Strennic

=Phonology=

Vowels
The phoneme inventory of Strennic consists of eleven vowel monophthongs. The reason why the vowel inventory is so large is that some vowel comes in a long and short variety, and this vowel length can form minimal pairs (for example pad "rug" and pád "butter") so each is considered a separate phoneme. Sometimes a long vowel is of a slightly different quality than it's corresponding short vowel (for example near-mid 'e', corresponds to mid 'é')

Vowel Length
Vowel length is phonemic in Strennic, however vowel length isn't always straight forward, some 'long vowels' have slightly different qualities than their short counterparts.

The open-mid central unrounded vowel /ɞ/, represented by the letter 'ọ' is always short in Strennic.

Long vowels are represented by the use of an acute accent above their letter, as in á é í ó and ú.

Diphthongs
There are five diphthongs in Strennic.

Note that these five diphthongs are the only environments which feature the letter <ŭ>.

Diaereses
Any other sequences of vowels other than the five diphthongs are diaerases, sequences of two vowels that do not collapse into diphthongs. For example dnrea and gvuon.

Syllabic Consonants
Some soronant consonants can sometimes be syllabic, meaning that they function as a vowel. Four consonant sounds [l], [m], [n] and [r] can act as a syllable nucleus. For example in the word gvr meaning "grass", which seems to have no vowel, actually instead has a syllabic 'r'. Some extreme examples from Strennic include gvrstvrsn (grass verge) from gvr "grass" and stvrsn verge.

This situation can arise in English words, such as acre, where the 'r' is, in fact, the nucleus of the final syllable.

=Orthography=

Alphabet
The Strennic Alphabet is a version of the Latin Alphabet, modified with the addition of the accented letters á, é, í, ó and ú, the other letters with diacritics 'ọ' (o with dot below) and 'ŭ' (u with breve), as well as five digraphs ch, lh, ny, sh and zh, which are all treated as individual letters in their own right.

=Basic Grammar=

Case
Strennic nouns come in nine cases: the Nominative, Dative, Genitive, Accusative, Adessive, Apudessive, Inessive, Benefactive and Comitative. These cases all come in a singular and plural varieties.

Posession
Posession is indicated in Strennic by adding a 'possessive suffix' to the noun, as shown in the following table.

Number
All nouns in Strennic come in a singular and plural. With Nominative Nouns the plural is formed regularly by adding the suffix -n or -en, depending on whether the noun ends in a vowel or a consonant. Otherwise, each different noun case has it's own unique singular and plural suffix.

Articles
Articles are (as in English) placed as a preposition before a noun. The indefinate articlue (english: a/an) is represented by sutv, and is only found before singular nouns. The definate article (english "the") is represented by va before singular nouns and vea before plural nouns.

Adjectives
Adjectives come in several forms, using suffixes to indicate varying degrees of intensity. The following table shows these suffixes using the adjective kovoŭde meaning "cold".

Adjectives can be made into verbs by adding the suffix "-goroŭ". For example "nyéván" meaning "question" can be altered to nyévángoroŭ "to question".

For example:
 * Hvrz ak kovoŭdemnezhe - That isn't cold
 * Va klhematí ak kovoŭdegoroŭ ní - The weather is making me cold

Tenses
Strennic verbs come in five tenses: the Past, Past Participle, Present, Present Participle and Future. Take the word ómne meaning "to go":

Agent
If the agent of a verb can be represented by a personal pronoun, then the agent is represented in the verb word itself, for example Ómneprnr means "I go". However otherwise the agent of the verb is placed before the verb, as in english. For example Sam ómnepr "Sam goes" and Va sulunzhlé omnepr means "The woman goes".

A list of the agent suffixes is as follows:

So for example ómnedn which means "went" becomes ómnednqr means "it went".

Patient
The patient is placed after the verb. For example the verb gvursht means "to like", becomes gvurshtnr "I like", which becomes gvurshtnr ví "I like you".

Personal Pronouns
Personal pronouns decline fairly regularly, although the 1st person singular and plurals may cause some minor irritation, for example the use of zheb where zesheb would have been more regular.

Interrogative Pronouns
Interrogative pronouns (like the English "wh words") are fairly easy.

For example: Ká va krdúvnta? "What is your name?"

Demonstrative Pronouns
For example: Ká stva? What is this?

Relative Pronouns
Relative pronouns are formed by adding the suffix -pt to their related interrogative pronoun.

=Dictionary= Dictionary of Strennic