Phonetics and orthography

## Phonetics and orthography

Phonemic spelling: the language is read as it is written, each letter always corresponds to the same sound; letters are pronounced as in standard Italian.

Word stress: always on the first syllable of the word (or of the root in prefixed words). Prefixes (such as the negation a-, the article en-, or the genitive i-) act as unstressed proclitics, meaning the primary stress remains fixed on the first syllable of the original root word. Examples: ARrue (house) → en-**AR**rue (a house); kett (friend) → i-**kett** (friend's). This preserves the acoustic stability and immediate recognizability of the root word. Unlike a rule based on the second-to-last syllable (which would shift every time a suffix is added), fixed initial stress stays the same no matter how many suffixes are applied to the root — consistent with NLS's agglutinative nature and with the language's overall spirit of predictability. This choice has precedent in natural agglutinative/inflectional languages with fixed initial stress (e.g. Czech, Finnish, Hungarian). Example: ARrue (house), ARruera (houses), ARruerane (the houses) — the stress never moves, even as suffixes are added.