I mentioned the similarities between the NisseLang and Wokuthízhű sound inventories (specifically focusing on the modern sounds), which prompted me to make a chart to see just how similar the inventories are.
The verb inventories absolutely match with one caveat: for each vowel quality, NisseLang has a short-long distinction where Wokuthízhű does not. The vowel qualities in both languages, though, are identical: [i, y, e, u, o, a]. Technically, the [a] in Wokuthízhű is central while the [ɑ] in NisseLang is a back vowel, but each language has only one low vowel, and they are very close in pronunciation.
The consonant inventory isn’t as precise of a match, but it is similar (not as similar as I had originally thought it was, but still close!).
The orange consonants only occur in Wokuthízhű, the teal in NisseLang, and the black appear in both languages.
NisseLang has glottal consonants [ʔ, h], where Wokuthízhű does not. And NisseLang has the voiceless (alveo-)palatal fricative [ʃ].
Wokuthízhű has more voicing distinctions than NisseLang does with these voiced stops and fricatives: [b, ð, z, dʒ]. And it has ejective fricatives (and affricates!) while NisseLang only has ejective stops.
Outside of those discrepancies, they share the plain-ejective voiceless stop distinctions with [p, p’, t, t’, k, k’], the voiceless [tʃ] affricate, and the fricatives [f, v, θ, s, ʒ]. The approximant and nasal inventories are identical: [w, l, j, ɥ, m, n, ɲ, ŋ].
The proto-syllable shapes are similar: NisseLang has a maximal CVC structure, and Wokuthízhű a CVV/CVC structure (if a syllable has a diphthong, it cannot have a coda). Proto-Nisse does not have any diphthongs, so it differs in that way (the modern language has three diphthongs). And Wokuthízhű has a restriction that the coda consonant cannot be an ejective. Proto-NisseLang does not have any ejective consonants (those are developed through sound changes), so technically it shares that feature—no coda ejectives all around.
While Wokuthízhű lost all its coda consonants, NisseLang kept codas. Both languages have tone, but tone is treated differently. Tone is a lexical feature in Wokuthízhű (it has high and low tones) but a grammatical one in NisseLang (it has a pitch accent system with three tones, or pitches, rather than a true tonal system).
As a small comparison of just how different the languages are in practice despite all the similarities, here is the sentence “The mouse hug(s/ed) the moon” in each language (the perfective is unmarked in NisseLang while the imperfective is unmarked in Wokuthízhű).
- NisseLang: Àjúnosseekú’i. “The mouse hugged the moon.”
- Wokuthízhű: Ch’ükí nyűfísüní me. “The mouse is hugging the moon.”
That wraps up my little comparison, and in a future post I’ll write more about the word order and how that came to be in NisseLang.