Mestian

General information
Mestian (natively Mástā) is the language of the dragon-herding peoples in the central lowlands and on the Dragonforge. It is part of the lowlands Sprachbund.

Speaking from a mixed diachronic and synchronic point of view, Mestian is a heavily fusional language descended from a heavily agglutinating stage. Many of the previously agglutinative components of the now-fusional morphemes are still vaguely evident and partially identifiable, although many have long since merged beyond transparency. Its tonal system descends from a mixture of stress accent and the disappearance of /*h/: most dipping long vowels come from a vowel that was lengthened by the loss of that /*h/.

Vowels
Mestian features distinctive stress and a pitch accent system: short vowels can either be stressed, marked with an acute accent such as in <ú>, or unstressed (unmarked), while long vowels can have either a peaking or dipping intonation when stressed. Dipping is marked with a tilde diacritic, such as <ũ>, and peaking is marked with a circumflex, such as <û>. The dipping and peaking diacritics replace the macron of long vowels.

Nominals
The category of nominals in Mestian includes nouns, pronouns and adjectives.

Nouns
Mestian has a moderately complex fusional noun system that distinguishes ten cases and three numbers. Mestian nouns are grouped based on their declension patterns -- the suffixes they take -- and their accentual paradigms -- how their accent shifts when they inflect.

They have five genders: ignic, aquatic, animate, inanimate and neuter. The division into these gender classes is largely arbitrary.

The ten cases of Mestian are:
 * Nominative
 * Accusative
 * Partitive
 * Possessive¹ (inalienable)
 * Possessive² (alienable)
 * Dative
 * Vocative
 * Commitative
 * Lative
 * Locative

Accentuation Patterns
Nouns generally fit into one of four large accentual patterns:


 * Short
 * Mobile -- most frequent
 * Static -- very rare
 * Long
 * Mobile -- common
 * Static -- slightly uncommon

While each of the patterns has its irregularities, the most common type of motion is relocation of stress in the direction of extension when the stem gets extended. Mobile long nouns generally either leave behind a long vowel upon relocation (either tone) or geminate the following consonant (only dipping). Static-stressed short nouns are overwhelmingly those that have a stressed short vowel followed by an unstressed long vowel: stress in these cases doesn't shift to the long vowel.

Many long nouns occasionally change their tone between paradigms.

(I) A-Stems
Mestian a-stems make up the first declension class in the language. By definition they are nouns with an <-a> in the nominative, optionally followed by a single consonant. A-stems can be in any of the five genders. The declension class has two subtypes: The two subtypes differ minimally in the suffixes they take.
 * Hard a-stems -- ending in a hard consonant followed by <-a>
 * Soft a-stems -- ending in any one of {š ž tš dž j} followed by <-a>

The three main suffix classes are:
 * a-class
 * as-class
 * an-class

The as-class nouns merge the nominative and accusative singulars and plurals, while an-class nouns merge the nominative and commitative cases in all numbers. The most common accentuation patterns of the a-stems are the short mobile-stressed nouns that make up the bulk of its lexical mass, as well as both mobile-stressed and static-stressed long nouns.

Neuter and inanimate nouns merge the two possessive cases.

An example aquatic a-class noun -- pírka, pirkássa (fish, aqu):

An example inanimate a-class noun: rhýka, rhykássa (pebble, ina):

An example animate an-class noun: itáran, itarássa (swan, ani):

An example ignic as-class noun: apákas, apakássa (breath, ign):

(II) UR-Stems
Mestian ur-stems make up the second declension class in the language. They are nouns that end in <-ur> in the nominative. They are most often ignic, inanimate or neuter. They do not have subclasses.

Neuter and inanimate nouns merge the two possessive cases.

An example ignic noun: ĩkur, ikkússa (snake, ign):

An example neuter noun: âghur, āghússa (egg/ovum, neu):

(III) Ā-Stems
Mestian ā-stems make up the third declension class in the language. They are nouns that end in <-ā> in the nominative, and are almost exclusively neuter. All nouns of the class merge the two possessive cases, regardless of gender.

