Afansevan/Grammar

Imperial Afansevan's grammar uses both head marking and dependent marking, and has both head-initial and head-final syntax, which is very rare across the world's languages.

Gender and Number, Pronouns, and Articles
Like other Indo-European languages, Afansevan has lost the case system of Proto-Indo-European. Definiteness is formed by adding an article before the noun, which declines for the gender and number of the noun. Afansevan has retained grammatical gender, and pronouns consist of the only traces of PIE's case system (but personal pronouns don't decline for gender, much like what's happening in English right now with the word "they" as the LGBT community is becoming more accepted), declining for five cases: nominative, vocative (which has the same form as the nominative), accusative, genitive, and dative. The reflexive forms descend from PIE enclitic forms, and the third person pronouns are descended from PIE second person plural pronouns. The reflexive pronouns can also be used to mark when the pronoun as an object, using the definate article, switches places with the verb in the sentence.

The plural suffix <-Vr> is derived from the PIE nominative plural *-es, with the final s being rhoticized in a dialect of Neosevan, which is now extinct today as it got replaced by the Mongolic languages during Genghis Khan's conquests, which made its way to the ancestor of the Afansevan spoken in the New World.

The indefinate and definate article each evolved from heavily simplified numerals for "one" and "two" respectively in Early Afansevan. "One" originated as the singular, and "two" originated as the dual, and the numeral for "three" evolved into the plural article. But the system was simplified in Proto-Neosevan, where the plural form was lost, and the singular became the indefinate article and the dual became the definate article. These articles agreed with their noun with case, gender, and number. When the case system was lost, the old case articles were carried over to pronouns and the feminine and neuter articles with cases were lost as pronouns have lost grammatical gender.

In addition to being used as a 3rd person pronoun,  can be used as a dummy pronoun.

To the left is the gender and number suffixes for nouns and adjectives. To the right is the pronouns. To the bottom is the articles.

Genders of Names of People
Determening the gender of people's names in Afansevan is determined by the person's surname. Feminine names are among the most complicated, so I'll talk about them first.

Feminine surnames end in -VNC, -VNV, or -VN before gender is applied. Surnames with the ending -VNC have the final consonant dropped and replaced with an . In those ending in -VNV, the final vowel is replaced by , while those ending in -VN have an  inserted at the end of the word. -N- is changed to , and any remaining -V- is replaced by . Any person with a surname ending in <-a> is also feminine as well.

Neuter surnames end in a vowel other than <-a> before gender is applied, unless there is a nasal before that vowel. Masculine surnames are everything else.

Then, gender agreement is applied. The first name is treated like an adjective and must agree with the surname in gender. However, names are treated as uncountable and don't take any marking for number. Middle names, which are usually found in foreign names, still have to agree with the surname in gender.

Pronouns Connected to Nouns, Proper Nouns, and Other Pronouns
The first argument (the pronoun) must be placed before the second argument (nouns, proper nouns, and other pronouns). Imperial Afansevan mandates that you place the first argument in the accusative case, unless it must take other cases, as in linguistically-correct descriptive grammars of English. This is because the conjunction is always treated like it is a verb, with the first argument being the object and the second argument being the subject, and therefore the pronoun after the conjunction must always take nominative case, unless the pronoun must take other cases.

This reflects the word order of Proto-Neosevan (OVS), the language during Afansevan's evolution that the case system was lost under the influence of a now-extinct Indo-Iranian language that was closely related to Avestan, although some scholars suggest that the case system was lost under Chinese influence. Proto-Neosevan and this Iranian language had very different case systems, as Early Afansevan had an agglutinative case system under the dwindling influence of Proto-Samoyed. Verb-initial word order later evolved in Imperial Afansevan and all the other Afansevan dialects under the influence of the Mesoamerican sprachbund, which Afansevan is marginally a part of (The Mesoamerican languages also influenced Imperial Afansevan to evolve possession suffixes and prefixes, and wh-movement).

For example,  "Me and Hannah went to the store" or "Hannah and I went to the store" is grammatical, but <*Vartar duv merkitos azh sake Hannah> is ungrammatical.

Possession
The informal speech retains the genitive for possession. In the dialect spoken by the higher classes, possession is expressed with a set of prefixes which evolved from genitive pronouns coming before the noun it possesses for inalienable possession and after the noun for alienable possession. This has been extended to nouns possessing other nouns, but the noun or pronoun that possesses something cannot be dropped. Only nouns can take possession markers, and adjectives do not need to agree with their noun in possession.

Prepositions
As a language that has lost most of its case inflections entirely, Imperial Afansevan uses a myriad of prepositions to make up for the loss of case marking. Some of these prepositions are derived from verbs that have been heavily simplified, but most have been directly inherited from Proto-Indo-European, such as  "in." Others are derived from case markers that got lost and had to become prepositions. These can be used as adverbs.

Gender and Number Agreement
Adjectives must agree in gender and number with the noun it modifies. Doing so otherwise is considered ungrammatical.

