Language summary
- Contents
- 1 Phonology (and orthography)
- 2 Grammatical features
- 2.1 Verbs
- 2.2 Nouns
- 2.3 Adjectives
- 2.4 Pronouns
- 2.5 Syntax
This document exists just to give a quick grammatical overview of Cenyani. It is a bit incomplete, but hopefully easier to digest than the full grammar.
Phonology (and orthography)
Pronunciation is given where the letter differs from its pronunciation in the IPA; as in c, which is pronounced [k] and not [c].
Note: y doubles as both a vowel and a consonant. This was a very poor design choice.
- Vowels:
a [a, ɑ],
ä [æ, æˑ],
e [e, ɛ],
ö [ø, øˑ],
i [i, ɪ],
o [o, ɔ],
u [u, ʊ],
y [y, ʉ],
- Acute accent marks long (and typically stresssed) vowels: á é í ó ú ý
- Stress-dependent pronunciation under some circumstances
- No vowel reduction: all vowels are clearly pronounced, always
- Vowel length is phonemic (except in ä and ö)
- Consonants:
- Syllabic: rr [r̩], ss [s̩], šš [ʃ̩]
- Voiceless: c [k], f, h [h, x], p, s, š [ʃ], t, þ [θ], x [χ]
- Voiced: b, d, ð, g, l, m, n, ŋ, r, rh [ʀ], v, w, y [j]
- Consonant length is phonemic in most fricatives, nasals and rh
- Tables of permitted consonant clusters
- Stress: mostly deterministic and fixed (within a word); irregularities marked orthographically (acute accent)
Cenyani writing system/native alphabet
Grammatical features
In general, Cenyani is:
- Strongly fusional: a single suffix expresses multiple ideas simultaneously
- Derivational: strong tendency to form new words by deriving from existing ones
- Largely regular
Verbs
- Eight verb classes which depend on the final phoneme(s) of the word
- Tense and aspect mashed together:
- Present: currently ongoing
- Past: went on in the past, whether completed now or not
- Perfect: completed action, whether completed recently or in the past (no distinction between “have done” and “had done”)
- Future: intended to be done in the future
- Future perfect: intended to be completed in the future, whether already started or not
- Volition, four degrees:
- Expresses the subject’s intentionality
- Neutral: neutral intentions; the subject has no agenda one way or the other
- Positive: expresses a strong intentionality, there is a purpose behind the action; also implies “I’m happily/gladly/willingly ‹verb›ing”
- Negative: the subject intended to avoid the action, but performed it anyway; “I’m unhappily/unwillingly ‹verb›ing”, “I’m ‹verb›ing but I don’t want to”
- Unintentional: (for transitive verbs) accidental action; (when the subject is an experiencer) something that just happened to happen; “I found myself sitting outside”
- Subjunctive for hypothetical scenarios, regardless of their probability
- Imperative for commands
- Verb inflection
Nouns
- Five core cases:
- Nominative: used for the subject of the clause
- Accusative: direct object (“She kissed her”)
- Dative: “to ‹noun›”; recipient or indirect object
- Expossessive: “from ‹noun›”, especially (as the name suggests) when transferring ownership
- Vocative: used for addressing people
- Genitive is a separate modification: owner agrees in core case with ownee
- Three numbers:
- Singular: a single entity
- Plural: more than one entity
- Conceptual: uncountable, or zero or fewer entities
- Distinction between indefinite and definite nouns
- Adpositions are suffixes, but can sometimes detach, becoming circumpositions
- Noun inflection
Adjectives
- Six degrees of comparison:
- Positive: “good”
- Comparative: “better”
- Superlative: “best”
- Reductive: “slightly good”, “a little good”
- Anticomparative: “less good”
- Antisuperlative: “least good”
- Agreement in core case with the modified noun, but not in number
- Adjective inflection
Pronouns
- Personal: I, you, he, she, it, etc. + reflexive modifier
- Possessive: independent genitive personal pronouns (mine, yours, his, hers, etc.)
- Reciprocal: “each other”, typically suffixed onto the verb in the accusative
- Demonstrative: proximal (“this”) and distal (“that”), distinction between animate and inanimate, as well as all three numbers
- Indefinite: someone/-thing, anyone/-thing, etc.
- Relative: make a distinction between animate and inanimate
- Interrogative: who? what? (distinction between animate and inanimate)
Syntax
- Primarily SVO but with VSO tendencies
- SVO is the default
- VSO and VOS are often used when one or more personal pronouns are involved
- VSO is used in dependent clauses
- No pro-drop
- Largely fixed word order, but with a movable, clause-initial topic
- Determiners before nouns (and any adjectives the noun may have)
- Adjectives before nouns
- Relative clauses after nouns
- Genitives after nouns
- Clause-initial relative pronouns, interrogative words and conjunctions
- A proper, actual zero-subject passive (the subject of an active sentence is simply left out to form the passive voice)
