Subject nouns must agree with person. Object nouns are a little more flexible, but also tend to follow this trend.

elvan

1. index

  • 1. index

    • Links to sections of the page.

  • 2. introduction

    • Background and overview of Albhan.

  • 3. phonology

    • Descriptions of sounds and phonological processes of Albhan. Sound charts are presented in the International Phoenetic Alphabet (IPA); most unfamiliar characters can be found on ipachart.com, or by copy-pasting the character into a search bar.

  • 4. orthography

    • Unfinished section: description of the corvish writing system.

  • 5. morphosyntax

    • Descriptions of how words and sentences are formed in Albhan. Combined 'morphology' and 'syntax' since Corvish is polysynthetic & the two are closely related.

  • 6. lexicon

    • Essentially a dictionary, sometimes including etymology.

2. introduction

(This is just part of my conlang page template I don't really have anything for this section. Yet?)

3. phonology

Consonants:

labial dental alveolar palatal velar uvular glottal
stop b ṭ ḍ k g q
fricatives ɸ [β] s [ʃ] [ɕ] [ʝ] [ɣ] ʕ h
affricates ʦ ʣ
sonorants m n ɳj ŋ
liquids ṛḷ ʀ
approximants w j

Vowels:

Front Central Back
High i [ʉ] ɯ [u]
Close [ʏ]
Open ɜ ʌ [ɔ]
Low æ ɑ

3.1. Vowel Harmony

Elvan phonology incorporates vowel harmony. The three categories used are "light" (front vowels), neutral, and "dark" (back vowels). Vowels tend to retain their roundedness before and after shifting due to vowel harmony. The most common way vowels

Light: æ i ʏ

Neutral: ɜ ʌ ɔ

Dark: ɯ u ɑ

3.2. Palatilization

Some consonant sounds are palatalized based on the following vowel, which can also change due to vowel harmony.

4. orthography

5. Morphosyntax

Elvan has a flexible sentence structure due to its declension system, but typically order is SVO. Endings are formed by a shell and core, which inflect with class and case respectively (section 5.1.). Adjectives may appear before or after a noun depending on type (essential and static, see section 5.2)

5.1. Nouns

5.1.1. Class

Elvan nouns fall into 4 simple classes:

  • Animate

    Animate nouns include most -o stem nouns, animals, people, local gods (such as river and forest gods), etc..

  • Inanimate

    Inanimate nouns include manmade objects, dead things, food, most plants, etc..

  • Semi-Animate

    Semi-animate nouns are less common and contain geographic features, tools, some plants, and water.

  • Aetherial

    Aetherial nouns include things associated with energy like fire and light, ideas and feeling, writing, and magical elements. (Magical/enchanted items will typically fall into the inanimate class.)

5.1.2. Case

Elvan nouns decline for four cases:

  • Nominative

    Typically when the subejct of a sentence

  • Accusative

    Typically when the object of a sentence

  • Ablative

    Used when the noun is moving toward or away from something.

  • Instrumental

    Used when the noun is being used to perform an action, such as a horse or a tool. It annoys me that all of the other ones end with -ive and this one ends in -al, but instrumentive is not a word.

5.1.a. Class-Case chart

Elvan noun endings have two elements: core and shell. The class of a noun dictates the shell, which is typically one or two consonants, and the core is dictated by the case. Shells are typically formed with a sonorant or liquid and a stop, not necessarily in that order, and a shell may or may not contain both.

5.1.b. Examples

5.1.3. Pronouns

5.1.4. Number

Elvan nouns do not decline for number. Instead, there are three words which indicate whether a noun is singular, dual, or plural, which typically appear before the word and adjectives. In some cases, adjectives have an inherent number associated with them, in which case the number word is omitted.

5.1.5. Person

Subject nouns must agree with person. Object nouns are a little more flexible, but also tend to follow this trend.

5.2. Adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions

Elvan has two kinds of adjectives: static and essential. Static adjectives refer to the noun's state; this can be something like ripeness, temperature, position (this kind of adjective includes adposition), etc.. Essential adjective refer to something's essence, like color, age, health, etc.. These categories are not completely consistent; color may be an essential adjective for a ball or a boat, but for vegetation it typically is applied as a static adjective. Age may be an essential adjective when referring to an object or a location, but when referring to a person it is typically an essential adjective. Knowing whether an adjective is static or essential is important because essential adjectives either precede or are prepositions of a noun, while static adjectives are usually postpositions. If you recall in section 3.1, vowel harmony tends to change the sounds after a vowel shift, but less often changes sounds before it. This means that static adjectives typically do not affect vowel harmony and are sometimes affected by it, where essential adjectives can change the pronunciation of a word in some cases.

5.3. Verbs

5.3.1. Agent agreement

5.3.2. Tense

Elves are a long-lived people, and their tense system reflects this. Elvish has two tenses for past and two for future, with one for present. The past and future tenses refer to near past/future and far past/future respectively.

6. lexicon