GRAMMAR

Phonology

A few things of interest have to be said about the phonology of Semụr:

Lexical roots carry one of three pitch accents. These provide a tonal melody to the stressed syllable, and (if applicable), the syllable after. Pitch accent is marked on the stressed syllable: acute for high tone (H on both syllables), circumflex for falling tone (H-L if there’s a syllable after, falling otherwise) and grave for low tone (L on both syllables).

Stress is predictable: On a given word, stress is placed on the syllable with the penultimate mora. In other words, if the final syllable is closed, stress is final, else it is penultimate. If you look at the auxiliary verbs tables, you can see this in effect quite easily. In compound words, stress is a bit more complicated, but this doesn’t really matter here. Stress may shift as suffixes are added to a word, and the accentual melody will move with it, but the accent itself won’t change. If a word doesn’t have any of the accent marks mentioned above, then it’s unstressed. This is always the case with articles, for example.

Voiceless nasals (typically written ⟨hm hn⟩) will devoice a preceding unstressed syllables completely. Vowels collapse to [ə̥] ⟨ạ⟩ in this environment. The ⟨h⟩ is omitted on voiceless nasals directly following the symbol ⟨ạ⟩. The onset consonant of the syllable will also be devoiced: /b d g ʋ m n/ ⟨b d g v m n⟩ become [p t k f m̥ n̥] ⟨p t k f hm hn⟩. The voicelessness may spread even further if the onset was a nasal.

/ts kx/ ⟨c q⟩ lenite between two voiced vowels to /ɾ ŋ/, indicated by an overdot. [Note: Other consonants ought to lenite as well, but I haven’t worked out the rules yet, so you’ll have it ever so slgihtly easier than the next person getting a Semụr relay text will. For an idea of how the lenition might eventually end up looking, compare positive and negative forms of the auxiliaries.]

Rounded vowels /ɔ u/ ⟨o u⟩ unround to [ʌ ɯ] if followed by a non-labial(ized) consonant. This is indicated with an underdot on those vowels. Labials are /pʰ p b m m̥ f ʋ/ ⟨ph p b m hm f v⟩, labialized are any consonants or consonant clusters followed by [u]. This can be seen in effect nicely when looking at the inflection table of the intransitive auxiliary.

Within the morphology, the archiphoneme |V| appears. This is realized as /ʋ/ if followed by a vowel. If followed by a consonant, it’s realized as /u/ if the next syllable has a high vowel [u ɯ i] ⟨u ụ i⟩, and as /ɔ/ otherwise.

Syntax

Semụr syntax is pretty straightforward. On the highest level, it can be described as

• Clause: Subject - Auxiliary - (Adverbs) - (Objects) - Verb

“Objects” here refers to both the direct object and any other noun phrases. The order of objects is free, the rest is very strict.

The subject, as well as any objects are prepositional phrase, minimally consisting of an inflected preposition (then termed an article), and optionally a noun phrase. Noun phrases are noun-final.

Morphology

There are four parts of speech which inflect: Nouns, articles, verbs and auxiliaries.

Nouns:

• • Nouns themselves are barely inflectional at all. They merely take an affix (which at times may be a suffix and at times an infix) agreeing with its noun class. As I consider this to be more or less derivational in nature, I’ve included these inflections in the lexicon.

Articles:

• Articles always consist of exactly three concatenated morphemes: a preposition, a definiteness marker and an agreement suffix. All (relevant ones) of these morphemes can be found in the second part of the lexicon. The agreement suffix may act as a pronoun. It may also be replaced by another kind of pronoun, such as the interrogative chî.

• The following degrees of definiteness are distinguished:
  • Definite (requires the argument to both be already established and also be a coherent group or a singular unit)
  • Indefinite
  • Collective (may also be used with partitive meaning, is inherently plural)
  • Negative (used for exactly 0 units)

Verbs:

• Verbal stems inflect irregularly for pluractionality, i.e. whether the action happened multiple times.
• Verbs can take an agreement prefix, agreeing with an object. What type of object is agreed with is lexically conditioned, but unless indicated in the lexicon it’ll be the direct object of a transitive verb, nothing for copular verbs, and either nothing or a patient-like subject on intransitive verbs.
• Additionally, a verb may take an instrumental suffix, indicating what the action was done with. These are also listed in the lexicon.

Auxiliaries:

• The auxiliary consists of a stem inflecting irregularly for tense/aspect and mood; tables above. There are three different auxiliaries, which one to use is lexically determined and listed in the lexicon in front of every definition.
• The auxiliary takes a agreement suffix, always agreeing with the subject.

• The following moods are distinguished:
  • Imperative (used for commands; the general meaning is somewhat broader than in English, also including optatives and the like)
  • Indicative (used in main affirmative clauses)
  • Subjunctive (used in subordinate clauses)
  • Interrogative (used in any type of clause to turn it into a question)

• The following tense/aspects are distinguished:
  • Present
  • Past
  • Present prospective (more or less equal to future)
  • Past prospective (future in the past, may be used for conditionals or simply to indicate a sequence of events)