Behru cesik

Setting
Behru Cesik (a combination of Behru, an ethnonym, cet, to speak, and the suffix -ik, indicating a manner of doing something) is a language spoken in the southern half of the lower Sedonese basin, the Hedri plains, and in the Northern portions of Kakinsake. Its speakers form a distinct ethnicity in the south of Sedone, independent from the dominant Idili. The Behru people originated from the distant and now extinct Behru empire, which attempted to settle the Hedri area 1500 years prior. The empire has collapsed since then, and the Behru people are now isolated, their nations being increasingly encroached upon by the native peoples they had once tried to conquer.

Phonotactics
All Behru morphemes of native origin consist of a 1 syllable root with a maximum structure stop-fricative-approximant-vowel/syllabic l or r-consonant. All syllables must start with a consonant and contain 1 vowel. No dipthongs or vowel contact exists in any kind within Behru. An exception, of course, lies in words of idili origin, which are typically multisyllabic and cv in structure. All free roots except particles have a suffix or infix of some sort indicating its grammatical role in the sentence.

Vowels
All roots that can exist unbound, along with several bound roots, hold a tone. This tone may be either a rising or falling ´ or `. Along with this, the vowel carrying a tone also carries a strength, an aspect of the root which carries grammatical information, and this strength can be on 1 of 4 levels. Words of idili origin carry the tone and vowel strength on the final syllable.

Sandhi
Sandhi in behru can be divided into two categories, tone sandhi and consonant sandhi. No vowel sandhi of any kind ocurs except in vowel stem roots, which are highly irregular and must be learned on a case to case basis

Consonant sandhi
Rule one- all stops and fricatives agree in voice with the final stop or fricative, ex: k+g=gg d+t=tt s+j=zj

Rule two- h turns preceding stops into fricatives, and dissapears after fricatives, ex: t+h=s b+h=v s+h=s exception: y+h=sh

Rule three- n assimilates with the following nasal, ex: n+m=mm n+ng= nng n+ñ=ññ

Rule four- dental stops and fricatives combine with y to become palatal, ex: t+y=c d+y=j s+y=sh z+y=zh

Rule five- y becomes a hiatused i after palatal consonants, ex: c+y+a= ci.a sh+y+a= shi.a

Rule six- y and w become zh and v in two cases, either when before an identical vowel, or at the end of a syllable followed by a consonant other than h,ex: y+i=zh w+u=vu kawd-kavd kayd-kazhd (also remember rule one, kawt-kavt-kaft)

Rule seven: shsh, ssh-c, zzh, zhzh-j

Tone sandhi
Rule one: in a word, the tone rises up to a rising tone, and falls immediately after, Vice versa for the folllowing tone.

Rule two: when two tones of the same type are next to eachother word internally, the first is absorbed into the second tà+tà=tatà tí+tí=tití

Rule three: in a weak vowel, there is no tone contour. Rising tone weak vowels are pronounced with a steady high tone, falling tones with a steady low tone.

Rule five: A word with multiple tones has the highest stress on the last one, second highest on the first one, and in between a crescendo

tàjeksétLÌ

Basic Grammar
Behru in the modern day is highly fusional, although the language of old, in the days of empire, was far more agglutinative. This older stage of the language is popular in literature, but this article primarily focuses on the Hedri colloquial. All root morphemes of the language can be split into 4 groups. All free morphemes are part of onne of 3 parts of speech, verb, noun, or particle. Adjectives and adverbs do not exist as a part of speech, they can exist as either prefixes or derived from verbs. The language is most commonly uses a subject object verb word order, but there are no strict rules on word order in most sentences. The language is exclusively head final, with all modifiers placed before the head. Verbs in Behru are exclusively

Morphemes
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Free
! scope="col"|Bound
 * Semantemes
 * Verbs, Nouns
 * adjectival prefixes, adverbial prefixes, derivational sufixes
 * Grammemes
 * Grammatical particles
 * grammatical sufixes, positional sufixes, grammatical infixes
 * }
 * grammatical sufixes, positional sufixes, grammatical infixes
 * }

