Bäladiri

General Information
Bäladiri is a Westerlander language of the central lowlands. Despite its general genetic affiliation with other Westerlander languages, it is part of the lowlands Sprachbund, having come under the influence of several dragon herder languages.

Bäladiri is, generally speaking, an agglutinative language that features prominent consonant gradation patterns triggered by stress shifts and certain types of affixes. It features marginally distinctive stress that tends to be either penultimate or antepenultimate. It has some partially opaque and obscured stem alternations deriving from earlier gradation and contraction rules.

Bäladiri is natively written in a Westerlander abugida, with a Dragon Imperial implementation used among certain communities.

Phonology
/pp p b tt t d kk k g ʔ/  /f v vv θ ð s z ʂ ʐ x γ/  /mm m ɳɳ ɳ ɲɲ ɲ ŋŋ ŋ/  /rr r ll l jj j/  /ts tts dz ddz tʂ ttʂ dʐ ddʐ/ 

/i i: y y: ɨ ɯ ɯ: u u:/  /ɛ ɛ: ø ø: ɜ ɜ:/  /ɐ ɑ ɑ:/ <ä a ā> /ɑi ɑu iɑ ɛɑ ɛi/ 

Bäladiri features marginally distinctive stress in a few loanwords and the occasional native relic or remnant. As its stress falls almost exclusively on the penultimate syllable, it isn't considered salient enough a feature to be marked in common usage; stress is indicated only in linguistic descriptions.

Consonant Gradation
Bäladiri features prominent consonant mutation that takes the form of gradation: its gradation is a lenition system that weakens consonants in certain morphological environments.

Most consonants are considered to lie somewhere on an axis, moving down it when specific types of lenition are triggered. As a result of several phonemic merges and multiple consonant shifts, many consonants have multiple lenited forms. The consonantal axes are:

Grammar
Bäladiri generally divides its words into nine classes, based on how they behave morphologically and syntactically:
 * Mutable
 * Nouns & Pronouns
 * Verbs & Proverbs
 * Adjectives
 * Adverbs
 * Metamodifiers
 * Immutable
 * Conjunctions
 * Adpositions
 * Particles
 * Interjections

The dichotomy between mutable and immutable words is based on their morphological properties: mutable words can be inflected to agree or show some morphological category, whereas immutable words overwhelmingly do not change their shape and are instead fixed in morphological and sytactic meaning.

Nouns
Bäladiri nouns generally fit into only one declension: they all take the same set of suffixes (though their nominative singulars might be unique), but are characterised by the presence of two stems; this phenomenon derives from earlier stress alternations that then caused consonant lenition and vowel reduction.

They inflect for five cases (nominative, accusative, ergative, vocative and oblique), and two numbers (singular and plural); the singular is generally characterised by an etymological nasal in the accusative and ergative, and the plural by a dental in all cases. Some Bäladiri nouns preserve a more ancient dual, which is characterised by the presence of a labial obstruent.

>>  Example nouns   << ---         SG         PL  NOM   mávës      máutis        ["friend"; *mȧva-s] ACC  máunas     máutas ERG  máuna      máuta VOC  máve       máutë OBL  mávë       mávët SG        PL  NOM   máθïl      máultis       ["olive"; *mȧθul-Ø] ACC  máulnas    máultas ERG  máulna     máulta VOC  máule/máθe máultë OBL  máθï(l)    máθï(l)t [sáppïs,  samúnas]  ["kinsman" *sȧppu-s] [úkät,    ughónas]  ["happiness" *u̇ko-t] [súngë,     sûnas]  ["brother" *su̇ŋa < *su̇ŋa-s] [básïs,    báunas]  ["stench" *bȧsus] [gháprï, ghavrínas] ["pigeon" *ḡȧpri] [móšpï,  možvúnas]  ["wealth" *mȯčpu] [káumën,  kāmánas]  ["moron" *kȧwaman] [fólpïn, folvínas]  ["cause" *folpin (loanword)] [párpï,  parvínas]  ["bottom" *pȧrpi (loanword)] [ärkádžï, ärkáunas] ["leader" *ärka-džu (loanword)] [ilúnnë, ilughánas] ["ally" *i-lu̇na]

Adjectives
Bäladiri adjectives come in two classes: one class of nominal adjectives that stand with nouns and modify them directly, and one class of verbal adjectives that conjugate and are usually used as predicates and can govern sentences. Most verbs belong to both classes: a single root most often produces both a verbal and a nominal adjective, though some exist only in one category.

Nominal adjectives generally follow a similar inflectional pattern as nouns, save for their lack of the nasal demi-morpheme in the singular. An example nominal adjective and its inflection:

Many vowel-final nominal adjectives have a straightforward verbal adjective that corresponds to the final vowel; ägúrrë [*o:kụrra] has a respective earthy verb:

Verbs
Bäladiri verbs have a complex conjugation: they agree in number and person to their primary argument, and further conjugate for tense and aspect. Unlike nominals, Bäladiri verbs have a dual in addition to a singular and plural. They distinguish between the present, imminent (essentially a prospective present and future) and past tenses, and the momentane and continuous aspects.

Bäladiri verbs also have an infinitive that acts as both a verbal complement to light verbs, and as general abstract verbal nouns of the verbs. The verbal infinitive features case and number inflection identical to that of regular nouns.

