Changes between Beta and Gamma
Here is a quick overview of changes since the Public Beta version of Toaq on http://toaq.org/:
- There are new consonants z /d͡z/ and nh /ɲ/. There is a new vowel y /ə/.
- There are some new syllable endings, like uoı. They aren't fully set in stone yet.
- Syllables may start with an unwritten glottal stop, like elū (elephant). Within a word it's written with an apostrophe: elū'āı.
- The interjections ha, hıa, hue are gone. Future interjections will probably look like: á, è, m̄.
- A few common words have moved: toaq (language) is now zu. deoq (talk) is now koy. suo (broken) is now zuy.
- Quantifiers now precede a falling-tone predicate phrase: sa rảı instead of sa ráı. The meaning of the rising tone (ráı) has changed a little bit. See this blog post.
- baq is now a quantifier. baq pỏq means "people", the kind, rather than "a person" or "some people".
- Adverbs like dẽ no longer wrap the whole sentence they're in. See Small Grammar Update.
- There is a rich new system of pronoun classes.
- As part of this system, ho now always "anaphoric": it refers to someone mentioned earlier in the sentence. The new "exophoric" third-person pronoun is nhao.
- lu now works the same in every tone (it didn't quite before) and la (a new word) now covers some old uses of it. See official blog post Miscellanea #2. The fate of "old la" is undecided.
- lu is terminated by ky, and relative/content clauses are terminated by cy. See Miscellanea #3.