Sevvuferyn History:Linguistic

Language Families up to Sevvufery

The oldest lanuage in The Sevvuferyn tree of whose existence scholars are aware is ȢȤȜȿ ("ZZanu" being the best approximation according to Sevvuferyn orthography and phonetics, though the real pronunciation was likely closer to /sʛˈæɴɯ/ in the times when ȢȤȜȿ was most commonly spoken. From this language, the gradual loss of the phoneme /ə/, which still puzzles contemporary researchers, caused it to diverge into 4 separate languages, one being proto-Gusvia-Jwar#ða, which further diverged into proto-Gusvia and proto-Jwar#ða, of which proto-Gusvia is the most important. Proto-Gusvia, naturally, evolves into Gusvia, the most famous ancestor of the Sevvuferyn languages; the language from which the name of the planet Erad comes, and also the first to use a similar writing system to Sevvufery.

The phonology of Gusvia, however, was in many ways quite different from that of Sevvufery. For one, it had kept the unrounded close back vowel /ɯ/, which Sevvufery does not have, and still allows tripthongs and consonant clusters of up to 8 consonants - an extreme example of this is the word "milamndiitspruji" /milamⁿʝztxpruji/, which refers to the concept of a person who has just died, having spent a long time in injustice. Additionally, the language had 5 more cases for nouns than Sevvufery and had 4 distinct declensions: 1 for abstract concepts; 1 for natural objects; 1 for things related to humans; and 1 for anything else. Its verbs also were more complex as, despite only having 1 conjugation, there were 7 moods: indicative, subjunctive(used to talk about things which one may do), predictive (used to talk about things which may happen), optative (used to talk about things which one wishes to do), causative, and 2 moods for capability (e.g "I am able to do") and necessity (e.g "I must do"). The only saving grace is that the verbs of Gusvia did not inflect in any way.

However, over time some developments occured which caused the language to evolve into Kaåbarun, the next stage of the language, including the following:

• The declensions for human-related and natural objects merged into a single declension for animate objects
• The predictive was lost, merging with the subjunctive, and the optative mood merged with the mood for necessity to create a stronger version of the mood for capability (e.g I am capable of doing this and wish to achieve it), which was then subsequently lost by merging with the already existing mood for capability. An example is the word "øa" /aɔa/, which meant "to do, achieve, continue" and had these (slightly irregular) forms before these changes:

	Indicative	Subjunctive	Predictive	Optative	causative	for capability	for necessity
Present	øa	aðlõ	øjú	aåil	iiaʰaw	ødë	øðo
Past	øu	aðlow	øjü	aåül	iiaswu	ødeu	øðoj
Future	øø	øðø	øjoj	øåo	iiøwte	ødjö	øðuʰu

And these after the first set:

	Indicative	Subjunctive	for capability (strong)	causative	for capability (weak)
Present	øa	aðúlõ	aåi	iiaðo	ødej
Past	øu	aðüloʰo	aåü	iiaswÿ	ødew
Future	øø	øjðø	øåo	iiøwu	ødjön

And these after the second set:

	Indicative	Subjunctive	causative	for capability
Present	øa	aðúlõ	iiaðo	ødeå
Past	øu	aðüloʰo	iiaswÿ	ødeuå
Future	øø	øjðø	iiøwu	ødjönå

(note that the forms may differ slightly in actual writing due to the fact that what is shown are the Sevvuferyn approximations).

From here, Kaåbarun evolved further, one last time into Krushildnajs before splitting into 2 daughter languages, Sak∞e, from which North-Sevvufery emerges, and Enuú, from which South-Sevvufery emerges. Here are the changes leading up to the development of Krushildnajs

• Many people started saying pronouns after verbs rather than before, due to the fact that emphasis tended to shift from the person doing the action to the action itself, especially in the first person, leading to the creation of new verb forms which were essentially just the verbs with the pronouns added on (the verbs without stem developed into infinitives), and then developed further as forms also emerged for the 3rd person singular and 1st and 3rd person plural.