Conjugation
Bäladiri verbs are directly conjugated by attaching a suffix or a blend of suffixes onto a stem. The stem may often change, most frequently in predictable ways and under the influence of stress shifts.

Verbs in Bäladiri come in three productive conjugational classes based on thematic vowels in earlier stages of the language. Even as sound changes have obscured a lot of the more transparent inflections, the conjugations of such verbs still remain readily apparent throughout their paradigms. The three classes, in traditional terminology, are:
 * Lunar verbs (those with a thematic *ū in suffixes)
 * Solar verbs (those with a thematic *ī in suffixes)
 * Earthy verbs (those with a thematic *ā in suffixes)

Two more classes are recognised, even though they have since mostly fallen out of use:
 * Mortal or Weak verbs (those with a thematic short { *a *i *u }; reanalysed as one of the three productive classes)
 * Muddy verbs (those with a thematic syllabic nasal { *m *n }; irregular, preserved in relics)

The assignment of verbs to conjugational classes goes back to a verb classification system once operational in proto-North-Westerlander but defunct long before Bäladiri times. Some verbs that share conjugational class might also have morphosyntactic or semantic similarities, though the system has truly been irregularised due to class reassignments and semantic shifts.

Bäladiri verbs are cited in three forms, representing the three lenition grades a regular verb stem has:
 * Strongest, unlenited — second person singular, present momentane
 * Medium — first person singular, present momentane
 * Weakest, most lenited — infinitive nominative singular

Even though the stems can be predicted for most verbs from just one form, all verbs are cited in three parts because of lenition and vowel contraction irregularities or omissions extant in the system.

Example conjugation of a lunar verb:

Example conjugation of a solar verb:

Example conjugation of an earthy verb:

Verb Clitics
Aside from straightforward inflection, Bäladiri verbs may additionally be modified by attaching verbal clitics, which act similarly to affixes but differ in four vital points:


 * They do not cause stress shifts or phonological alteration of any inflected verb form
 * They often have multiple ambiguous meanings outside of context and without further pragmatic specification
 * They are frequently employed to encode both modal, directional and polar specification
 * They have a somewhat flexibly ordered and are not fixed in placement or position

Furthermore, verb clitics interact with light verbs in several interesting ways:
 * Verb clitics attach to the whole light verb phrase — if the light verb has a postfixed oblique compliment, the clitic attaches to it even as it is a nominal
 * Light verbs may take on redundant verb clitics, and are more prone to taking on clitics than full verbs
 * Some light verbs have very specific interactions with clitics, sometimes requiring some and forbidding others, and at others changing the meanings of the clitics — or even their own meanings — based on the clitic attached

Only infrequently stressed, many of the clitics are subject to significant phonetic degradation, and certain prominent combinations of them have fused into a single multi-faceted morpheme (uncharacteristic of Bäladiri).

Bäladiri verb clitics are divided into four large fuzzy classes:


 * Modal clitics
 * Directional clitics and cliticised particles
 * Subordinators
 * Fossilised clitics (unproductive, lexically conditioned)

General Word Order
Bäladiri has a generally free word order, as its extensive inflections give it configurational liberty. Even as such, Bäladiri tends to follow the principle of putting its objects and intransitive subjects before the verb, and transitive agents and other arguments after it.

Some verbs require different case assignments respective to argument roles; this phenomenon of quirky case most frequently occurs with the three core cases.

Passivisation
Unlike proto-North-Westerlander, Bäladiri lacks a specific passive verb inflection or analytic construction; Bäladiri passives are formed by case reassignment. With passivisation, the accusative argument gets promoted to the nominative, whereas the old nominative argument is demoted to an ergative. These pseudopassive sentences are syntactically and semantically identical to absolutive-ergative active sentences; the nominative patients of these sentences come before the verb, and their ergative agents follow the verb.

Copula
Bäladiri has a zero copula in the present tense.

Verb Agreement
Bäladiri verbs feature a more ergative syntactic alignment: they agree in person and number to the intransitive subject and the transitive patient, instead of agreeing with a specific case argument.

Relative Clauses
Bäladiri relative clauses are introduced with the relative demonstrative  (declines like a regular noun).

Morphosemantics
Barring syntactical and lexicomorphological oddities, Bäladiri has fairly flexible ways of assigning morphological marking and tying semantic and pragmatic information to it: each morpheme carries some sort of semantic and pragmatic meaning, aside from agreement.

Case Marking
Case marking in Bäladiri is generally straightforward. Aside from the adpositions that require a specific case nearly at random, the language assigns cases fairly logically:
 * The Nominative marks the subjects and agents of active sentences, and the patient role in a passive sentence
 * The Accusative marks the patient role of active sentences
 * The Ergative marks the agent role of a passive sentence (a former demoted nominative)
 * The Vocative marks an addressed party
 * The Oblique marks secondary arguments; almost never occurs without an adposition

Tense Assignment
While the present and past tenses carry an absolute meaning (indicating an absolute present and past, relative from the speaker's timeframe). The imminent 'tense' is more akin to a prospective: from the present timeframe, it acts as a future tense, whereas in a past frame it works as a future-in-the-past. It is quite common in both direct discourse and renarration.