User:Con quesa/shireroth conlang

This is a public scratch pad for the Shireroth language, or Præta Sxiroþes. The official version thereof, once created and decided upon, will appear on another page in this wiki.

In this grammar sketch, italic text is used to indicate romanized text in Shireroth (or sometimes to indicate English text used to illustrate a linguistic feature of Shireroth). Bold text is used to indicate linguistic terms that may need further definition.

Phonology

Consonant Inventory

	Labial	Dental	Alveolar	Postalveolar/ Palatal consonant	Velar	Glottal
Nasal	m /m/		n /n/
Plosive	p /p/, b /b/		t /t/, d /d/	c /tʃ/, ç /dʒ/	k /k/, ɡ /g/
Fricative	f /f/, v /v/	þ /θ/, ð /ð/	s /s/, z /z/	sx /ʃ/, zx /ʒ/	kx /x/	h /h/
Approximant	xw /ʍ/, w /w/		l /l/	j /j/
Flap			r /ɾ/

Some consonants are written as digraphs, i.e. two separate letters treated as a single unit and used to indicate one sound. The specific letters used have been chosen such that there is no potential for ambiguity between two letters meant to indicate a single sound and two letters representing two separate sounds.

Whenever two consonants appear in a single cell, the one on the left is voiceless (pronounced without vibration of the vocal cords), and the one on the right is voiced (pronounced with vibration of the vocal cords). In English, voicing is the difference between the initial consonants in fine (voiceless) and vine (voiced), or between the final sounds in house used as a noun, and house used as a verb.

p b t d k and g are all sounds found in English, and an English speaker should have no problem dealing with the equivalent sounds found in Shireroth. f v s z and h are also sounds common to both Shireroth and English. Note that in written English voiced sounds are sometimes written the same way as their equivalent voiced sounds - we can see this in house used above, where the final s may represent either a /s/ sound or a /z/ sound. This does not happen in Shireroth - a s always represents an /s/, and a z always represenents a /z/ (we would expect a Shireroth speaker, therefore, to write that English word as "house" and "houze", until he was taught the complexities of English's writing system).

þ and ð represent the voiceless and voiced versions of the fricative sound normally written in English as th, as in thin. The initial sound of "thin", in fact, is a voiceless th, and would be written in Shireroth as þin. In English, the voiced version of that sound also written with a th, as in the pronoun "them". Shireroth, unlike English, writes these two sounds differently; if "them" were a Shireroth word, it would be written ðem.

kx represents /x/, a fricative sound that is not found in English, but is found in German (as the ach-laut, the sound written "ch" in words like "acht".

c and ç represent the sounds that are more traditionally written in English as ch and j, IPA /tʃ/ and /dʒ/. These sounds are written in the Stops row of the table above for convenience, but they are more accurately affricates, which may be thought of as sounds that are a combination of a stop and it's corresponding fricative. This use of the letters c and ç to write these sounds is precisely the opposite of how Turkish writes those same sounds (i.e. a Shireroth c corresponds to a Turkish ç, and vice-versa).

sx and zx represent the sounds written in English as sh, and its voiced equivalent. The voiceless version of the sound appears in words like ship, while the voiced version is the initial sound of the second syllable in words like pleasure or leisure.

r in Shireroth represents a sound not found in English, a tapped r. This sound is found in Spanish (r as opposed to rr). This sound is very similar to, but not exactly the same as, the sound of a t or d pronounced between two vowels in an unstressed syllable in American English (ex. "prattle" or "paddle").

j is used, as in German, to indicate the consonant sound normally written in English as y, as in "yes" or "yellow" (which a Shireroth speaker would want to write as "jes" and "jelo").

xw is a voiceless w, IPA /w̥/, pronounced similarly to how some British speakers of English would pronounce the initial wh of "what" or "which" (as opposed to witch). w is the voiced version of this same sound, and is pronounced identically to the English sound written as w in words like "win" and "worry".

