Cenyani grammar reference

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Adjectives (and adverbs)

Positioning of adjectives and adverbs relative to their respective phrases as well as construction of complex phrases is described in syntax. This page is primarily concerned with inflection.

Adjectives in Cenyani are very straightforward, but are nevertheless more complicated than in English. There are two major differences between English and Cenyani adjectives:

Other than that, adjectives really aren’t very complicated at all. Adjectives can be detached from the noun they modify, too, to form predicative adjectives (“her scales were green”) or to function as nominal/substantial adjectives (“he was in love with the tall one”). Rules for how to do that are below.

Adverbs are, if possible, even simpler; so simple, in fact, that their usage rules have been given only only two paragraphs.


Comparison

As mentioned above, whereas English adjectives only have three degrees of comparison (“good”, “better”, “best”), there are six degrees of comparison in Cenyani. They are:

Positive (pos.):
this is the base form of the adjective, e.g. “big”, “good”, “sexy”, etc. It is used in the same way as the English equivalent, including being used with adjectives which cannot logically be compared (like “dead”; it’s not possible to be “more dead” than someone else, unless something highly irregular is going on).
Comparative (cmp.):
this form is equivalent to English “more ‹adjective›”, e.g. “bigger”, “better”, “sexier”. It is used in comparisons, where one object is more something than some other object. It can be used both in explicit comparisons – “My tail is longer than yours” –, or in implicit comparisons – “Maybe, but my wings are bigger” (implicitly: than yours).
Superlative (sup.):
this form corresponds to English “most ‹adjective›”, e.g. “biggest”, “best”, “sexiest”. The superlative indicates that whatever it is being applied to is to the highest degree of something either among a specific collection or among all similar objects. Unlike English, the superlative is used even if comparing only two objects, e.g. “his car is the biggest of the two”.
Reductive (red.):
while English may lack this feature in grammar, there are still ways of expressing it: the reductive form translates roughly to “a little ‹adjective›” or “slightly ‹adjective›”. It indicates that whatever the adjective is modifying has qualities that the adjective describes without necessarily being entirely like that. Come to think of it, the colloquial English suffix “-ish” serves a similar purpose; saying that “that girl was cute-ish” means that she was sorta kinda cute but maybe not extremely much so; she was a little cute, sure, but not that cute.
Anticomparative (a-cmp.):
whereas the comparative expresses the idea of “more”, the anticomparative expresses the opposite – “less”. Note that this form does not negate the meaning of the adjective; “big” does not become “small” or anything like that. It merely expresses that something is as the adjective describes, but to a lesser degree than something else is. Saying someone is less attractive than another does not mean they are unattractive; it merely means there’s someone else who happens to be more attractive.
Antisuperlative (a-sup.):
I’m going to make the description of this form as short as possible: antisuperlative is to superlative what anticomparative is to comparative. That’s all there’s to it.


Rules of usage

Case agreement

As mentioned above, Cenyani adjectives have to agree in case with the noun or noun phrase they modify, according to the inflection patterns below. Noun cases are described in nouns.

The only oddity worth mentioning is that nouns in the vocative case have nominative adjectives. Other than that, Cenyani adjectives are so straightforward that I swear it makes me feel as if I’ve forgotten to mention some small but important detail.

Oh yes! Predicate adjectives – as in “her tail was long and muscular” – do not inflect for case; they are all treated as if they were in the nominative. Also note that the inflection of an adjective never depends on the grammatical number of the modified noun.

Independence

Higher up on the page somewhere, I mentioned that Cenyani adjectives can be separated from the nouns they modify in order to form nominal/substantial adjectives, such as “my boyfriend is the tall one”. Creating nominal/substantial adjectives is rather easy in Cenyani: if the adjective ends in a vowel, the nominative form plus a suffix -x is used, and if it ends in a consonant, the base nominative form is used without any additional suffix; this form is then inflected like a normal noun. The only differences between nouns and nominal/substantial adjectives is that adpositions used on such adjectives must always be detached. See adpositions for more details.

The case and number of a nominal/substantial adjective is always expressed in the noun suffix appended to the word; the base adjective itself is always in its nominative form. For example, the sentence “I like the green one” in Cenyani is Möšci ä rimaxum, where rima is “green” (specifically a kind of dark, foresty green). Since it ends in a vowel, -x is first added to it, to make it a nominal/substantial adjective, followed by the definite singular accusative suffix -um.

Nominal/substantial adjectives can be formed from adjectives of all six degrees of comparison: the -x is placed on the inflected adjective form, after any comparison suffix.

Adverbs

There are two basic kinds of adverbs: those that are derived from adjectives or other words, and those that are not. Those adverbs which are derived from adjectives are derived thus: if the adjective ends in a vowel, a -t is affixed to the adjective; this is also done if it ends in a consonant and if and only if phonological constraints allow the addition of a -t to the end of the word. For more information about the phonological constraints of Cenyani, see the orthography & phonology page. If a -t cannot be affixed to the adjective, no other modification is carried out, and the only thing identifying the word as an adverb is the context, and the minor change in intonation.

Adverbs which modify an adjective are placed directly in front of it; adverbs which modify a verb, on the other hand, can be placed more freely. See syntax for more details. Most adverbs can also be compared just like adjectives: the suffixes used are exactly the same as those for consonant-final adjectives. Note that while English omits the adverbial -ly when the adverb is compared, Cenyani still requires the -t to be present during adverb comparison.


Inflection patterns

The inflection of an adjective depends on what it ends in: vowel or non-syllabic consonant. (Adjectives may not end in syllabic consonants.) Almost all adjectives end in a vowel, and the inflection pattern of consonant-final adjectives is much simpler and straight-forward.

Vowel-final
pos.comp.sup.red.a-cmp.a-sup.
nom. --li-ša-m-lim-šam
acc. -c-cil-caš-cim-cilim-cašam
dat. -t-til-taš-tim-tilim-tašam
exp. -r-ril-raš-rim-rilim-rašam
Consonant-final
pos.comp.sup.red.a-cmp.a-sup.
all cases --il-aš-im-ilim-ašam