Vallés

Vallés, also known as Granvallés, is spoken on an alternate-history Earth and derives from Vulgar Latin, somewhere in the southwestern portion of Europe. The precise location of the speaker community and the details of that world's history (at least for the last two millennia) are still largely unknown.

The language is relatively conservative, compared to the romance languages *here* and probably to the others *there* as well. This may be due to a stronger Latin influence. It resembles Iberian Romance in some respects and Italian in others and also Gallo-Romance.

Orthography and Phonology

Vallés is written using the basic latin alphabet plus the letter Æ (for which AE may be substituted). The letters K, W, and Y are used only when writing foreign names. There are four diacritical marks used: grave, acute, circumflex, and breve. Except for the breve, these are used prosodically.

For a romance language, Vallés has more than the normal number of sounds. There may be as many as thirty-one consonant phonemes (not counting approximants) and fifteen vowel phonemes (not counting length); the phoneme status of a few of these is questionable. Five of the vowels are nasal. Accentuation includes pitch as well as stress. A stressed syllable has either a high tone (this can't occur in the ultima) or a high-to-low tone (this can't occur in the antepenult). Any following syllables have low tone, and any preceding syllables have a low or medium tone. Intonation may be modified in questions.

The orthography is not very phonemic. In addition to the use of digraphs, there are phonemes written more than one way and letters used for more than one phoneme. This, of course, is typical of romance languages.

Morphosyntax

The word order is typical of romance languages.

Declension

Case isn't distinguished, except in some of the pronouns. The major declensional categories are gender (masculine or feminine) and number (singular or plural), with noun modifiers agreeing. Certain pronominals have "abstract" forms and interrogative pronouns distinguish human, non-human, and situational rather than masculine and feminine. There are definite articles (which contract with several of the prepositions), indefinite articles (in the singular), and partitive articles. The first three numbers decline for gender, with the masculine and feminine forms of "three" being identical.

Plurals are mainly formed by adding -S or -ES. There are a few oddities, such as vowel lowering before R in final syllables. One peculiarity is that dictionaries prefer to cite the feminine singular of adjectives rather than the masculine; this is because those that end in -A drop that to form the masculine singular (mostly) while those that don't have the same form for both.

Only a few words have synthetic comparatives and superlatives, with the adverbs PLUS "more" and MENS "less" used otherwise. There's a suffix -ISSEM called superlative, but it has only an "absolute" use. Adjectives can be made into adverbs by putting MENT after them (as a separate word).

Conjugation

Verbs have four major conjugations. A lot of verbs are irregular, mainly in stem formation.

Finite verbs have inflection for the following combinations of aspect, mood, and tense: present indicative, imperfect indicative, future indicative, preterite indicative, present subjunctive, past subjunctive, conditional, and imperative. All of these further inflect for person and number, except that the imperative has only 2nd person forms.

The non-finite verb forms are the infinitive, gerund, supine, present participle, and perfect participle; the last two are adjectives and the perfect participle has the same stem as the supine, while the supine and gerund are indeclinable forms used in constructing compound verbs. The infinitive is also indeclinable. Passives are periphrastic.

Unstressed object pronouns are clitics following non-finite verbs and imperatives, but preceding other finite verbs.

Vocabulary

Most of the vocabulary comes from Latin, either inherited directly from Vulgar Latin, or borrowed later on from Classical Latin. The most peculiar thing about this is that the scholars who introduce the latter kind into the language attempt to modify them according to the changes that would have happened had they been inherited.