This is the landing page for information about Aldéril.
Basic Structures
Aldéril is head initial, meaning that the most important word in a phrase is typically the first word, with the following words modifying it. The functional result of this is that the language typically sees nouns come before adjectives, the verb come before the object, and prepositions rather than postpositions. Adverbial phrases typically come at the end of the sentence, and the most important information in a sentence is brought to the beginning using various discourse particles.
The default word order of an Aldéril sentence is subject – verb – object. This order is strictly observed and may only be altered using the aforementioned discourse particles.
Although the basic verbal morphology is fusional, the language is largely analytical. Most of the grammatical features and information is expressed by syntactic relations of words or specific lexical items. There is a large inventory of clitics that encode grammatical information, but do not act strictly as prefixes or suffixes typically would be expected to behave, tending to modify a whole phrase or clause rather than a specific word and remaining in either a phrase initial position or in the second position within a phrase, clause, or sentence.
Animacy and Valency
Nouns in Aldéril are placed into an animacy hierarchy. This is reified in the language in a variety of ways. Adjectives and other modifiers typically must agree with the animacy of the noun they modify, whether it is a human noun, an animate noun, or an inanimate noun. Additionally, the subject of a verb must always be higher in the animacy hierarchy than the object of the verb. Related to this, the subject of a verb must always be definite, and in most cases, the direct object of a verb must be definite. These two rules have led to several valency and voice operations in Aldéril. The inverse voice is used to switch the role of the subject and object, such that the object acts as the agent of a verb while the subject acts as its patient. The antipassive voice allows the speaker to demote the object of the verb to an indefinite or to remove it altogether. Similarly, the passive voice allows the speaker to remove the subject of the sentence. The impersonal voice is used to remove both subject and object, which may be reintroduced in prepositional phrases modifying the verb. The impersonal voice is the only way an indefinite agent may be used.
See the pages below for more detailed discussions of different topics within the language:
For a more complete treatment of the language, you may reference the most current Grammar of the Language. Note that this remains a work in progress, some sections are incomplete and others are missing altogether. As the grammar of the language is filled out, the document will be made more complete until it reaches a more stable completed form.