Vowels

	Front	Neutral	Back
High	y	i	u
Mid	ö	e	o
Low	ä	a	å

Shireroth's vowel system cannot be understood without understanding the concept of vowel harmony. Vowel harmony is a phonological process active in the language that restricts certain types of vowels from occuring together in a single word.

Shireroth's vowels are divided into three classes: front vowels, namely y ö and ä; back vowels, u o and å; and neutral vowels, i u and a, for a total of nine distinct vowels in the langauge. The principle of vowel harmony states that a single word may either contain front vowels but no back vowels, or back vowels but no front vowels. The neutral vowels do not participate in vowel harmony, and may occur in all types of words.

(In phonetics, the terms front, central and back are often used to describe vowels based on where in the mouth they are physically articulated. Clearly, the vowel harmony in Shireroth has its basis in the backness and frontness of the vowels, but that is not the whole story. /i/ and /e/, for instance, are phonetically front vowels just like y and ø are, but the former are not affected by vowel harmony and the latter are. The Wikipedia article on vowel harmony gives a more in-depth overview of the linguistic concept, and provides examples of it occuring in several different languages. In fact, the vowel harmony processes in Finnish are quite similar to the ones in Shireroth, owing to their similar vowel inventories.)

While the writing system of English does a reasonably good job representing English's consonants in a straightforward manner, its ways of representing vowels are terrible, and there is no straightforward way of describing Shireroth's vowels in terms of written English vowels. Shireroth has exactly nine vowels written with exactly nine separate letters, and the ways that those letters are used in English should in no way influence a person trying to use them to write Shireroth.

y represents a high front rounded vowel /y/, which is not found in English. This is sound of Finnish yksi, or German über, or French tu. An English speaker can produce this sound by saying the vowel of see, and then rounding their lips without otherwise changing the way the pronounce the vowel.

ö represents a mid front rounded vowel /ø/, which is also not found in English, but exists in Finnish and German in words like ön and Göbbels. A speaker of English can produce this sound by pronouncing an e and rounding their lips as if they were pronouncing an o or u.

æ represents a low front unrounded vowel /æ/, found in English as the vowel sound of pat or cat. The Shireroth word ræd is pronounced almost like the English word rad. In Shireroth, unlike English, this sound can occur at the end of a word. In words containing the vowel a, æ is often pronounced more like an [ɛ], the sound of English "pet" or "set", to maximally distinguish it from a.

i represents a high front unrounded vowel /i/ (here, "front" refers to a phonetic description of the vowel. It is not a "front" vowel for the purposes of vowel harmony). This is the sound of English "pea" or "see", only not generally pronounced as long as the English vowel would be.

e represents a mid front unrounded vowel /e/ which is neutral to vowel harmony. This vowel varies between the English vowel sounds of "pen" and "pain" - and so, we might expect a speaker of Shireroth to have difficulty with those two vowel sounds in English, and mix up words like pet and pain frequently until they were more comfortable with English's different vowel system.

a represents a low central unrounded vowel /a/. This vowel is not found in American English. It is somewhere between æ and å in quality, and is neutral to vowel harmony.

u represents a high back rounded vowel, similar to the English sound in lewd or sue. Some dialects of English pronounce this vowel noticably forward in the mouth, and round it less. This does not happen in Shireroth - the vowel u is always pronounced in the back of the mouth with rounded lips.

o represents a mid back rounded vowel, somewhat similar to the English vowel in low or sew. Note that most dialects of English tend to pronounce this sound as a diphthong, which does not occur in Shireroth.

å represents a low back unrounded vowel /ɑ/. This is the vowel of "cot" and "caught" for English speakers who do not pronounce those two words differently (for instance, most English speakers in western North America).

Owing to vowel harmony, there are many suffixes in Shireroth which have two different forms - one with back vowels, one with front vowels - depending on whether the word the affix is attached to has front or back vowels. For instance, the suffix marking the accusative case is -æ for words with front vowels (so the accusative of ræd is rædæ), but -å for words with back vowels (so the accusative of sxun is sxunå). Suffixes like these which have vowels subject to change under vowel harmony are written like this: -æ/å.