Comparatives and Superlatives
To form a comparative, the first syllable of the adjective is reduplicated. To form a superlative, Imperial Afansevan uses ablaut reduplication, where the first syllable is reduplicated with ablaut and the original first syllable is unchanged. This has evolved first in Afansevan-speaking slaves in order to not get caught trying to plan to escape, followed by slave masters who learned what the slaves are trying to say, and then the majority of Afansevan speakers, partly due to many slave masters becoming members of the nobility and bringing this pattern with them. However, tonogenesis and other sound changes have eroded the original reduplication pattern slightly, like in this:


 * Vrenshti duvö anvírovrezhö dvenosontö jusrövanvírö azh. "I am the master's good slave"
 * Vrenshti duvö anvírovrezhö dvẽvenosontö jusrövanvírö azh. "I am the master's better slave"
 * Vrenshti duvö anvírovrezhö dvãvenosontö jusrövanvírö azh. "I am the master's best slave"

Basic Tenses
Afansevan has two basic tenses: past and non-past. The past is represented by ablauting the vowels in the verb, while the non-past is unmarked. Tense can also be created by using the copula's declinations, followed by marking the specific tense in the verb.

Copula Constructions
Verbs (other than "to be") don't conjugate for person nor mood. This is retained in the vulgar Afansevan dialects, but evolved a class system, which later evolves into the American Turkic class system for person. This means that Imperial Afansevan, like in English, is an anti-drop language, as the verb does not clarify the subject, and that some inflections look indistinguishable and thus speakers can get very confused. The non-future copula root, , descends from PIE e-grade*h1es "to be", and is a cognate with English is, Irish is, Latin est, Sanskrit asti, Persian ast, Old Church Slavonic jest. The future copula root, , descends from PIE *bʰuH "to grow, to become" and is cognate with English be, Latin futura ( > English future), Greek phúō ( > English physics, physical).

Unlike in English, however, the copula can be dropped in the present tense. Instead, the gnomic auxillary performs this role in the present tense, but the copula is never dropped in subjunctive or optative phrases, even in the present tense.

Distant Past and Future
To form a distant past/future, a suffix (<-pedj>) is used. This was originally a word meaning "a long time" that was placed after the verb. The original word is still used by peasants when communicating with the Californian emperor.

Habitual
To form a habitual, use the suffix <-nö̃>. This is its own seperate word meaning "to use". The suffix was originally  being placed after the verb to mark the habitual, but it has been suffixed to the verb to mark the habitual instead.

Resulting Tenses
Hence, the tense conjugations look like this:

Voice
Imperial Afansevan has two voices: passive and active. The active is unmarked, and the passive is marked with an <-(a)r> suffix.

Regular and Irregular Verbs
Imperial Afansevan distinguishes between regular and irregular verbs. Irregular verbs except for "to have" don't take the copula for the future tense, and unfortunately, the only way to go around this is brute-force memorization.

"Have"
In Imperial Afansevan, the verb meaning "to have", which in IA is derived from a vowel alternation of the word "to possess", , has irregularity comparable to the copula, as the function of "have" in Proto-Indo-European was derived from the third person copula with the subject taking dative case. It is slightly less irregular than the copula, featuring singular and plural subject agreement with the dual being absent unlike in the copula, but takes all of the forms that normal verbs take minus evidentiality and voice, which is taken up with a null subject marker. The different agreement suffixes between the copula and  is remincient of a class system in Early Afansevan, where the -V and -H stems (which the copula belongs to) have endings comparable to the copula's endings in Imperial Afansevan, and the -C stems (which the verb meaning "to possess" in Imperial Afansevan belongs to) have endings comparable to the endings seen in  in Imperial Afansevan with the dual being merged with the plural.

Evidentiality
Perhaps the most impacts of Amerindian and Turkic influence in Imperial Afansevan are in its system of evidentiality, which is marked with a series of optional verb suffixes. Using inflections to mark evidentiality is very rare among Indo-European languages, but in OTL evidentiality in Indo-European languages only exists in Bulgarian.

Resulting Regular Verb Conjugation
As a result, there are 93 regular verb conjugations in Imperial Afansevan. In dialects that retain person and mood marking, verbs could be conjugated for over sixteen hundred different forms, which doesn't have time to be recorded here because listing it would crash your scrollbar and it would take until the end of the universe to list them out. Evidentility is completely regular, as it recently got suffixed on to the verb.

Auxillaries
In Imperial Afansevan, some verbal morphology is now expressed with auxillaries, as most of the inflectional morphology has been lost. * The imperative auxillary doesn't occur in the first person singular, as it is used to command other people.

Auxillary-Verb Combos and Null Subject Markers
To form tenses and aspects and moods that would not be possible using the verb conjugations or auxillaries, Imperial Afansevan relies on combinng the auxillary, the verb and one of its conjugations, and a null-subject marker, in that order. The null subject marker is used in order to prevent miscommunication, which could then be used to conjugate the entire phrase for tense and the habitual "tense" that normal verbs take, and agrees in voice and evidentiality with the verb.

Conjunctions
In Imperial Afansevan, conjunctions are expressed with a single auxillary with sixteen different inflected forms.

