Today’s work is in grammar. Draványa is an inflected language, like Latin but not (in its modern form) to the same degree. Thus there are declensions and conjugations of nouns and verbs, respectively. This what I’ve been hammering out. It’s still a work in progress, as I work from the existing lexicon of several hundred established words. I aim to keep the existing names in place, insofar as is possible, and I have a list of “core” names that I will make an effort to not change. Thankfully most of these are from relatively late in the creative process, when my linguistic ignorance was more total than it is now. But there’s a few stragglers.
Ytherra itself is one of these, alas. In recent iterations I’ve resorted to the unlovely step of making it a Selurean word (which I can do very easily since almost nothing has been done to develop the Selurean language.) The problem arises in two places: in the initial y and in the double r, neither of which were to be found in the phonology of Draványa as it was originally conceived after reading J. C. Catford’s wonderful A Practical Introduction to Phonetics
In more recent versions of the language, the y has appeared, corresponding to the sound of i in English lid – recall that the i in the transliteration system that I have adopted for Draványa refers to the ee in English meet. However, the two sounds are not differentiated in Draványa’s syllabic script, and thus the original confusion. The rr remains an issue.
Now, though many names will remain as they are, many descriptive terms will be changing to reflect the new grammar, which is already much more fleshed out than it was when I came up with them. Thus, a term like Arashál Uilíru, once given as the “Emperor’s Glyphs,” will likely change to reflect the new plural genitive value of the root word arásha. Thus in its new form the term would be Arashalúr Uilíru.
Note that genitive forms precede the word they modify, while ablative and lative forms follow. This is similar to the word order used in English to reflect possession, one of the Genitive case’s functions. However, when the genitive case is used to indicate position, in which situation the word order will be the opposite of what an English speaker would expect. Thus “my hammer,” indicating possession, but “the hammer is with me” to indicate position. In Draványa this use of the genitive does not change the word order, and so édh vegérat, the latter being the noun meaning “hammer” and the former the singular, masculine, genitive form of the personal pronoun, might mean either, depending on context.
The genitive is one of three “positional” cases in Draványa, the others being the ablative and lative. All have other uses as well, but in this sense the ablative is used to denote motion or transition from the noun being modified, while the lative implies similar motion or transition toward. The genitive, then, in its positional function, denotes position with some other object or person. These cases can also represent motion in a particular direction; backward, forward or in place with the ablative, gentive and lative cases respectively.
At any rate, the first noun declension (based on the noun’s controlling vowel, rather than placed rather arbitrarily in a particular declension as it is in Latin,) is done and the second and third are in progress. The present, active forms of the present tense for the first verbal conjugation is also done. These bits represent the most fundamental elements of the Draványa language. Once it’s done the world (of Ytherra, of course,) will be my oyster.
