and are not phonemic, but are distinguished in the orthography.
Phonotactics
Syllables can begin and end with up to one consonant each. I.e., English wrong would be an acceptable word, but strength would not. Words can only end in either a vowel or. The vowels and never occur word-initially. never occurs before or.
Writing system
varies from 20% to 80% in different areas.
Morphosyntax
Negation
Negation in Maisin
Negation in Maisin is achieved predominantly by morphology. In the Marua communalect, negation is marked by isaa… -ka, while in the Sinapa communalect, negation is marked by saa… -ka. The negation marking is discontinuous. Isaa is a morpheme located prior to the predicate of the sentence, and can be roughly glossed as ‘not’ in English. Morphologically, it is classified as a separate word. -ka is an enclitic that is found attached to a verb’s tense- or aspect-marking enclitic. Alternatively, when there is no tense- or aspect-marking enclitic in the sentence, it attaches to the predicate’s last item. Negation through isaa... -ka can be seen in the following examples.
Example 1 In Example 1, the verb stem 'swim’ takes both the progressive marker -ye and the negative enclitic -ka, as well as the male second-person singular pronominal enclitic. The enclitic -ka attaches to the progressive marker -ye. The combination of isaa and -ka in the sentence negates the action of swimming.
Example 2 Here negation is also shown through isaa… -ka. In this case, -ka is attached directly to the end of the predicate, as there is no tense- or aspect-marking present. The first -ka in the sentence is not a negative marker; rather, it is a homophonous morpheme that functions as a topic marker.
Example 3 In Example 3, -ka is found attached to the enclitic -anan, which marksfuture tense. Again, negation is achieved through the combination of isaa and -ka.
Maisin negation with ''isaa'' only
In the presence of the conjunction -ate or the demonstrative -nen, the -ka enclitic is removed, leavingisaa as the sole negation marker in the sentence. This occurs because -ate and -nen are both located in the same position in a word as -ka. isaa-only negation is demonstrated in the following examples. Example 4 The presence of the demonstrative morpheme -nen in the first clause of Example 4 displaces -ka. Thus, isaa is the sole negator of the clause. Example 5 This example shows the presence of the conjunction -ate, which is attached to the end of the verb stem kan. This removes -ka and again leaves isaa as the only negation marker in the sentence.
Maisin is an Oceanic language, and its negation system is fairly typical of Oceanic languages. Oceanic languages often express negation discontinuously, with the first element located preverbally and the second postverbally – Maisin fits this pattern, as the above examples demonstrate. Additionally, Maisin follows both the Polynesian pattern of marking negation clause-initially and the Papuan pattern of marking negation clause-finally.
