Aelatha/Tempus

General
In the Aelathan language, the tempus refers to the noun, usually in the vocative case, that is placed directly after the verb and acts as the verb's tense. The tempus is always a neuter gender noun that falls under "-éþ", the "time" noun class. Unlike other parts of speech and with the exception of the present tempus "astreþ", the tempus cannot be dropped through word drop.

Usage
The tempus acts as an enclitic, always positioning itself after the verb. As they are nouns, they have nominal means all attributed to time; "astreþ" (the present time), "arjisseþ" (a day of the week), "aheþ" (the entire span of time after something), etc. These meanings are attributed as the tense of the verb.

Time frame marking
Tempuses can describe arrays of time both large and narrow and thus many tempuses overlap others or have similar meaning, though none have the same meaning and most cannot take the place of another without changing the subtle semantic nuances. Because of this, Aelatha uses time frame marking. Complex sentences are usually placed in order from tempus that handles the greatest amount of time adding up to the smallest at the end of the sentence. When this happens, the largest time marks the sentence and all following sentences as the time of all the verbs. The largest time that marks the time frame of all following verbs is called the "topical time" marker.


 * The paragraph above demonstrates that the actions take place throughout the main tempus in while smaller portions of time during the red period are marked in . It is to be noted that the actions that take place outside the span of that year (knows and will do) are marked with the future and the distal future respectively.

Time is relative to the largest tempus in a phrase and not to the speaker, so it is common to phrase something using the largest tempus as the starting point of all following actions, throwing actions during the largest time frame into present tenses, those after it into future tenses and those before it into past tenses. Compare the examples above and below:


 * The main tempus in marks the topical time as today, while actions that happen before today (yesterday) and after (tomorrow) are marked in  and sent into the past and future tenses.

When a new time frame needs to be marked, the tempus "ambreþ" (lit., the end of an era) is used. In some cases ambreþ can be and is often avoided, but it is required when the new time frame covers an expanse of time smaller than that of the previous time frame.


 * Because "aeþ"(1) is a larger time period in this case and therefore usurps "araeþ"(2), "ambreþ" is used to change the topical time to "during class."

Compound tempuses
A verb can be modified by more than one tempus at a time. This is called a compound tempus. A compound tempus is put in order from smallest time frame to largest and is usually used to disambiguate time within the same sentence, especially when a larger time acts as a tempus when the speaker does not intend to mark a new time frame as the topical time.

Combining tempuses
Tempuses can combine with other nouns to create new words. The tempus is always added at the tail of a compound, where it replaces both the honorific and noun class.
 * Axad (life, n.noun) and Aelleþ (postmortem future, tempus) yield Axaelleþ (the afterlife, n.noun, tempus)

Newly created words can only be used as tempuses if they are neuter gender nouns.

Tempuses as noun cases
Adding a tempus at the head of another noun turns the tempus into one of many temporal noun cases. The time frame a tempus attributes to a noun usually gives the noun a sense of when that noun exists in reference with the tempus of the verb. For example, when a verb is an the present tense and a noun is in the pre-temporative case (past tense tempus case), the action has a sense of happening before the noun was ever important in the matter or before the noun ever existed. Tempuses as noun cases are considered a bit formal and esoteric, even in impolite forms.