Jorayn
| Jorayn | |
|---|---|
| Pronounced: | /ʒɔrɐjn/ |
| Timeline and Universe: | contact with cree, french and then english |
| Species: | Human |
| Spoken: | Manitoba |
| Total speakers: | 1.01 |
| Writing system: | Joranic / romanization |
| Genealogy: | none |
| Typology | |
| Morphological type: | inflecting, agglutinative |
| Morphosyntactic alignment: | Nominative-accusative |
| Basic word order: | VOS |
| Credits | |
| Creator: | Matthew Turnbull |
| Created: | ~2003 |
The language
Jorayn is a language that I am in the process of creating on a purely for the heck of it basis, as a personal artlang. It is the second language I have ever worked on, and the first one that really ever got anywhere.
some grammatical overview
Jorayn is a VOS, prepositional language that has quite a bit of case marking and complicated verbs with aspect tense and evidentiality on some verbs. Jorayn is a pro-drop language(It often does not state a pronoun that is evident from context or other grammatical cues).
Orthography
vowels :
| orthography | quality |
|---|---|
| i | ɨ |
| a | ɐ |
| o | ɔ |
| u | u |
| ii | i |
| e | ɛ |
| é | e |
Consonants
| orthography | quality |
|---|---|
| p | p |
| t | t |
| k | k |
| f | f |
| th | θ |
| s | s |
| sh | ʃ |
| ts | ts' |
| kka | k' |
| kko | k'w |
| r | r |
| rk | R |
| rrk | Rr |
| l | l |
| w | w |
| y | j |
| gn | ɲ |
| n | n |
| m | m |
| b | b |
| d | d |
| g | g |
| z | z |
| j | ʒ |
the real grammar section
Pronoun system
Jorayn is a pro-drop language, which drops all subject pronouns, unless emphasis is desired, object pronouns are very rarely dropped.
Jorayn has only one subject pronoun, which declines for the following things :
- animacy
- number
- person
- sexuality
- case
- The inanimate pronouns are jii(1SG) tii(2SG) and lii(3SG), which pluralize via the normal rules to form ja, ta, la.
- The animate pronouns are as follows
- Heterosexual : jor, tor, mor -> jur, tur, mur
- Bisexual : jorrk, torrk, morrk -> jurrk, turrk, murrk
- Homosexual : cor, dor, por -> cur, dur, pur
- the pronouns follow the normal case derivations outlined in thier respective sections
notes on the pronouns - The sexuality marking is a diachronic result of the reassignment of a larger more elaborate system the included case, the plurals were reassigned to the bisexual and the singular objective became the homosexual pronouns; While this change was coming about I debated simply scraping the "extra" pronouns, but realized that since Jorayn is prodrop it would be pretty easy to hide one's sexuality in case you were uncomfortable with someone knowing, although the conculture that speaks the language wouldn't care one way or another, so the sexuality marking stayed.
- The person marking on the inanimate pronouns comes from stories where inanimate things talk and to things, they will refer to themselves, and others will refer to them with these pronouns. A good example is the word for thankyou, which has a form for each second person pronoun: maniimotii, maniimota, maniimotor, maniimotur ... ect
Verb forms and conjugations
Jorayn has at least three verb forms, which are very distinct from one another, and share some, but not all of their conjugations.
The stative verb
The stative verb of Jorayn is used for two main things, adjectives and for a very few actions. Many of these adjectival verbs are derived from corresponding nouns. The mode of derivation is as follows.
If the nouns ends in the form of CVC it will become CaCe, which is the verbal infinitive
If the noun ends in VCC it will become VCaCe, or on rare occasion aCCe.
noun : lur - blueness; stative verb : lare - to be blue.
noun : nars - stupidity; stative verb : narase - to be stupid.
The active verb
The active verb of Jorayn has two main verb forms, one very common and one very rare.
All active verbs end with -tyo.
ex. actualized verb : duftyo - to fall down (physically)
The active verbs all describe actions that are not states, actions that are considered states are described by actualized stative verbs.
The actualized stative verb
The actualized stative verb describes actions that are seen as states, without any real beginning or ending, I'm really not sure if this is a tellicity distinction or not, but it may well be so.
All acctualized verbs end in -arre in the infinitive
ex. actualized stative verb : morantharre - to live, to be alive
The stative & actualized stative verb conjugation
All of the conjugations below are for the verb lare, to be blue.
| 1st | 2nd | 3rd | 4th | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| singular | lare | lara | laro | laré |
| dual | lere | lera | lero | leré |
| quintuple | lore | lora | loro | loré |
| plural | lure | lura | luro | luré |
The rest of the conjugations of the verb are based on the present tense, which as you can see is made by the permutation of the end vowels.
For a CVcv stem the V denotes number of the subject (1:a, 2:e, 5:o, 3,4,6,7...:u)
and the v denotes the person of the subject (1st:e, 2nd:a, 3rd:o, 4th:é)
The other tenses and aspects and moods are formed thusly, with lare as an example:
Indicative mood
durative aspect
Futur tense : _n - laren : it will be blue
Present tense : _∅ - lare : it is blue
Past tense : _m - larem : it was blue
Imperfect aspect
This is used to decribe actions that began in the past, which continued almost to the present, or which will soon come to an end. The tenses denote how far back in the past the action started.
Far : _né - larené : it's been blue ever since I can remember (but now it isn't, or it won't be for long)
Past : _na - larena : it's been blue for a while (but now it isn't, or it won't be for long)
Close : _nii - larenii it's only been blue for a bit, like a couple weeks max. (but now it isn't, or it won't be for long)
habitual aspect
non-past : Ṽ - larẽ : it's always blue (it's blue everyday, or every couple of days, no chance of that changing soon)
past : _mṼ - laremẽ : it was always being blue (at least once every couple days)
Eternal aspect
non-time : Ṽa - larẽa : it doesn't matter when it started being blue, but it seems like it has been forever, even when it wasn't, and it will be forever, or at least till i'm dead and gone.
Other moods
the optative
present : _r
futur : _ra
A note to make sure of is that underlying NASAL+r clusters manifest as r+NASAL
some usage examples of the optative, which is derived from the indicative.
- koineder - I want to be together
- koinedera - I will want us to be together
- koinederna (underlying *koinedenra) - I want us to be together in the futur.
- mortharrer - I want to be dying!
- mortharrer - I want to die!
The Imperative mood
The specific imperative is formed by reduplication of the ultimate syllable.
- vrminadada : come here! from vrminada : you are comeing here.
The general imperative is formed by addition of _mé, it is used mostly in exclamations, it's like asking the universe to do something you know it won't. I can only think of one example from English.
- mortharromé jor - kill me now! (no one really expects someone to kill them when they say this)
