" → LA binem [ˈbiˑnë̞m] ~ HA penem [ˈpɪnɪm]
 * PÖb *inki "younger sibling" → LA igki [ˈiˑŋkɪ] ~ HA enke [ˈɪŋkɪ]
 * PÖb *cic'ī "red clay" → LA cic'i [ˈtʃiˑtʃʼɪ] ~ HA cec'i [ˈtʃɪtʃʼiː]

Phonotactics
The syllable structure is (C)(A)V(C) where C is any consonant, V is any vowel and A is an approximant /w l j/. An approximant A can only occur if the onset consonant is a non-approximant with a different place of articulation to A. Syllables with no onset consonant are common and as a result, there are many examples of vowel hiatus. If two identical vowels meet at a syllable boundary, a glottal stop /ʔ/ is inserted between them. Every word has one stressed syllable which falls on the first syllable of the stem.

Grammar
The language is fairly agglutinative and makes use of many case markers, derivational affixes and compounding to derive words. The pronouns come in singular, dual, paucal and plural forms and the morphosyntactic alignment is almost purely ergative-absolutive. The word order is strictly verb-final but otherwise fairly free, though typically uses a head-final structure.

Number
There is a set of prefixes which can be attached directly to a noun stem to specify grammatical number: Vowels in brackets are present only on consonant-initial stems, so the singular person prefix is ∅- on vowel-initial stems.

The numeral system of Alöbi is base-five, with the basic numeral roots from one to five; ac-, wib-, nüh-, bix- and om-. These roots do not occur in isolation and must be suffixed with a classifier which specifies the type of object being counted. Animals are classified by type of animal and non-animal objects are generally classified by shape. Numerals do not modify nouns but rather are nouns which can be modified by the thing being counted. The noun being counted is adjectivised by a genitive prefix a-, and falls last in the list of adjectives modifying the numeral noun. owa ugo, a-ugo bix-to, owa a-ugo bix-to

big ugo, GEN-ugo four-CL(large_animal) big GEN-ugo four-CL(large_animal)

‘big ugo, four ugo, four big ugo’ Context often permits the original noun to be dropped: cia öb, cia wib-ka

red person, red two-CL(people)

‘red person, two red people’Nouns with no specified number are treated as plural by the pronominal and verb agreement systems. Numeral nouns are generally treated as singular by these systems, so ugo is interpreted as an unspecified number of ugo, whereas augo omto is interpreted as a single group of five ugo.

Greater numbers are formed using a special suffix -ö, which turns a numeral into an adjective which modifies a (multiple of five) numeral noun by adding to it.acö om-, wibö om-, nühö om-, bixö om-

one-add five, two-add five, three-add five, four-add five

six, seven, eight, nineTen and 25 have their own roots, üs- and myaq- respectively, other multiples of five are expressed using a mixture of 25s, tens and fives using the relational linker suffix -i.