The ā-stems come in two subclasses:
 * regular-class
 * džā-class

The džā-class category specifically includes abstract nouns derived from adjectives using the derivational <-džā> suffix. These nouns have their own unique declension that doesn't quite line up with the regular declension of this declension class, although similarities are too great to be ignored.

An example regular neuter noun: qásā, qasášša (sound, neu):

An example regular neuter noun (different stress paradigm): elétā, elétašša (table knife, neu):

An example džā-class neuter noun: tándžā, tandžâšša [tán(es)-džā] (tension, neu):

(IV) Ę/Ą-Stems
The fourth declension superclass in Mestian includes nouns that end in the vowels <-ę> and <-ą>. The super-class has two paradigms, corresponding to the endings, that have parallels in declension and are close enough to be grouped into one category.

An example ę-stem aquatic noun: ýšpę, yšpímmę (tadpole, aqu):

An example ą-stem animate noun: óllą, ollímmą (sky, ani):

(V) Ū/Ī-Stems
The fifth Mestian declension class includes nouns that end in the vowels <-ū> and <-ī>. The two endings do not actually cause a difference in inflection: the only difference is that nouns respectively take <-u-> and <-i-> as thematic vowels.

An example ū-stem aquatic noun: dásū, dasúššą (blackfish, aqu):

An example ī-stem inanimate noun: akãkī, akakkíššą (revelation, ina):

(VI) Nasal Stems
Mestian nasal stems are nouns that end in any of {m n ŋ}, preceded by either a vowel or a single consonant. The category systematically includes nouns ending in <-an> as standard members; many of these overlap with a-stems that end in <-an>. A good number of these nouns are slightly irregular in unpredictable and uncategorisable ways.

An example ignic noun: trąkún, trąkúnnu (small dragon, ign):

An example animate noun: awãraŋ, awarhúnnu (muscle fibre, ani):

(VII) L-Stems
Mestian l-stems are nouns that end in <-l> in the nominative; many of them are irregular and have complex stem alternations.

An example l-stem animate noun: tâlhęl, tąllêlle (blink, ani):

(VIII) Alveopalatal Stems
Mendian alveopalatal stems are nouns that end in an alveopalatal consonant in the nominative, namely one of {š ž tš dž}.

An example alveopalatal-stem inanimate noun: béč, béčella (boulder, ina):

(IX) Consonantal Stems
Mestian consonantal stems are generically nouns that end in consonants other than {m n ŋ l š ž tš dž}, while also excluding those that end in <-ur> (but not nouns that generically end in <-r> preceded by another vowel).

Example consonant-stem animate noun: dârab, dârabašša (fowl, ani):

Pronouns
The pronominal system of Mestian only has dedicated pronouns for first and second persons; third person pronouns as such don't quite exist as their role is taken up by demonstratives that all have full declensions.

First and Second Persons
Both the first and second person pronouns in Mestian have emphatic and unstressed forms for all case-number combinations. The first person pronoun lacks a vocative (due to semantics), and both persons lack the possessive cases, compensating with dedicated possessive pronouns.

The first person pronoun is:

The second person pronoun is:

Third Person
The third person pronominal system is more open: all the pronoun types follow one declension pattern.

The proximate pronoun dínaj (this one) serves as a good example:

All other third person pronouns decline the same. Some common ones:
 * dívaj -- that one (that you can see)
 * kévaj -- that one (that you cannot see)
 * kénaj -- this one (that you cannot see)
 * âssaj -- the previously mentioned one
 * ŷlaj -- the same one

The third person pronouns all take a gender determiner that depends on the gender of that which they refer to. These determiners aren't added when people are referred to. The determiners are:

These determiners cause stress shift and are attached directly onto the inflected pronoun.

Verbs
As the concept of clear-cut morphemes is a bit more loose in Mestian verbs, this section is divided into a theoretical and practical section. This is due to the complex morphophonological alternations that exist between morphemes, that's evolved out of a highly agglutinative and isolating system.

Theory
Mestian verbs are quite complex: they inflect for person of multiple arguments, aspect, telicity, tense and mood. They can take on multiple sequential clitics that further narrow their meaning and extract diverse additional semantic information.

