Jorayn
| Jorayn | |
|---|---|
| Pronounced: | /ʒɔrɐjn/ |
| Timeline and Universe: | contact with cree, french and then english |
| Species: | Human |
| Spoken: | Manitoba |
| Total speakers: | 1.01 |
| Writing system: | Joranic / romanization |
| Genealogy: | none |
| Typology | |
| Morphological type: | inflecting, agglutinative |
| Morphosyntactic alignment: | Nominative-accusative |
| Basic word order: | VOS |
| Credits | |
| Creator: | Matthew Turnbull |
| Created: | ~2003 |
Contents
The language
Jorayn is a language that I am in the process of creating on a purely for the heck of it basis, as a personal artlang. It is the second language I have ever worked on, and the first one that really ever got anywhere.
some grammatical overview
Jorayn is a VOS, prepositional language that has quite a bit of case marking and complicated verbs with aspect tense and evidentiality on some verbs. Jorayn is a pro-drop language(It often does not state a pronoun that is evident from context or other grammatical cues).
Orthography
vowels :
| orthography | quality |
|---|---|
| i | ɨ |
| a | ɐ |
| o | o |
| u | u |
| ii | i |
| e | ɛ |
| é | e |
Consonants
| orthography | quality |
|---|---|
| p | p |
| t | t |
| k | k |
| f | f |
| th | θ |
| s | s |
| sh | ʃ |
| ts | ts' |
| kka | k' |
| kko | k'w |
| r | r |
| rk | R |
| rrk | Rr |
| l | l |
| w | w |
| y | j |
| gn | ɲ |
| n | n |
| m | m |
| b | b |
| d | d |
| g | g |
| z | z |
| j | ʒ |
the real grammar section
Pronoun system
Jorayn is a pro-drop language, which drops all subject pronouns, unless emphasis is desired, object pronouns are very rarely dropped.
Jorayn has only one subject pronoun, which declines for the following things :
- animacy
- number
- person
- sexuality
- case
- The inanimate pronouns are jii(1SG) tii(2SG) and lii(3SG), which pluralize via the normal rules to form ja, ta, la.
- The animate pronouns are as follows
- Heterosexual : jor, tor, mor -> jur, tur, mur
- Bisexual : jorr, torr, morr -> jurrk, turrk, murrk
- Homosexual : corr, dorr, porr -> cur, dur, pur
- the pronouns follow the normal case derivations outlined in thier respective sections
notes on the pronouns -The default sexuality is Bisexual, and it would be rather impolite to presume that someone was heterosexual or homosexual. Not to say that most people are bisexual, heterosexuality is still prevalent, but people are inclined to say they're bisexual if they have *any* attraction to the same/opposite sex, as it makes them have more options open for marriage.
- The sexuality marking is a diachronic result of the reassignment of a larger more elaborate system the included case, the plurals were reassigned to the bisexual and the singular objective became the homosexual pronouns; While this change was coming about I debated simply scraping the "extra" pronouns, but realized that since Jorayn is prodrop it would be pretty easy to hide one's sexuality in case you were uncomfortable with someone knowing, although the conculture that speaks the language wouldn't care one way or another, so the sexuality marking stayed.
- The person marking on the inanimate pronouns comes from stories where inanimate things talk and to things, they will refer to themselves, and others will refer to them with these pronouns. A good example is the word for thankyou, which has a form for each second person pronoun: maniimotii, maniimota, maniimotor, maniimotur ... ect
Verb forms and conjugations
Jorayn has at least three verb conjugation groups, which are very distinct from one another, and share some, but not all of their conjugations.
The -tyo verbs
-tyo verbs in general have punctual aspect, and have a relationship with stems such as that STEM+tyo forms the verb more often than not.
The VC(C)V verbs
These verbs almost universally have non-punctual aspect, and many may be derived from -tyo verbs. They have a relationship with stems such as that the final vowel is replaced and one is appended to yield the carateristic VC(C)V# pattern.
The fiiyoliioma verbs
These are verbs that follow the conjugation of fiiyoliioma, which is similar to but not identical to VC(C)V verbs, as it also shares some features with -tyo verbs, and has some unique to it.
The VC(C)V verbs
All of the conjugations below are for the verb lare, to be blue.
| 1st | 2nd | 3rd | |
|---|---|---|---|
| singular | lare | lara | laro |
| dual | lere | lera | lero |
| quintuple | lore | lora | loro |
| plural | lure | lura | luro |
The rest of the conjugations of the verb are based on the present tense, which as you can see is made by the permutation of the end vowels.
For a CVcv stem the V denotes number of the subject (1:a, 2:e, 5:o, 3,4,6,7...:u)
and the v denotes the person of the subject (1st:e, 2nd:a, 3rd:o, 4th:é)
The other tenses and aspects and moods are formed thusly, with lare as an example:
Indicative mood
durative aspect
Futur tense : _n - laren : it will be blue
Present tense : _∅ - lare : it is blue
Past tense : _m - larem : it was blue
Imperfect aspect
The imperfect aspect is considered archaic, and is very rarely used in speech, it's been replaced by the past with a time specified with sun. This is used to decribe actions that began in the past, which continued almost to the present, or which will soon come to an end. The tenses denote how far back in the past the action started.
Far : _né - larené : it's been blue ever since I can remember (but now it isn't, or it won't be for long)
Past : _na - larena : it's been blue for a while (but now it isn't, or it won't be for long)
Close : _nii - larenii it's only been blue for a bit, like a couple weeks max. (but now it isn't, or it won't be for long)
habitual aspect
non-past : Ṽ - larẽ : it's always blue (it's blue everyday, or every couple of days, no chance of that changing soon)
past : _mṼ - laremẽ : it was always being blue (at least once every couple days)
Eternal aspect
non-time : Ṽa - larẽa : it doesn't matter when it started being blue, but it seems like it has been forever, even when it wasn't, and it will be forever, or at least till i'm dead and gone.
Other moods
the optative
immediate : _r
delayed : _ra
A note to make sure of is that underlying NASAL+r clusters manifest as r+NASAL
some usage examples of the optative, which is derived from the indicative.
- koineder - I want to be together
- koinedera - I will want us to be together
- koinederna (underlying *koinedenra) - I want us to be together in the futur.
- mortharrer - I want to be dying!
- mortharrer - I want to die!
The Imperative mood
The specific imperative is formed by reduplication of the ultimate syllable.
- vrminadada : come here! from vrminada : you are coming here.
The general imperative is formed by addition of _mé, it is used mostly in exclamations, it's like asking the universe to do something you know it won't. I can only think of one example from English.
- mortharromé jor - kill me now! (no one really expects someone to kill them when they say this)
