Monthly Archives: March 2019

Innocence Seekers: The Black Rose – Namari orthography and romanisation

This post details the orthography of Namari, as well as the main romanisation systems in use. Namari is primarily written in kana, although in the past Han characters have also been used (their use in the present day is largely limited to disambiguation). In terms of romanisation, the most common system is a modified version of the Hepburn system used to transliterate Japanese, although other systems are also in use.

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Innocence Seekers: The Black Rose – Vowel harmony in dialectal Namari

Unlike the previous posts, this post will focus on a feature only found in some dialects, namely, vowel harmony. Vowel harmony may have existed in an early form of Namari; however, most dialects, if not all, have lost it. In fact, it is not clear if the vowel harmony found in the western dialects is an echo of this prehistoric feature or an entirely new innovation.

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Innocence Seekers: The Black Rose – Verb pairs in Namari

As I mentioned before, Namari has pairs of related transitive and intransitive verbs, such as agu (“to raise”, lower bigrade) and agayu (“to rise”, quinquegrade). This post will detail some of the morphological features used to make these verb pairs, none of which are productive in the modern language.

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