Take, for example, the sentence "I see the shore" (in modern Sevvufery this would be "saåalen wasul"). In kaåbarun this would be "ez euloa tatun". However, that is only the case in the official version of Kaåbarun. Most people would instead switch to saying "euloa ez tatus" or even "tatun euloa ez", which over time contracted to "tatun euloyz", giving the 1st person singular ending for some verbs, and, due to a few phonetic changes, "sataún heulosyz" as the sentence in Krushildnajs.

However, there was still no form for the 2nd person, as this form was only common in direct speech, where the person doing the action was still emphasised, which would now require the infinitive plus a pronoun.

• The declensions for abstract concepts and "anything else" merged into a single declension for in-animate objects in general, leaving only 2 declensions.
• The subjunctive and causative moods merged into a past subjunctive (from which the imperative and historic conditional moods later emerge), but with seperate forms to the already-existing past-subjunctive (many grammatical scholars of the time write about the strange "two-form-subjunctives" (tujanisi-tarrifi) that the younger generations have mysteriously started using - see this account from a contemporary scholar.)

Now the age of Krushildnajs lasted a long time, namely because, as the name of the language ("krushil(den)" (community) + "ajs" (speak)) suggests, an egalitarian society had been established, causing peace for well over 800 years (for more information, see here. This is a remarkable feat, not only from a political perspective but also from a linguistic perspective, as the language endured very few changes, as attested by a large majority of scholars. However, in the last 200 years of said peace, younger generations shifted more and more towards individualism, leading to prejudice and eventually the breaking of this peace. As a result, the split off from Krushildnajs to Enuú and Sak∞e was violent and caused an enmity that would only be resolved centuries later with the unity of Sevvufery, which, again, is also true linguistically. This is especially evident in the distinction of verbs: the community of Sak∞e had stuck to verbs ending in "s" or "rs" or "r" in their infinitives, whilst the community of Enuú had stuck to verbs ending in "nk" or "n" in their infinitives. This eventually manifested itself in the following way: those in North-West Sevvufery used verbs with "r" and, later, "ar" in their infinitives, those in the North-East used "s" and, later, "si", those in the South East used "n" and, later, "on", and those in the South-West used "nk" and, later, "unk". This is also why Sevvufery has the four-conjugation system with its verbs - another measure to unite the people so long divided by ideology.

The split off from Krushildnajs is also where the loss of the phoneme /ɯ/ comes in. As is evidenced by the name of one of the daughter languages, Enuú (officially /enˈɯɵ/), it became common for the phoneme /ɯ/ to be followed by either itself, /u ~ y/, /o/ or /a/, with the addition of new loanwords from Kluusna, the ancestor of the Cathlushenian language (the Cathlushenians live in the land to the south of South-East Sevvufery). For more information, see here. when surrounded by these phonemes, the speakers of Krushildnajs had a tendency to round /ɯ/ to /u/, which gradually became more common as the younger generations even began to insert extra /u/ phonemes where they were not needed. Thus, /ɯ/ was replaced by /u/. After this, the phoneme was fronted to /y/ in both daughter languages, as is maintained in current Sevvuferyn orthography.

History of Sevvuferyn Grammar

Historic conditional and imperative

Now, as previously mentioned, the historic conditional and imperative moods emerged from the mysteriously formed 'second past subjunctive' of Krushildnajs. This happened in stages: first, people started to form seemingly imperative constructions using the subjunctive. The use of "if only" clauses also drastically increased in writing (due to a portion of the population Krushildnajs wishing that tensions had not increased to this extent), and these also made use of the subjunctive. Initially, much like Ancient Greek, the different tenses of subjunctive were only used to distinguish aspects (which survives today in Sevvufery's future imperatives). However, let's not forget that we have two past-subjunctives. Therefore, for every "past" form of these expressions, we have two different forms of the expression based on whichever subjunctive is chosen.

