tú·h ąmɔ̨mpáhe·nʔikyá osǫ́mɔ̨mpáhé·n
Everyone will have to eat, so let's go eat first!
Ɔwíʔyixa, also known as Awiha, the correspondent English exonym, is a conlang that I created in Fall of 2019. One of its many quirks is that it's almost exclusively documented on paper — or more specifically, in a notebook. Although I only worked on it for a couple of months, it is still dear to my heart, as it's a prime example regarding the art of simulating a certain natural language's aesthetic. In the case of Awiha, the natural languages I took the most inspiration from are indigenous North American languages, esp. those from the contiguous United States. With its direct-inverse system inspired by Kiowa, a Tanoan language from Oklahoma, and its phonoaesthetics adapted from Algonquian¹ languages, it is quite a mishmash of similar yet distinct elements of several native U.S. languages.
Now onto some typological characteristics of Ɔwíʔyixa: the language is heavily synthetic, and you might even argue that it is polysynthetic, although I'd use that label with caution, as it's not always clearly defined which characteristics a polysynthet ic language actually exhibits. Awiha features a complex templatic stem derivation system, as well as noun and adverb incoporation, a direct-inverse morphosyntactic alignment and an elaborate ablaut-like vowel gradation system.
Thanks for reading,
Fiat Lingua!
PS: You can find a preliminary sketch grammar that I used for relay21 here
¹If you take a look at the language's vowels you'll notice that it doesn't really look that Algonquian at all! Regarding that part I just took a load of artistic freedom and smashed it onto the vowel system. And thus you have similar, yet distinct phonoaesthetics that kinda match Algonquian languages but also kinda don't.