Síntári

Síntári developed due to inspiration from both Finnish and Basque. It shares characteristics of both languages, such a system of vowel harmony and polypersonal verb conjugation; it is, however, ultimately an a priori conlang. In addition, Síntári sometimes synthesizes features of both Finnish and Basque, as in its tripartite morphosyntactic alignment. Like the languages that inspired it, Síntári is a highly agglutinative language.

Phonology

Phoneme Inventory

Consonants
	Bilabial	Labiodental	Dental	Alveolar	Alveolo-Palatal	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Nasal	m		n			ɲ
Plosive	p b		t d				k g
Affricate				ʦ ʣ	ʨ ʥ
Fricative			θ ð	s z	ɕ ʑ		x ɣ	h
Approximant		ʋ				j
Trill				r
Lateral fricative				ɬ
Lateral approximant			l			ʎ

Vowels
	Front							Back
Close
Short	i y							u
Long	iː yː							uː
Close mid
Short	e ø							o
Long	eː øː							oː
Near open
Short	æ
Long	æː
Open
Short								ɑ
Long								ɑː

Phonemic Length

Consonants, as well as vowels, have long forms. Geminate consonants are written by doubling the letter, while long vowels are written with an acute accent over them. In each case, Síntári contrasts the meaning of long and short vowels and consonants. Being that they are phonemic, there is a difference in meaning between the words halla and hala, which mean fish and air, respectively.

Phonotactics

Síntári is capable of building fairly complex consonant clusters. There can be at most four consonants in the onset, but this does not occur frequently and is limited to /vstr/. The syllable nucleus must be a vowel sound; Síntári does not allow syllabic nasals or liquids to occur. The coda usually ends in a single consonant, as any other consonants accompanying it will be moved to the onset of the following syllable. Exceptions can occur, however, as in a word like roumna, forest, where the [mn] occupies the same syllable.

Syllabification

Síntári divides open syllables into [CV.CV]. As mentioned above, a coda with two consonant sounds will likely be divided. For example, halla divides as [CVC.CV] as would similarly built words like halta, halda, or halka. Syllables that have a cluster of three consonants, such as ístve, love (n.) keep that cluster as the onset of a new syllable. Illustrated, it looks like [V.CCCV].

Stress & Intonation

Síntári regularly stresses the penultimate, or next-to-last, syllable of a word. Since all of the above words have two syllables, the first syllable would be stressed; it would predictably move one syllable to the right if the word took on an extra syllable, perhaps due to it being inflected. Since Síntári is an agglutinative language, words have a tendency to be rather long. In such cases, the primary stress will always fall on the penultimate syllable; a secondary stress will fall every third syllable from the primary stress.

Compound words function slightly differently. The first segment of the compound maintains a regular, primary stress on the penultimate syllable, but the second segment of the compound has a secondary stress on its penult.

Intonation works much the same way in Síntári as it does in English. Declarative sentences and questions formed with a question word have a falling intonation; questions and declarative sentences formed like questions have a rising intonation.

Vowel Harmony

A Venn diagram showing which vowels may appear in a stem.

Síntári has a fairly simple system of vowel harmony. A stem will contain either front vowels or back vowels, and any suffixes attached to that stem must follow its vowel harmony. Síntári's system of vowel harmony has three classes of vowels: front, back, and neutral. The front vowels are Æ, Ø, and Y, while the back vowels are A, O, and U. These vowels will never be seen in the same stem together. The neutral vowels E and I can coexist with either set of vowels; however, if a stem is composed solely of any combination of E and I, front vowel suffixes must follow. Compound words will sometimes mix front and back vowel stems, but even then, each class will stay firmly inside its own word boundary.

Nouns

Number and Case

A speaker can inflect any Síntári noun into one of three grammatical numbers and one of twenty-three grammatical cases. Síntári possesses a singular, a dual, and a plural number. The dual and plural forms are marked with suffixes, while the singular, being the basic form, is denoted by the lack of any number suffix.

The singular functions in Síntári the same way it does in English, with a single exception. Where English would use the plural to express zero of some object, Síntári always uses the singular. The dual always refers to a set of two objects, and unlike in some languages, Síntári's dual forms are not restricted to body parts that come in pairs. The dual also extends to pronominal forms and verb conjugations. Finally, the plural refers to a set of three or more objects.

Síntári's case system employs twenty-three different suffixes to express quite a range of grammatical concepts. These twenty-three cases are divided into groups: the syntactic cases, the locative cases, the temporal cases, and the transitional cases. The intransitive, ergative, accusative, dative, genitive, instrumental, and abessive cases make up the syntactic group. The inessive, illative, elative, lative, adessive, allative, ablative, perlative, subessive, and superessive form the locative group of cases. The temporal class includes the distributive-temporal, antessive, and postessive; the remaining transitional cases include the essive, exessive, and translative.