Some affixes which change under vowel harmony do not have pairs of front and back vowels, but instead pairs of neutral and back vowels. For instance, the affix marking the plural accusative is -a/å. For back vowel words, this means that the plural and singular accusatives are identical: sxun (nom), sxunå (acc sg/pl). But front vowel words consequently have different singular and plural accusatives: ræd (nom), rædæ (acc sg.), ræda (acc pl.).

Nouns

Præta nouns are declined for four cases, the nominative, accusative, genitive and prepositional. Nouns are also divided into three genders, masculine, feminine and neuter, which are generally arbitrary.

Noun declension

Præta has several different declension patterns for nouns, which imperfectly align with the gender system.

-C declension

This declension class is used with noun stems ending in a consonant. Almost all such nouns are masculine or neuter, but there are a few feminine ones as well.

Ex. ræd, (m), "house" (front vowel harmony)

	Singular	Plural
Nominative	ræd	rædek
Accusative	rædæ	rædæ
Genitive	rædes	ræðez
Prepositional	ræði	ræðim

In this declension class there is a minor difference between front and back vowel harmony nouns. The accusative singular suffix is -æ/å, while the accusative plural affix is -æ/a. So, nouns with front vowel harmony have identical singular and plural accusative forms (cf. ræd, which has identical singular and plural accusative forms in rædæ, and åtol, whose singular accusative is åtolå and whose plural accusative is åtola).

In this declension also note the presence of consonant weakening (lenition). Here, the d of ræd weakens to a ð due to the presence of an i in the singular and plural prepositional, as well as in the plural genitive (this is due to a historic i which has been dropped). In general, -C class nouns ending in a stop consonant (that is, p b t d k g weaken that consonant to f v þ ð kx j, respectively, in the prepositional and genitive plural cases, before adding the case ending.

-Cpal declension

This declension class is made up of nouns ending in one of the consonants -c, -ç, -sx or -zx. These nouns are exclusively feminine. Historically, these nouns ended in a feminine marking suffix -i, explaining the palatalization. This class is almost entirely made of front vowel harmony nouns.

ex. mec

	Singular	Plural
Nominative	mec	mecim
Accusative	mecel	mecele
Genitive	meces	mecez
Prepositional	meci	mecim

-o/ö declension

Much like how -a is a characteristic vowel of the feminine gender in Spanish, -o/ö is the equivalent vowel in Præta. Almost all nouns ending in -o/ö are in the feminine gender, and they decline thusly.

	Singular	Plural
Nominative	læjö	læjöm
Accusative	læje	læjem
Genitive	læjys	læjyz
Prepositional	læji	læjim

-u/-y declension

-u/y declension nouns are all either masculine or feminine, lacking neuters entirely. Generally, nouns ending in -y (i.e front-vowel harmony nouns) are feminine, while nouns ending -u (back-vowel harmony nouns) are masculine, but there are a few exceptions to this tendency. The presence of the -w blocks consonant lenition in the Genitive plural, but lenition still occurs in the prepositional singular and plural if the noun stem has one of the affected consonants.

ex. jatu, (m) sheep

	Singular	Plural
Nominative	jatu	jatwek
Accusative	jatwel	jatwele
Genitive	jatwes	jatwez
Prepositional	jaþi	jaþim

ex. harsy, (fem), "prostitute"

	Singular	Plural
Nominative	harsy	harswem
Accusative	harswel	harswele
Genitive	harswes	harswez
Prepositional	harsxi	harsxim

-V declension

This declension class is used for nouns whose stems end in a vowel (apart from feminine -o/ö nouns and masculine -u nouns). These nouns are generally feminine, but some masculine and neuter nouns occur in this declension as well.

ex. Præta (fem), "speech"

	Singular	Plural
Nominative	præta	prætan
Accusative	prætan	prætane
Genitive	prætanes	prætanse
Prepositional	prætani	prætanim

-n declension

-n declension nouns are either feminine or neuter. No masculine noun may occur in this declension class.

