Aelatha/Nouns

Nouns
Nouns inflect to include case, gender and noun class as well as take a prefix and an infix for formality.

Noun infinitive
A word's root, called the noun infinitive, controls the semantic meaning but can rarely work alone. A noun infinitive has an inherent gender as well.

There are cases where the noun infinitive will be in a gender other than its inherent gender. The cases include when it is in the possessed case and occasionally when it acts as a verb.

Noun gender

 * Main: Vowel harmony in Aelatha
 * See also: Aelathan Phonology

A noun's gender refers to the vowel harmony declension it follows. All inflections on a noun or other part of speech must agree with it in gender. Three genders exist--neuter, masculine and feminine--none of which can be deciphered through the noun infinitive.

The table at the right demonstrates the pattern in which vowels change to agree in gender. "Á", by example, changes to "a" for the neuter, "o" for the masculine and "u" in the feminine. By contrast, "A" remains the same for all genders.

In its infinitive form, nouns aren't declined to meet vowel harmony. Therefore, the gender of each noun needs to be memorized.

Noun formality
Aelatha maintains a high degree of formality by using prefixes and infixes for polite and honorific value. The prefix "a-", called "polite a" comes from the word ac, an archaic dual gender speech word meaning god. It is added to show politeness and respect toward the listener and toward everything in the sentence by suggesting that they all "belong to god" or are "godly, and therefore good-willed."

Formality is also expressed by having a high level of vagueness, thus word drop and pronouns are considered extremely formal.

Polite A
It is said that all words begin with the vowel "a" in Aelatha. This however is false. "A" is an honorific and the only one placed at the beginning of a word to make it polite. Polite a can be dropped to make the word casual or pejorative or to mark it otherwise as an expletive though it is viewed much harsher than dropping other honorifics. Polite a is rarely dropped from proper nouns due to this.

Dropping polite a from a word that would already begin with a vowel is easily visible when that vowel is a or i. Words beginning with a- are written as ae- when adding polite a, and words beginning with i- are written as ai-. When words begin with e-, they are written as ane- and may be confused with ne- words. There’s no definite way to distinguish them and their impolite forms must be memorized. Likewise, dropping polite a from some words results in vowel-less words or consonant clusters that cannot exist such as aþ to þ or and to nd, this is usually do to the contraction of a following e or i.


 * Aþ > þe
 * And > nid

Colloquially, the polite a is dropped from verbs, modifiers and the tempus in spoken language. Dropping it from the other parts of speech however is always viewed as marking that word colloquially or pejoratively.

Honorifics
Honorifics are formal infixes (or suffixes, if applicable) placed directly after the noun and before the noun's class ending.

While they are not often found in common nouns, they appear as an integral part of any noun they appear in. The proper noun, however, becomes pejorative when dropping the honorific title, showing the speaker's disdain for the person, place or thing.

Honorifics have a wide range in meaning. There are set honorifics for someone who is a teacher, a bachelor, engaged, divorced, the brother of the speaker, the brother of the listener, a child, and so on. A large number of honorifics deal with a person's familial or social relationship with another person, though many exist as amelioratives or pejoratives, as markers of a person's talents or careers or as personality traits. Because the honorifics have such varying meanings, a person's name is said to change a few times in his or her life.

Contrarily, there are some honorifics that can be kept throughout one's life. These honorifics usually detail something unchangeable about the nouns they modify.

Word drop
Aelatha is a pro-word drop language. Some words can be inferred from the context and dropped from the phrase though some may not. In the right context, the most complex of phrases can be summed up by the use of just the verb's tempus and the modal. Word drop is viewed as a formal practice, used in schools, newspapers and religious ceremonies as well as in business and legislature. The idea is that the more words in a sentence, the more informal it sounds. A common saying in Aelatha translates as "Only casual friends are chatty." This is true so much so that speaking to older relatives such as parents, uncles and aunts, grandparents and oftentimes siblings makes use of word drop.