Noun Morphology
Behru Nouns may be modified to show the nouns role in the sentaence. This modification is shown through vowel strength, final consonant mutation, and suffixes. A nouns number is also shown in this way, and there is no distinction between number and role markers. The standard Hedri dialect has 9 sentence roles and 3 numbers attached to the noun fusionally, but several dialects to the North have fused many postpsitional suffixes to the location suffix to form anywhere between 10 and 19 roles. The three numbers of Behru are one, few, and many. The few number is used for small groups of things, pairs, and a cluster of things. The many number implies that there are too many of a noun to be easily counted. There is also a mass noun suffix, -mik, with its own endings, but grammatically it is treated effectively identically to the one number. Nouns, excluding irregular ones, can be divided into the following declension groups: k, t, n, ik, ot, l, a, i, e, r. The declensions may also be divided into animate, inanimate, and abstract/mass, each of which use slightly different endings.

Verb Morphology
Behru verbs are conjugated by factors, person, number, transitivity, tense aspect, and mood. Many Behru sentences consist of only a verb, as both the subject and object may be dropped if they can be determined by context. Another feature of Behru verbs is exculsive transitivity. A Behru verb MUST change form in order to change its transitivity, unlike english, where most verbs can have their transitivity changed. A Behru intransitive verb differs from the English verb as it may agree with either the subject or the object, and uses different sets of endings for both. An intransitive verb agreeing with the object gives a sense of inevitability to the action, like the difference between "I slept" and "I collapsed on the bed after an exhausting day." Aspects, moods, transivity, and tenses are indicated with changes in stem. Stem changes in a regular verb, cet, to speak, and a regular vowel verb, mala, to move, are shown here. Malë would mean "I moved something" and malal would mean "I moved over there". Cedl is a nonsense verb form, it is shown simply to show the morphological changes in a regular consonant verb. After the stem is changed, person-number endings must be applied. Some moods are only compatible with certain tenses, for example, the intention mood is only used with the future stem, and the varying command/ request moods are exclusively present stem.

Step 1: Mood
Present tense As you can see, there are several processes capable of changing a behru verb stem. The first is weakening. Weakening is used to form the irrealis stem, which is used for all statements not known to be true. To get the present stem, the final vowel or stop is weakened. In order to get the possible condition stem, both the stem vowel and final stop must be weakened. To weaken a stem, vowels are reduced to their weakest forms and final stops become fricatives. For intransitive verbs, the l is removed and the stem vowel is weakened. The stem then has mood markers attached to it. Notice how some mood markers have their own tone. These mood markers are infact bound verb roots, which are attached to the possibility stem. This list is by no means exhaustive in how many compound verbs can be formed this way. Intransitive forms are formed by suffixing l and voicing the preceding stop. The command form is formed uniquely. The command form strengthens the root vowel, and suffixes -la to intransitive verbs. The tone of the root is then shifted to the last syllable. Notice how malal is contracted to mall before mood endings.

Step 2: Tense
Past tense, indicating things that have already happened, is indicated with the infix le. le is added before the final consonant of the present transitive stem, present intransitive stem, or either form of the irrealis stem. In the irrealis stem, le is reduced to l and if the preceding vowel is ë, it is elided Unless the final consonant is already an l, in which case nothing happens. Future tense, for actions that may happen in the future, is formed similarily, with the infix ne (weakend to nî). Mood markings are then added. (note: request and command forms are exclusively present tense.)

Step 3: Aspect
Aspect is the simplest part of the Behru verb. It is indicated, with one exception, with unchanging prefixes. The most common aspect, which indicates a continous action, is created through reduplication. To reduplicated, the first consonant and core vowel are attached before the stem of the verb. The verb may then be conjugated as normal.

Examples

cèt: talk cecès: is talking cecî`s: might be talking cecèles: was talking

brúvi: watch, supervise bubrúvi: is watching