Ex. sxun (n.), "spike" (back vowel declension)

	Singular	Plural
Nominative	sxun	sxunk
Accusative	sxunå	sxunåk
Genitive	sxunz	sxunsk
Prepositional	sxuni	sxunim

-t declension

This class of nouns is made up of nouns whose nominative singular ends in a -t. This class is exclusively made up of neuter nouns. While it is not always easy to determine the gender of a Præta noun by knowing it's form, any noun ending in a -t in the nominative singular can be assumed to be neuter and decline according to this pattern.

Ex. zxelt, "leg"

	Singular	Plural
Nominative	zxelt	zxelk
Accusative	zxelæ	zxelæk
Genitive	zxeles	zxelesk
Prepositional	zxeli	zxelim

Vocative case

Præta has a marginal vocative case, only used with personal names and some nouns used as titles (ex. king, general). The vocative is also largely restricted to polite and formal language, although some vocative constructions, especially with personal names, have a prejorative meaning.

The vocative is formed very simply and regularly. For nouns whose stem ends in a consonant (i.e all nouns except neuters ending in -t), regardless of declension class, the vocative is formed by adding an -e to the noun stem. So, the vocative of kajsar, "king" is kajsare, "O King". Nouns whose stems end in a vowel have a vocative identical to the nominative, except for -t neuters, which drop the t. The vocative of sxulomåt, "duke" (which, recall, is a neuter -t noun with a vowel stem), has a vocative identical to its own stem: sxulomǻ, "O duke".

The determiner

In Præta, most modifiers come after the noun (ex. læjö byraza til si sxikxi, "a long road to the city", lit. road long to the city"). However, there is a class of modifiers to the noun, termed determiners, that can appear immediately before the noun. This class of determiners includes the article (se, "the"), numbers (sof, "two"; håpsa, "first"), and certain quantifiers (meci, "every, all"; nul, "no, not any").

In general, only one determiner can appear in the position immediately before the noun at a time. So, in order to modify a noun with multiple determiners, one of them is placed in the initial position (generally, this is an article), and the other one is placed after the noun, just as if it were a normal adjective or other modifier. For instance, "two roads" in Præta is sof læjöm, but "the two roads" is sum læjöm sof. sof, "two" is treated as an adjective even thought

Personal Pronouns

Præta has nine personal pronouns:

	Singular	Plural
1st Person	æj	sym
2nd person	desæ	desæn
3rd person
Masculine	þun	senk
Feminine	þo	senk
Neuter	sxå	senk
Human	sen	senk

Præta's 2nd person pronoun declines like a regular -æ ending noun. desæn is the regular plural of that class of nouns, and the other cases are formed regularly as well. 'Desæ' seems to be a loan from Yardistani or a closely-related langauge, explaining its regularity. The other personal pronouns seem to be native and, as might be expected, decline irregularly.

The masculine, feminine and neuter third person pronouns are used only for inanimates, and agree in gender with the grammatical gender of their antecedent. Humans and some animals (generally pets, working animals, or otherwise easily-personifiable creatures) are referred to in the third person singular by a separate pronoun, sen. This pronoun is historically a 3rd person plural pronoun, and its application to singular human antecedents is similar to the phenomenon of singular-they in English.

Præta has taken this process further than English has, however; sen is the default pronoun for referring to a human in the 3rd person singular, and þo or þun can only be used with 3rd person human antecedents to specifically call attention to their gender. sxå is never used for a human antecedent, though it is occasionally used with animals. "That man" or "that woman" would be better translations than "he" or "she" for Præta's third person gendered pronouns used with a human antecedent.

As a result of its historical origin, sen has plural subject or object agreement on the verb, even when referring to a singular human antecedent, while þun, þo and sxå have singular agreement. In the plural, all the 3rd person pronouns merge as senk, and take plural agreement.

Pronoun Declension

First person

	Singular	Plural
Nominative	æj	sym
Accusative	hån	son
Genitive	hin	von
Prepositional	hi	vi

Second person

The second person pronoun declines like a regular -V declension noun.

