Mésylþo

=General information=

=Phonology=

Consonants
There is also the glottal /h/ ‹h›, though in any position apart from in onset position position indicates breathy voice in the preceding phoneme, which is phonemic.

Consonant length is phonemic, but only across syllable boundaries, as consonant clusters within syllables do not exist.

Vowels
Orthography for vowels is identical with the IPA values. RTR is differentiating: non-RTR ("tense") vowels are represented with an acute accent ‹´› over the character. Word-final vowels and /a/ are not marked this way and are always tense.

Phonotactics
Mésylþo only allows CV and CVC syllables, with no diphthongs.

=Morphology= Mésylþo has two grammatical genders, also called classes: animate and inanimate. These are by and large also semantic classes, but there are a number of nouns that are semantically inanimate while grammatically animate and so are better treated as genders.

Nouns
Nouns are inflected for person, case, animacy, and number, with the latter three features typically expressed together within a single suffix.

Eight cases exist: Nominative, Accusative, Dative, Instrumental/Associative (considered a single case), Locative, Comparative, Vialis, and Vocative, though for semantic reasons, not all exist for both animate and inanimate classes.

Many adjectives may also be attached to nouns in a clitic form, as a prefix closest to the root.

Person
Possessive markers are prefixes.

Verbs
Verbs come in four different paradigms: Animate Intransitive (AI), Inanimate Intransitive (II), Transitive Animate (AI), and Transitive Inanimate (AI). Crucially, this means that verbs (and adjectives, which are treated the same) must be used appropriately to their paradigm: for instance, the root for throwing an inanimate noun such as a ball is hílo, while throwing an animate object (whether actually alive or not) is arrówe.

Verbs are obligatorily inflected for person and number (in a single prefix). Transitive verbs are obligatorily inflected for the person and number of the object (in a single suffix). They may also be inflected for tense, aspect, and voice as individual agglutinations.

Person
Subject prefixes are always furthest from the root.

Object
Object suffixes are always furthest from the root.

Tense, Aspect, Voice
=Lexicon=