Tario language

The Tario language is a language.

Consonants
Consonants can be divided into two groups, hard and soft. Hard consonants occur morpheme-finally, while soft consonants occur in all other positions. This contrast can be phonemic, as shown by the minimal pair [ˈa.hui̯] "house" and [ˈa.θʰui̯] "forest". The correspondence between soft and hard consonants is shown in the following table.

The only consonant without a hard counterpart is /m/, which cannot occur morpheme-finally.

Vowels
Vowel sequences occur frequently, as in the word ahuiuiaen [ˈa.hui̯.ui̯.a.eŋ] "in the cities". Sequences of two or more vowels in the same morpheme often become diphthongs in rapid speech.

Phonotactics
Tario syllable structure is (C)V(C).

Stress
Stress is word-initial.

Grammar
Tario is an agglutinative language. It is largely head-initial: most affixes are suffixes, and most adpositions are postpositions.

Nouns
Compound nouns occur frequently. There is no limit to the number of stems in a compound, but it is rare for three or more stems to be compounded in speech.

Some nouns have specialised or figurative senses when used in compounds. For example, the word tah normally means "foot", but it can also mean "creator", "source", or "maintainer", as in esietah "murderer" (literally "death foot") and birirtah "gardener" (literally "plant foot").