Verb Shapes
All Mestian verbs follow a basic shape pattern that determines the order of their morphemes. A full Mestian verb consists of the following components:

These are, in order:
 *  -- preverb; usually prefix or postposition
 *  -- Slot A, one of the two slots for personal agreement
 *  -- the root of the verb
 *  -- the verb's morphosemantic characteristic suffix; can contain more than one such suffix
 *  -- Slot B, the other of the two slots for personal agreement
 *  -- the inflection suffix slot

Person Agreement
The verbs can take four different kinds of personal agreement affixes, grouped into two groups:
 * Primary
 * Nominative agreement affixes
 * Secondary
 * Accusative agreement affixes
 * Partitive agreement affixes
 * Oblique agreement affixes

The positioning of the affixes is complex: there is a strong tendency for the primary affix to be in Slot B, while the secondary affixes are more closely bound to Slot A. Their position is mostly conditioned by grammatical voice.

Both the primary and secondary affixes have four persons and three numbers. These are:
 * Persons
 * First person (speaker)
 * Second person (addressee)
 * Third person proximate (prominent)
 * Third person obviate (sidelined)
 * Numbers
 * Singluar
 * Dual
 * Plural

Mood and Modality
Mestian modality is primarily dependent on modal affixes and mood. It makes a distinction between three classes of moods:
 * 1) Realis moods
 * 2) *Indicative
 * 3) *Gnomic
 * 4) Irrealis moods
 * 5) *Subjunctive
 * 6) *Volitive
 * 7) *Potential
 * 8) *Interrogative
 * 9) Deontic moods
 * 10) *Imperative
 * 11) *Hortative
 * 12) *Permissive

Mood, polarity and tense are inflected together with the same affix. Some moods have different behaviours in the negative: these are primarily the prohibitive (from the permissive) and imprecative (from the hortative). Not all mood-tense combinations exist.

Aspect and Telicity
Aspect and telicity are closely connected in Mestian. The combinations of telicity and aspect are:
 * 1) Telic
 * 2) *Inchoative
 * 3) *Momentane
 * 4) *Delimitative
 * 5) *Terminative
 * 6) *Iterative
 * 7) Atelic
 * 8) *Defective
 * 9) *Momentane
 * 10) *Progressive
 * 11) *Frequentative

The aspect combinations line up fairly evenly:

Aspects are either an inherent property of the root or are marked in the morphosemantic suffix slot.

Voice
Mestian verbs can have one of four (two simple and two 'augmented') voices: The applicative is extremely limited and generally no longer productive in the language; it exists in semantically shifted applicatives and similar fosilised constructions. The active and passive are generally indicated by order of person affixes, while the mediopassive requires a dummy pronoun (remnant of older reflexive construction); applicatives used to be formed by infixation and reordering of person affixes, and these processes have by large been thoroughly irregularised.
 * Simple
 * Active
 * Passive
 * Augmented
 * Applicative (†)
 * Mediopassive

Tense
The Mestian tense system is deceptively simple: there are only three tense-like forms extant in the language, alongside a few fossilised remnants:
 * Present
 * Nonpresent
 * Timeless
 * Telic
 * Present Telic (†)
 * Future Telic (†)
 * Future (†)

The telic tenses remain in a few verbs and are generally unproductive. The future is mostly preserved in hortatives.

The present and nonpresent are the primary temporal distinctions in the language; the nonpresent is the result of the merger of the future and an unattested past tense. The timeless is a tensified aorist that doesn't encode temporal information as such.

The distribution of tenses against aspects is somewhat skewed -- the atelic aspects occur more frequently in the present, whereas telic ones are more frequent timeless or nonpresent -- and some tenses are found only in some aspects -- telic tenses can only have telic aspects, and the future can have only atelic aspects.

Tenses are usually marked either by way of a morphosemantic suffix, or in the inflection slot.

The distribution of tenses is closely linked to moods:

Praxis
The practical section of Mestian conjugation deals with the morphology of verbal inflectional morphemes.

Tense and Aspect
The tense-aspect-mood (TAM) system of Mestian is partially derivational: there exist various fusions -- as well as various degrees of fusion -- of the three categories marked by one or more affixes that can sometimes carry semantic baggage.

