ayearinlanguage:A Year in Language, day 45: Moksha.It’s Valentine’s Day, so of course I have chosen
ayearinlanguage:A Year in Language, day 45: Moksha.It’s Valentine’s Day, so of course I have chosen the most romantic of languages: Moksha.Moksha is a Uralic language, a distant relative of Finnish and Hungarian. It, along with Erzya, form the Mordvinic branch of the Uralic family, named for the Russian republic of Mordovia in which both languages are spoken. Despite their relation and proximity they are not mutually intelligible.Cross linguistically, certain consonants are more likely to appear unvoiced than voiced. This included the stop and fricative type of consonant, and collectively are known as obstruents. Conversely “sonorant” consonants are almost always voiced and include nasals and approximates. Moksha, in defiance of these norms, has a voiceless /l/ and /r/.Moksha contrasts its dental consonants with palatalized and unpalatalized forms (this includes the aforementioned voiceless sonorants). It does not have vowel harmony like most Uralic languages, but retains it in a form of vowel-consonant harmony. Palatalized consonants can only be followed by front vowels (/i/, /e/, /æ/), and conversely non-palatalized consonants cannot be followed by front vowels. -- source link
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