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#7Drsk by Isoraķatheð
DrskEnglish

Morpheme roster

All rosters are sorted in order of appearance.

Lexemes

Nouns

Nouns always have a gender that works more as a classifier à la the taxonomic system of old. They are separated from the root word with a dot in this roster. Furthermore, in any such rosters the case is always the dictionary form tʲ (but see below for other usages) except for names, where there is no suffix (implying t, ť and tʲ as appropriate).

Any noun may change its gender to emphasise different aspects of the root, for which see link.

Where there is a gender and a suffix with no intervening root, take the definition of the gender as the noun.

A lexeme dictionary has a listing of genders, followed by more specific genders CAT MAJ and CAT MIN, And finally the word itself, which is separated from all genders with a dot.

  • z
    • Grammatical and self-reference
    • z.sfmtʲ
      • The following, what comes next
  • dᵘ
    • collections, in general
  • n
    • “Unit” (think “unit”)
    • ns
      • A collection, a crowd
      • +mᵘr
        • in general, less specifically
      • ns.cstʲ
        • A cohort, a crowd of similars.
  • ć
    • abstract objects
    • c.tᵗtʲ
      • two
  • g
    • speech, writing
    • g.mᵘztʲ
      • information
    • g.zztʲ
      • question
    • gg
      • sound, voice in general
      • gg.stᵘtʲ
        • name, identifier (generally unique)
  • sˢ
    • crops
    • sˢlt
      • time
      • sˢlt.ptʲ
        • a short to medium term period of time, usually implied to be biased more toward the future than in the past (i.e. it extends further into the future than into the past).
      • sˢlt.rsḱtʲ
        • a history, a time (this does not appear in the text in this way, but is included for completeness as the morpheme rsḱ is included elsewhere.)

Names, Proper Nouns and the backslash

Names for units are indicated using CAPITAL LETTERS. However, since most foreign names have vowels, their presence, but not their identity, is marked via \[THESE ESCAPE SEQUENCES\]. Exclamations also sometimes use a backslash to indicate that there is a certain vowel that must pair up with the consonant, but again the identity is not indicated. You’ll have to know beforehand, or guess using the vowel insertion techniques.

For more information about \, \[ ... \] and similar escape sequences, see this page. For a concrete example of how importing names work, here’s how the Cindri word Zencuru is imported.

Quasinouns

Quasinouns have a suffix y but no gender. They generally clarify the exact usage of some following compound component.

  • lfy
    • in an approximate manner

Verbs

Verbs lack gender, and their inflections are localised, i.e. they stick close to the verb.

Normally, verbs are free to go everywhere around a sentence, subject to any confinements that a clause might impose – they are themselves delocalised. Wherever they land, they then take on arguments in a telescopic manner, which brings us nicely to order morphemes, which are inflections on the verb that essentially give them a temporal order as well as an order in which they slurp up arguments. If they have no order morphemes, or if multiple verbs carry the same morpheme, then arguments are to be collected from left to right for each set of verbs with the same order morpheme.

  • dᵘħ
    • calculate, understand, derive
  • ŋᵘnᵘḱ
    • insult, damage, hurt
  • f
    • and Note that, e.g. θ φ f is a complete sentence in an of itself (given nouns on θ and φ), so f is only free to move to θ f φ or f θ φ.
  • rsˢg
    • coërce
  • dᵈsl
    • banish, ban, eject, leave
  • dlˡ
    • create, get, capture, produce, collect
  • pþ
    • come/go, leave/arrive (depends on case suffix), have

*** editor's note: As the programming of the relay website does not support hyperlinks, this representation of the grammar note does not do justice to the true Drsk grammar experience found at https://gist.github.com/isoraqathedh/f841e88e86176a22a8ee0d70b83f4c8b

Non-lexemes

Suffices and questions

These are letters at the end of a root that describe its function. They do two things: case and morpheme boundary marker. For a listing see here and here.

Nouns that become dredge replace any suffix with -p. The topic/trigger suffix -ð also marks the thing to be queried when the sentence is a question. Also here’s how to answer a question. Note that sometimes ħŋ is omitted from a lone kdᵘ or sm, as is done here.

Dredge and TAM

These are delocalised inflections — inflections that fall off and become free-floating within the sentence. Unless otherwise indicated, they change form based on the first letter of the noun they are inflecting: if it is a terminal, then place the terminal analogue of the final letter of the consonant of the dredge after it. e.g. dms hrt but dmst pþ, where dms is the root form of the dredge. If either or both letters are unpaired in the phoneme chart, then no change occurs.

Some dredge don’t change no matter what. This is a sign that it is an ownerless dredge (same link as <telescopic manner>) and usually are connectives and conjunctions, for which see link for essential information about them.

A listing of those that exist in this text is:

  • rcᶜ
    • approximately English “tries”. Has an inflection indicating success, suppressing the usual rules.
    • -f
      • implies that the action was successfully carried out.
    • -rⁱ
      • implies that the action has failed to be carried out.
  • kᵏŋ
    • intensifier. Add the first letter from the word it affects at the beginning, and a t at the end if the next word starts with a non-terminal (add nothing otherwise or if no word follows).
  • rsḱ <noun>
    • At the time <noun>. Technically a TAM dredge but since it’s the only one present it’s faster to describe it here. Note that this is subtly different from the definition of rsḱ when it is part of the main sentence. This combination of TAM dredge together acts as a noun.

TAM appears at the beginning of a sentence, always, so an appearance of a TAM word indicates the beginning of a new sentence or a relative clause in the sentence. (None of the latter show up in this text).

The Camera

The camera is an automatic context machine. It allows the speaker to change the point of view to whatever he wishes. A full treatment is given here.

Note here again that certain words inside a camera sentence can be subtly different in meaning when placed elsewhere. The one to watch out for here is that rḱz means “in the past, but not too long ago”.

Sundry

These words have no gender unless marked (e.g. nP “I, a unit”) and usually have no suffix, again unless marked (e.g. Ps), implying a suffix of -t or -tʲ as context allows.

  • P
    • The author, the writer, the narrator, “I”
  • ŋ
    • The proword. This word replaces certain previously-mentioned words. As it name suggests it can replace either a noun or a verb. If the word is implied, i.e. not previously mentioned, it is written ŋr instead.
    • Genders placed on ŋ implies which word it replaces. This allows for some way to figure out which word the ŋ replaces.

Word order

Nouns always appear in this order:

  • 1. Exclamations (possible, must be escaped if placed here)
  • 2. Any TAM dredge that acts like a noun
  • 3. One of these:
    • Intransitive:
      • a. Intransitive
    • Transitive:
      • a. Ergative
      • b. Accusative
  • 4. Other cases, such as the ablative and instrumentative
  • 5. Exclamations (possible)

Verbs go anywhere in the list, as can dredge. However most dredge only appears at the beginning or end, and dredge that indicate TAM are usually placed at the beginning with the TAM nouns and the ownerless dredge.

Most remaining grammar should be available scattered within the roster. Good luck!