Language summary

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)