LotM - Aug 16: Rireinutire: view article

Rireinutire has a delightfully moderate phonological system, with 12 consonants and 5 vowels. Most of Rireinutire's consonants are stops, with a nice full set of bilabial, alveolar, and velar stops. There's even a glottal stop, naturally represented with everyone's favorite glyph: '. The fricatives are a bit more unusual: there's a /v/ and an /s/, but no /f/ or /z/. As there are a /p/, /t/, and /k/ but no /b/, /d/, or /g/, that /v/ really stands out. No doubt there's some interesting historical process at work.

Compared to the consonants, the vowels don't have any suprises. Rireinutire has a fairly standard five vowel system, with /i/, /u/, /e/, /o/, and /ɑ/. They're represented orthographically much as you'd expect. OR ARE THEY? Well, yes, in the romanization. They're just i, u, e, o, and a. But Rireinutire has more than just romanization. It has a whole syllabary; a rather nice one, if I say so myself. The syllables are crisp, distinct, and easy to write. There are a fair number of mirrored or flipped syllables, but if English can manage with d and b, I'm sure Rireinutire's writers do just fine.

[edit] [top]Grammar and Morphology

Rireinutire has SOV word order, a NOMNominative (case)
TRANS subject, INTR argument-ACCAccusative (case)
TRANS direct object; patient morphosyntactic alignment, and evidentiality for spice. Nouns aren't marked for number, but 12 cases keeps things exciting. I'm personally a fan of Rireinutire's exessive case, which indicates the cesation or transformation of something. I never knew that case existed, but it looks quite handy. Every case other than the nominative is marked with a short suffix, no larger than a syllable.

[edit] [top]More on Rireinutire

Crave more? Check out its articles, translations, or typology. And don't forget to look over those lovely cases.

[edit] [top]A Note on LotM

Got suggestions for how the next LotM should be written? See something in Rireinutire that wasn't covered and you wish it had been? Hate my guts and want to tell me? Feel free to shoot us (either @phi2dao or @argyle) a PM with your thoughts, suggestions, and hate mail. Also feel free to drop by the LotM clan if you have other feedback, want to join in the voting process, or nominate a language! ✎ Edit Article ✖ Delete Article