	Singular	Plural
Nominative	desæ	desæn
Accusative	desæn	desæne
Genitive	desænes	desænse
Prepositional	desæni	desænim

Third Person

þun - third person masculine pronoun

	Singular	Plural
Nominative	þun	senk
Accusative	þån	sxik
Genitive	þono	sxono
Prepositional	þi	sxi

Verb Morphology

Præta verb morphology is something akin to Basque; that is, only a small minority of verbs are inflectable, and most inflectional information is actually expressed through periphrastic verb constructions. Præta does have some encoding of both subject and object on the verb - the subject is encoded by a relatively sparse set of personal endings (comparable to German), while the object of (transitive or benefactive) verbs is encoded by a set of prefixes. Historically, these prefixes are actually politeness prefixes, with polite forms generalized to always refer to 2nd person objects and plain forms generalized to 1st person objects (comparable to Japanese, which has, for instance, ageru for "give (to someone else)" vs. kureru, "give (to me)" ).

Because there are so few verbs which inflect, and because those verbs are so common, these verbs are basically irregular. But once the irregular conjugation of those few verbs is learned, every verbal construction in the language (except the simple past, which is completely regular) works the same way.

Verbs also have two participles, the imperfect participle and the perfect participle, as well as a general nominalized form, the gerund, which fulfills many of the same roles that the infinitive and gerund (i.e. the -ing form) do in English. The citation form is actually the 3rd person singular form of the verb, rather than the infinitive as is common for romance languages. In Præta the infinitive is always formed very regularly, whereas knowing the 3rd person singular form is enough to know how to fully conjugate the verb.

Simple Past

The simple past tense is the only tense that is directly expressed on regular verbs - all other tenses are formed with inflected (and generally irregular) auxuiliary verbs (like English "is coming", "will be seeing", etc.). There are two conjugations of verbs with consonant stems, and only one conjugation for verbs with vowel stems.

Vowel stem verbs: ex. torku, "turn, twist",

Verb form	Pronoun
torkun	æj
torku	desæ
torku	þun/sxå
torkult	sym
torkut	desæt
torkut	sen/senk

Consonant stem conjugation I example: kart, "to run" (front vowel), dång, "to burn, set fire" (back vowel harmony)

Verb form	Pronoun
karta/dånga	æj
kart/dång	desæ
karti/dångi	þun/sxå
kartyt/dångut	sym
kartyt/dångut	desæt
kartyt/dångut	sen/senk

Consonant stem conjugation II example: cæzöti, "to chase" (front harmony), muçuri, "to kill" (back harmony)

Verb form	Pronoun
cæzöta/muçura	æj
cæzöt/muçur	desæ
cæzöti/muçuri	þun/sxå
cæzötit/muçurit	sym
cæzötit/cæzötit	desæt
cæzötit/muçurit	sen/senk

For vowel-stem verbs, the personal endings are: æj -n, desæ -0, þun/sxå -0, sym -lt, desæt -t, sen/senk -t. For consonant stem verbs of the first conjugation, they are: æj -a, desæ -0, þun/sxå -0, sym -yt/ut, desæt -yt/ut, sen/senk -yt/ut. Of the second conjugation, they are: æj -a, desæ -0, þun/sxå -i, sym -it, desæt -it, sen/senk -it.

It is easy to tell if a consonant-stem verb is in the 1st or 2nd conjugation by knowing whether the 3rd person singular has no ending or -i, since verbs are cited by their 3rd person singular form. There is a slight possibility of confusion with vowel-stem verbs which happen to end in -i, but those are very rare.

Participle and Infinitive forms

The participle and infinitive forms are very important, because they form the basis for all the other tenses.

There are two types of participle forms, the imperfect participle and the perfect participle. Different auxiliary verbs require the main verb to be in the imperfect or perfect form in order to form particular tenses. The infinitive is used with other auxiliary verbs, and is also used to form the simple nominalization of a verb (just like how in English we can say "To err is human" or "Running away from your problems is bad").

