Amulni grammar

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This article details the grammar of the Amulni language.

öას ốსიოვ (Aiñyna Indákasá)

Amulni is an analytic fusional language with a complex vowel and consonant morphology.

Vocabulary

Amulni is a synthetic language, characterised by a relatively small wordstock that is supplemented by a much wider array of morphemes that achieves a comparatively diverse vocabulary. Its words rely on being combined with certain "standard patterns" of vowel-based morphemes in order to signify anything beyond the most basic of meaning. These patterns are vast in number and highly specialised, with patterns implying animacy, associated motion, aspect, clusivity, evidentiality, mirativity, mood, voice, to some degree as augmentatives or diminutives, and even quasi-adjectival functions, where patterns imply physical or philosophical differences between similar concepts, e.g. "writing", or "library".

Nouns

In their base form, all nouns and verbs exist essentially as key groups of consonants, with many nouns and verbs appearing identical when presented with no context. For example the english word "eat" means to consume "food"; in amulni, the word for eat and food would be the same word. These words then become either nouns or verbs through being combined with specific vowel-morpheme sequences, as well as through their specific placement in sentences.

Noun gender takes the form of animacy, something popularly known to distinguish it from the inflected Mordrasi language with its three article-signified genders of masculine, feminine and neuter.

For nouns, vowel usage dictates variants of a core concept (for example "writing" is given a default vowel sequence, with "text", "book", or "library" and etc. each expressed with different vowel sequences). Nouns are then optionally agglutinated with consonant-based morphemes for possession, location, and number - in addition to any desired describers -, with the vowel usage in the word stems dictating the vowel usage throughout the entire word, that is, as vowel harmony.

Verbs

Verbs function identically to nouns, though they behave in a scrambled and somewhat inverted manner. Although the same morphemes are agglutinated into verbs to indicate number and tense, the vowels in verbs alter to instead establish possession and location. Due to so frequently being used as enclitics to nouns with pre-established context, altered vowels are often left out entirely, with the verbs instead following the vowel harmony of the noun they refer to. Like their noun counterparts, core verb concepts are written with consonants, but derivative concepts are established solely through describers instead of vowel sequences.

Adjectives and adverbs

Adjectives and adverbs exist as identical consonant-based morphemes, being referred to as "describers", and are added to the words they refer to as suffixes, assuming the established vowel pattern of their noun in a process of vowel harmony. Describers are typically rare, and are normally used to direct especially nuanced meaning.

Phonology

Timing

Amulni is a mora-timed language. Most syllables are generally rhythmic and are pronounced monomoraically, however diphthongs (them being ou /oʊ/, ey /eɪ/ and ai /aɪ/) and some vowels, (ah /ɑː/, y /iː/, or u /uː/) are by default perceived and spoken with bimoraic syllables, i.e. at a length of two moras.

Sentence structure

Amulni expressions are typically ordered as subject-verb-object (SVO), however subject-object-verb (SOV) constructions are often used to emphasise the object in question. The language is littered with a vestigial case structure that implies older forms of Amulni were more inflected, something notable in other languages of the Zemlyumir language family.