Noun case
The case indicates the grammatical function of the noun in the sentence. Aelatha has at least 24 cases. The uninflected, dictionary case of the noun is the vocative case. All nouns are declined from this case.

All verbs are transitive and may receive direct objects. The accusative case is the case used for direct objects for some verbs though verbs receive objects in a case specific to the verb in question.

Most cases are inflected at the head of the noun, though the vocative and the genitive are inflected alternatively.

Genitive case
The genitive case serves the purpose of indicating the possessive form of a noun as well as, while in the genitive of the vocative, distinguishing which nouns are acting as the subject and verb of the sentence. The noun class at the tail of the noun is taken away and replaces the noun class of the object of the genitive. Its object then must agree with the genitive in gender (vowel harmony). The object of the genitive is said to be in the possessed case ( POSS ).
 * Aferias (flower, n.gender) and Aptius (petal, f.gender) yield Afer aptias (a flower's petal, n.gender, aelsjonoþ)
 * Alessias (flower, n.gender) and Anechios (petal, m.gender) yield Ales anechias (a flower's petal, n.gender, aelvuþ))

Because the genitive requires that its object agrees with it and not vice versa, the genitive and its object are often treated as compound words in some dialects. It is common in eastern dialects to hyphenate the genitive and its object, while in the northern dialects, the words are crammed together to form a single, larger word.

Verbs, being nouns that are acting in the possessed case (of the vocative), follow this phenomenon as well by attaching themselves to the subject in some dialects. The tempus then attaches to the end to create a three-part compound. The tempus takes an apostrophe to show that it does not agree in gender with the rest of the compound in the eastern dialects. When this happens, the hyphen is dropped between the noun and the verb. In the northern dialects however, the tempus does agree with the compound in gender and the apostrophe becomes optional.

When a genitive is used on words in the other case, it must take that case's prefix. In a double genitive compound such as "a friend's mother's car" where two nouns are in the genitive case in English, only the first will appear to be so in Aelatha. This is because the first genitive requires that the word it modify (the second genitive) drop its noun class from the sentence and agree with it in gender. The final noun in a multiple genitive series is made optional to agree in gender with its modifier because its modifier is being modified itself. The final noun in this case rarely, if ever, drops its noun class and agrees with its modifier's gender in the written language or when the final noun itself is the verb's tempus.

Noun class
Nouns are separated into different groups called noun classes. These classes represent different groups of things the noun can belong to and correspond to the gendered nouns of Indo-European languages. The noun's class ending tells which group of words the noun belongs to. The groupings can range from vague and broad to detailed and specific. Common nouns fall mostly into the correct group, though several groups are irregular, having taken words from noun groups that fall between Middle Aelatha and modern Aelatha. The word for house, by example, ends in -attís, the noun class for buildings and structures.

In the table below, all examples are aelsjonoþ.


 *  1: Nouns in these categories are irregular, receiving nouns from fallen noun classes 

Noun classes with irregular groupings usually have incorrectly grouped words in a regular pattern. By example, many words from the "-ixhánt" (fire, smoke and heat) noun class fell into the destructive things or the air, wind and temperature noun classes. Likewise, all word from the "-adíð" (celestial bodies) noun class fell into the "-ád" (magical) noun class.

Proper nouns do not follow noun gender and class conventions. The can be any word root within any gender and belong to and class. The name Andeschid coming from the root "anid" (boy) should follow masculine gender’s vowel harmony and belong to one of the noun classes concerning people, however, it follows the neuter pattern and ends in –íd, the class containing arts. As a person ages and changes his or her honorific, they never change the root or the noun class of the name they are given.

Paradigms
A noun's paradigm is the term used to refer to all the total amount of noun class endings a root can take in order to make new words. Many roots can take ten or more endings. The meaning of a word is based strongly from the root's meaning making changes for its noun class ending. The root "addis" meaning both "community" and "middle aged woman" may mean a "community of animals" (animal kingdom) when taking the -és ending, but means "the mind of a middle-aged woman" (intelligent conversation) when taking -árd. All words in a paradigm will be of the gender speech and usually of the same gender.