Vayardyio

Overview

=Setting= Vayardyio is an extra-terrestial language spoken by the humanoid population in the so-called Northwestern quadrant of the Great Continent on the planet called Tolouga (in V.: meaning 'world' or 'living space'). Tolouga circles its sun in more-or-less earthlike circumstances and (mostly due to lack of imagination of their creator) its animate species look and behave quite familiar to us. Vayardyio is the mother tongue of the Vayardi people (they who inhabit the country of Vayardo). Native speakers number approx. 49 mi. It is seen as the sole representative of the Western branch within the Coumrillian language family. Two more branches of this family exist in neighbouring countries: the Northern (or ‘High’) branch, consisting of Tozurian, Chirchian and Gabilian, and the Southern branch, with Avessite, Alemnic and Silmerian. All languages show a strong lexical and syntactical relationship, whereas rather prominent differences occur in the phonology and phonetics. Vayardyio shares with the Northern branch-languages feautures like a fully active nominal and pronominal declension in three cases, while it still displays rare phenomena other languages have lost, such as the use of a ‘4th person’ (often called: obviative). Also, only Vayardyio retains the original four verbal moods of the Old-Coumrillian root language. Vayardyio languages history tracks back some 2000 years, dating to the westward movement of Coumrillian tribes from the northern plains even before the Classical Civilisation of Coumrillia came to full bloom. Therefore, Vayardyio lexicon displays quite a few words and meanings which differ from words in all other modern Coumrillian languages, more heavy influenced bij the Classical Coumrillian speech.

Typology
Vayardyio is a typical SOV-language, in which fronting constituents to the 'left' (head) of the sentence marks topicalization. Typically, negation is expressed by fronting the verb, preceded only by the general negation marker yé. The language is inflecting, according to regular patterns: declension of nouns and pronouns, conjugation of verbs, on a nominative-accusative basis. Verbs show four moods and display active and passive voice; nouns are distinguished by gender: -o class (male), -a class (female) while -o class being the default type. An earlier gender distinction in animate - inanimate has left only some remote traces in the language. Vayardyio clearly distinguishes singular from plural

Phonology
Vayardyio phonemic inventory consists of a set of six vowels: a, e, o, i, u and /schwa/; the latter only appears in inflected endings. It is obligatory in V. that all (native) words end vocalic; also words rarely begin with  /i/, /o/ and /ou/. Furthermore, strict rules inhibit the forming of allophones. Diphtongs are non-existant too: between any pair of vowels a pause is always observed.

The consonants are: b, k, ç, d, f, g, j, l, m, n, p, r, s, t, v, z. Of these, /b/, /j/ and /z/ are much less distributed. The two glides /j/ and /ç/ (palatalized) are expressed gi+(vowel) an y respectively in “terrestial” orthography; whenever g preceding i+(vowel) should not be pronounced /j/, it is written ğ. Several consonant clusters are allowed at the beginning of words but the language as a whole favours syllable formation of the type CV, CVC or VC. Base words mostly have no more than three syllables, however throug inflection and suffixing, strings up to six syllables can exist.

=Basic Grammar= ...

=Dictionary= ...

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