Examples of Afansevan Conjunctions

 * AfansevanConverb1.png  "I had a child and a dog (LIT: "I posessed a child and dog until recently")."
 * AfansevanConverb2.png  with emphasis on <nís> means "Let's eat Bob." However, when you put emphasis on <Bob>, the sentence's meaning changes to "Let's eat, Bob." This type of meaning-changing emphasis isn't reflected in the writing system, but in poetic writing, where this emphasis is frequently used, you can add a diacritic to the first vowel of the word that is being emphasized to let the reader know that he/she should emphasize that word.

Derivational Strategies
Imperial Afansevan uses <-tus> to form nouns from verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. This suffix usually assigns the newly-formed nouns to masculine gender, as the suffix was masculine in Proto-Indo-European. It uses <-(o)nt> to form adjectives and adverbs from nouns and verbs, but the vast majority of words using the suffix are derived from nouns, and uses <-li̋> (cognate of English -ly and -like) to form consttructions similar to English -like. Also, to derive the exact opposite of the word, a prefix <an-> is used. These strategies are increasingly being used in Imperial Afansevan as it becomes more agglutinative.

Another strategy that is still productive in Imperial Afansevan, like most the world's languages, is compounding. When combining at least one noun together with another part of speech, the first noun assigns the gender to the whole word.

Imperial Afansevan also uses a suffix <-ina> (in the singular) to mark feminine nouns that have a Sanskrit origin, but it is also used to derive feminine nouns from masculine and neuter nouns.

Numbers
Afansevan uses a pure vigesimal system with a sub-base of five. It has an ordinal suffix <-ynch>, which was derived from American Turkic. The numbers one to three have irregular ordinal forms, because they were used commonly enough to resist the change. Numbers greater than 10 (except for non-compounds and numbers made of shortening of compounds) don't recieve their own ordinal suffix: it's just the individual numbers they are made out of plus ordinal suffixes. As hinted with the Mayan loanwords, Afansevan was part of the Mesoamerican sprachbund, which later expanded into American Turkic.

Numbers and Gender
Some numbers conjugate for gender, but not all numbers.


 * 0 is not conjugated.
 * The numbers from 1-3 are conjugated.
 * All other numbers are not conjugated.

Word Order
Afansevan has a very strict VOS word order. The word order got more verb-initial as most of the case system was lost in Proto-Neosevan, only being retained in pronouns, and as Mesoamerican influence began to kick in. Adjectives and adverbs always come before the parts of speech they modify. Adjectives modifying the same noun may be shuffled around frequently and the maning that is being communicated still makes perfect sense. The copula always preceeds the verb, and auxillary verbs come before the verbs they modify, but after the copula. The negative particle is placed before the verb, and after the copula and/or an auxillary verb if there is one.

There are some exceptions to the strict VOS word order, such as the object being placed before the verb if it is being linked to the subject by a copula and if the object is a pronoun that is being preceded by an article (hence the example in the writing system example above is and not.

However, the indirect object can be placed wherever you want to as long as it is placed before or after the subject. If there is a null subject, than the indirect object must be placed after the object.

Wh-Questions and Preposition Stranding
To form a question, the interrogative pronoun switches places with the verb and becomes the first word to occur in the sentence. Placing the pronoun where it should belong in the object spot between the verb and the subject in an interrogative sentence is ungrammatical in Imperial Afansevan. Imperial Afansevan also acceptsPreposition n stranding in questions by moving the pronoun's preposition to the end of a sentence. Preposition stranding is not allowed to exist within a non-interrogative sentence.

Conjunctions
Conjunctions in Imperial Afansevan are banned from starting or ending a sentence, and are therefore restricted to medial positions. BUT, there is a loophole around this rule. As said in a previous section, conjunctions are treated as verbs, but don't take any marking, and reflect the word order in Proto-Neosevan. Therefore, the null subject and object particles can be used in conjunctional phrases to create a loophole around the no conjunctions in sentence boundary rule, unlike in the prescriptivists' corrupted version of the English language.

Null Subjects/Objects
With a default VOS word order and as one of the few Indo-European languages to allow null-subjects, Imperial Afansevan speakers are highly likely to get misunderstandings from other Imperial Afansevan speakers. For example, simply saying <*Shiravalg jú> "He runs" is ungrammatical. Every Imperial Afansevan sentence cannot occur without at least two nouns and a verb, in order to avoid miscommunication due to null subjects and objects. To solve this, and to still allow null subjects and objects, a special syntactical word exists (<nís> for null subjects and <ním> for null objects) to mark null subjects and objects and is always placed at the end of a sentence. This was evolved from case markers that were treated as seperate words and were placed after the subject, and later got suffixed to the numeral for "zero" after the tonogenesis process and carried over the same function.

When there is no subject or object, than the word order defaults to VOS.

The grammatically correct version of the sentence "He runs" is <Shiravalg jú ním>, which literally translates to "He runs to," which doesn't make any sense in English but makes perfect sense in Imperial Afansevan.

Basic Negation
Negative statements are formed in Imperial Afansevan by placing <ne> after the copula and before the verb.

Multiple Negatives and Questions
Historically, multiple negatives were mandatory, like in many synthetic Satem languages. In Imperial Afansevan, this system has been reduced to some questions and negative answers of questions.