Phonology and Romanization

The phonology of Māryanyā is in many ways closer to Proto-Indo-Aryan than its sister language Sanskrit, but includes two phonemes, /l/ and /x/, found only in loanwords (see the Sound Changes section for more). The romanization scheme I use is based on a combination of standard academic romanizations for Sanskrit and those for Near Eastern languages such as Akkadian and Hittite.

		Labial	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar
Stop	Voiceless	p	t	t͡ɕ	k
	Aspirated		tʰ		kʰ
	Voiced	b	d	d͡ʑ	g
	Breathy	bʱ	dʱ	d͡ʑʱ	gʱ
Fricative	Voiceless		s	ɕ	x
	Voiced			ʑ
	Breathy			ʑʱ
Nasal		m	n
Approximant		ʋ	l	j
Tap			ɾ

		Labial	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar
Stop	Voiceless	p	t	c	k
	Aspirated		th		kh
	Voiced	b	d	j	g
	Breathy	bh	dh	jh	gh
Fricative	Voiceless		s	š	ḫ
	Voiced			ž
	Breathy			žh
Nasal		m	n
Approximant		v	l	y
Tap			r

/ʋ/ is pronounced [v] in clusters.

	Front		Central		Back
	Short	Long	Short	Long	Short	Long
Close	i	iː			u	uː
Open			a	aː

	Front		Central		Back
	Short	Long	Short	Long	Short	Long
Close	i	ī			u	ū
Open			a	ā

Māryanyā also has the phonemic diphthongs /au̯/ ⟨au⟩ and /ai̯/ ⟨ai⟩.

Prosody

I developed Māryanyā’s predictable stress system based on the reconstruction of neighboring Akkadian’s stress system found in Helle 2012. The rules are as follows:

There are three types of syllables: light (open with short vowels), heavy (open syllables with long vowels/diphthongs and closed syllables with short vowels), and superheavy (closed syllables with long vowels/diphthongs). If the last syllable of the word is superheavy, that syllable bears the stress. If the last syllable of the word is not superheavy, then the last non-final heavy or superheavy syllable bears the stress. If there are no superheavy or non-final heavy syllables in the word, then the first syllable of the word bears the stress. Monosyllabic words do not bear stress.