The 2 types of consonant-stem conjugation don't matter for forming the infinitive and participle forms, the endings only differ between consonant-stem and vowel-stem verbs.

	Vowel-stem (ex. kartu)	Consonant-stem (ex. dång (back vowel), kart (front vowel))
Imperfect Participle	kartu-ni	dång-i
Perfect Participle	kartu-z	dång-åz (kart-æz)
Infinitive	kartu-ça	dång-oça (kart-öça)

Simple Present

The simple present is formed using one of three auxiliary verbs - zaça (intransitive and 3rd person obj) giça (1st person object) and kuçå (2nd person object) - plus a main verb in its imperfect participle form. The simple present is much like the english be-progressive (as in "I am seeing", "You're running", "We're playing a game") in both its meaning and the way the construction is formed - you can think of the imperfect participle as basically the same as the -ing form of an English verb, and zaça, giça and kuçå as different forms of the "to be" verb.

How do you decide which of the three auxiliary verbs to use? It depends on the object of the whole verb construction. Intransitive verbs (verbs without an object, like "run", "think", "fly") and verbs with a 3rd person object (like in "I'm seeing a cow", "I'm eating some pie", "You were shoving him roughly into a pile of dung") use zaça. Verbs with a 2nd person object use kuçå - "I saw you in the garden", "The monster attacked you", "Don't you kill yourself!" and verbs with a 1st person object use giça ("I saw myself in the mirror", "They took us to the party"). In all cases it doesn't matter whether the object is singular or plural, only whether it is 1st, 2nd or 3rd person.

As befitting very common grammatical function words, all three of these auxiliary verbs are highly irregular. Their conjugation pattern is given below. Note that the infinitive forms of these verbs are irregular - they are not predictable from knowing the form of the 3rd person singular like with most verbs, and so have to be listed separately.

zaça, 3rd-person-objective auxiliary

Verb form	Pronoun
za	æj
o	desæ
za	þun/sxå
zån	sym
zån	desæt
zån	sen/senk

It is very common for the form za æj, "I am (doing something)" to be contracted to zæj.

giça, 1st-person-objective auxiliary

Verb form	Pronoun
gel	æj
gy	desæ
gil	þun/sxå
çi	sym
çi	desæt
çi	sen/senk

kuçå, 2nd-person-objective auxiliary

Verb form	Pronoun
kuz	æj
ke	desæ
kuzå	þun/sxå
kåz	sym
kåz	desæt
kåz	sen/senk

It is very common for the 3rd person singular form of this verb to be reduced to ku: ku þun and ku sxå instead of the full kuzå þun and kuzå sxå.

Prepositions

Præta uses prepositions to indicate certain types of relationships, often spatial, between objects. Further, some verbs require complements of a prepositional phrase of a particular preposition.

að - translated as "of" or "from", used primarily to indicate direction from which movement has occured: Hjalpta æj að se ræði, I walked away from the house.

Syntax

Præta has Verb-Subject-Object (VSO) word order. More generally, Præta is typologically a head-initial language - that is, a language in which modifiers tend to come after the constituent they modify. So, in Præta adjectives follow nouns, genitives and relative clauses follow nouns, there are prepositions instead of postpositions, etc.

Vocabulary

At this time, only a very incomplete list, of course. This is mostly just to have some vocabulary to play around with when making example sentences.

sxun (m. noun) spike,nail
ræd (m. noun) house
jor (adv) yesterday
læjö (f. noun) road, path
mec (f. noun) fire
hys (f. noun) person
måna (adj) male
odmåna (adj) female
pike (f. noun) sword
traum (n. noun) journey
sult (n. noun) ocean
æksel (m. noun) arm, metaphorically weapon
zxelt (n. noun) leg
sxulomåt (n. noun) duke
jatu (m. noun) sheep
til (preposition) to, until
sikx (n. noun) city
åtol (m. noun) island
waçhörsy (f. noun) parliament, council
waçet (n. noun) country, land