Introduction
Nahaıwa, also known as Haıwa or NLL1 (acronym for ⟪Ntsékees' Logical Language #1⟫) is a prototype of a constructed monosemic language, i.e. a loglang: syntactic ambiguities are disallowed, as well as word polysemy and homonymy not resolvable through syntax alone, as well as opaque idiomatic expressions not explicitly marked as such. It is also an artlang, inasmuch as aesthetics (in the eyes of the author) is taken into account.
It is currently in a developmental stage of prototype, and the description given here may be obsoleted by future changes to the language. The development of the language started in mid 2016.
The language exhibits ‘scopal polysynthesis’, i.e. words may contain an arbitrary number of recursively stacked affixes —in this case, prefixes— with transparent meanings, called “extensional prefixes”. Its morphology is purely prefixal, of agglutinative nature with some portmanteau morphemes. There are three main lexically-assigned categories of lexical units:
• contentives (which may assume the syntactic roles of finite verb, relativized verb, noun, adjective, adverb, conjunction or quantifier, depending on the way they are inflected);
• inflecting functors / functional words (these have exactly the same morphology as contentives, but have special effects on the surrounding syntax);
• uninflected functors, i.e. particles.
Functors are closed classes, and they have a fairly small number of members.
The vocabulary is a priori, not derived or borrowed from that of existing natural or constructed languages, with the exception of concepts which are highly culture-specific, such as ethny names, specific customs and cultural practices, prepared foods…
The consonant inventory is large (36 consonants), and mainly inspired by the inventories of Athabascan languages, Aymaran and Quechuan languages.