User:Elector Dark/Mestian

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
 * Singular
 * 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); they have irregular semantics but regular morphology. 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.

The aspect inflection morphemes have four different shapes, based on whether they are surrounded by consonants or vowels:

Aspect affixes are attached to the verb, with a general tendency to attach to the telic momentane and atelic progressive when deriving/changing aspect. Many verbs have differing telic and atelic stems that may diverge quite wildly from one another. Additional affixes exist, but they usually carry semantic, derivational information along their aspectual information -- the ones in the table are primarily inflectional.

Person and Voice
Mestian is pecular in that it inflects for voice using the order of affixes for person marking in the verb. Thus, person marking and voice are intrinsically linked. The distinction between the active and passive is determined by the ordering of affixes into the two slots:

Here the red letter represents the primary affix and the black letter the secondary affixes. Applicatives attach a <-žde-> as augmentations onto the moprhosemantic slot, after the last morpheme (including temporal augmentations) and use the same affix order as passives. Mediopassives use the order of indicatives, whilst requiring the reflexive pronoun <ãmaj> to inflect and come after the verb.

Mestian verbs agree with the nominative, accusative, partitive and oblique arguments with unique affixes, in turn grouped into primary (nominative) and secondary (accusative, partitive, oblique). Verbs can take at most three at a time; they cannot have both the accusative and partitive at the same time. The secondary affixes, when occuring together, can fuse into one unseparable and partially opaque hyper-affix, with a less frequent separate form. The person affixes have four different shapes, based on whether they are surrounded by consonants or vowels.

To improve legibility and reduce table size and number, the following matrix is used:

Mood and Polarity
Grammatical mood in Mestian has a simplistic realisation: it is plainly marked with an inflectional suffix at the end of the verb. The modal suffix is conflated with polarity.

Mestian moods are divided into three morphophonological classes:
 * D-Moods
 * Indicative
 * Gnomic
 * Potential
 * Interrogative
 * S-Moods
 * Subjunctive
 * Permissive
 * K-Moods
 * Volitive
 * Imperative
 * Optative

The mood affixes have two forms: a postconsonantal and postvocalic form:

In the event that the interrogative needs to be stacked with another mood, that mood's regular affix is used, and is then followed by a cliticised =jā / =jāla. This formation is used most frequently with the gnomic and subjunctive; the simple interrogative is considered to be indicative in nature.