The tenses are marked using a huge variety of suffixes and alternations: the timeless has four classes, the nonpresent has six and the present has eighteen different unique classes. The present classes are:


 * Type 1: Morphosemantic presents (seven classes)
 * Type 1a: -n- nasal root-infixed presents
 * Type 1bp: Primary -ešte- augmentations
 * Type 1cp: Primary -ŋ- stems
 * Type 1dp: Primary -ŋ- augmentations
 * Type 1bs: Secondary -ešte- augmentations (ablauting)
 * Type 1cs: Secondary -ŋ- stems (ablauting)
 * Type 1ds: Secondary -ŋ- augmentations (ablauting)
 * Type 1e: -lh- extensions
 * Type 1f: -r/rh- extensions
 * Type 1gp: -w- ~ -j- alternating extensions
 * Type 1gs: -u- ~ -i- ablauting
 * Type 2: Doubly-kinetic presents (three classes)
 * Type 2an: -n- nasal root-infixed, nasal-prefixed presents
 * Type 2ak (†): -n- nasal root-infixed, velar-prefixed presents
 * Type 2as (†): -n- nasal root-infixed, s- prefixed fientives
 * Type 2bs: -(a)gha- augmented, s- prefixed denominal presents
 * Type 2bw: -(a)gha- augmented, w- prefixed detelic presents
 * Type 3: Doubly-static presents (five classes)
 * Type 3ap: Primary -s- root-infixed, -aw- ~ -aj- augmentations
 * Type 3as (†): Secondary -s- root-infixed, -aw- ~ -aj- stems (ablauting, irregular)
 * Type 3b (†): -esse-, -gh- suffixed augmentations (ablauting, irregular)
 * Type 3c (†): -(a)šše-, -gh- suffixed augmentations (ablauting, irregular; suppletive)
 * Type 3d: -ŋ- augmented, -gh- suffixed causatives (ablauting; semantically shifted)
 * Type 3e: -zd- augmented, -d- suffixed perfectives
 * Type 4: circumfixed (two classes)
 * Type 4a (†): -s- prefixed, -gh- suffixed
 * Type 4b: -s- prefixed, -d- suffixed
 * Type 5: irregular
 * - ablauting raw stems
 * - primary raw stems
 * - suppletive
 * - irregular raw
 * - irregular pseudo-augmented

The nonpresent classes are:
 * Type 6: Morphosemantic nonpresents (five classes)
 * Type 6a: Primary -axi- ~ -axu- stems
 * Type 6b: Primary -rh- stems
 * Type 6cp: Primary -gha- stems
 * Type 6cs: Secondary -gha- stems (ablauting)
 * Type 6d (†): Primary -zda- stems
 * Type 6e (†): Primary -zda- augmentations
 * Type 7: irregular
 * - ablauting raw stems
 * - primary raw stems
 * - suppletive
 * - irregular raw

The timeless classes are:
 * Type 8 (four classes)
 * Type 8a: Primary -s- augmentations
 * Type 8b (†): Primary -žd- stems
 * Type 8c (†): Primary -žd- augmentations
 * Type 8d (†): Primary -žd- extensions

The distinguishing feature forms of these classes are:
 * infixed
 * augmented
 * stem
 * extended
 * prefixed
 * suffixed
 * primary vs. secondary

Infixations are single consonants inserted into a verb's root to provide inflectional information. Stem additions are morphemes added directly to roots to form stems onto which morphosemantic suffixes are added. Augmentations are inserted at the end of the morphosemantic slot. Extensions attach to either stem additions or augmentations, both already previously extant as active parts of the inflectional system. Prefixes and suffixes are, respectively, in the prefix and suffix slots; temporal prefixes are usually closer to the root than particles or postpositions, whereas suffixes are usually the first in the suffix slot. The difference between primary and secondary inflecions is that secondary inflection involves ablaut as part of its inflectional process; this ablaut is irregular and varies from verb to verb.

Verbs are (primarily) arbitrarily sorted into classes; verbs can be in several classes at the same time, with semantics that may or may not have since shifted.

Syntax
Mestian is very strongly a head-initial language, with the natural word order varying between VSO and VOS. Verbs always come first in verb phrases, while noun phrases can have their heads be in almost any position amongst their modifiers, with a strong preference towards being initial.

Vocabulary
Mestian/Lexicon