What happened next depends on which context of the subjunctive's use we speak of:

In the aforementioned "imperative constructions", speakers would generally pair one or two auxiliaries with a subjunctive verb, to give the sense of "may you (not) do that!" (an extra auxiliary was added for negation, and we shall see what happened to it over time). Here is an example using the verb "atsar" (cf. "agar" in Sevvufery):

"atsamtwajõt un nek e ez!"

meaning

"May I never ask that(once)!"

Keep in mind that I used the second subjunctive here, where one can also use the original:

"atsamülõ un nek e ez!"

So, what happened? Well, firstly, the dominant expression easily became the first. The second dropped out of common usage and actually became the precursor to the modern past subjunctive. Secondly, it became common to become ambiguous. As we see in these two sentences, they clearly specify a person, as was common in the time of the people of Krushildnajs, as it was reflective of the unmissable importance of each person in society. However, a consequence of rising tensions was that people no longer cared about this and were quicker to generalise and slander whole groups. This destruction of individuality can be seen in parts of the language: people started to drop pronouns in these subjunctive clauses, and in certain verb clauses which had not followed the pattern of merging their pronouns (this is part of the reason why Sevvuferyn "would" clauses function the way they do). This was more As a result, the sentences would start looking like this:

"atsamtwajõt e un nek!"

Now meaning

"May the question never be raised!"

Or something along those lines. Next, speakers started to merge tense- and mood-markers with main verbs for ease of pronunciation, and thus "e", the past-tense-marker and "un", which marks the iussive subjunctive mood, were dropped and merged with the verb, creating a sentence like this:

"nek atsamtøõt!"

And there emerges a proto-imperative, with the sentence now meaning

"Don't ever ask!"

A few sound changes later, we get the modern Sevvuferyn equivalent: "nek agato!" which just means "don't ask!".

However, there's more, because as we know, Sevvuferýkilý are unlikely to say this sentence in practice. They would rather say "agante", which carries the same meaning since it is a negative imperative. But how did this happen?

Well, let's jump back in the chain to the third stage: "nek atsamtøõt". Notice how I switched the position of "nek" to be in front of the verb rather than behind it? This was not done for nothing. Here's what happens if I would have left the negation in its original position:

"atsamtøõt nek" undergoes a fourth transformation, namely a merging of the verb and negation, and becomes

"atsamtäút"

Same meaning - "Don't ever ask!", but a quicker, better way of saying it.

Just like the first option, this simplifies over time due to sound changes to give the modern Sevvuferyn equivalent:

"agante"

In the case of "if only" clauses, a different auxiliary was used, but still, the tense of the subjunctive used indicated aspect. Let's use an example including "atsar" again:

"atsamtwajõt ømo e ez."

Meaning

"If only I'd ask (once)."

The same processes happened to this expression: first, the pronoun was dropped, turning the sentence into

"atsamtwajõt e ømo"

Now meaning

"If only the question were raised."

Then, the tense and mood markers merged with the verb. Here is the key difference: in this merging, õ was surrounded by the vowel o and the dipthong ao or ø. This meant that, over time, the õ disappeared as speakers tended to pronounce it less clearly than the similar vowel o and dipthong ao. Hence, from the merging the sentence becomes

"atsamtwajoõøt"

Which seems to be a proto-historic-subjunctive. The reason there is a meaning shift here is because the original meaning implies one wishes to have even done an action once. The idea of time was then manipulated, as someone who wants something to be done once could want this because it's happened several times. For unknown reasons, the form adopted the meaning of the consequence rather than the event, so to speak.

A few sound-changes later (bearing in mind that the õ is surrounded), the Sevvuferyn equivalent emerges: "apagø" which now means "I would usually ask".

Now, you might be asking: where are the future imperative and past historic subjunctive in all of this? All we've done is explained how the regular imperative and historic conditional come about. What about the rest?

The answer lies in the fact that I oversimplified the past-subjunctive's evolution. Yes, everything I have just shown is true, but other factors, such as the future subjunctive, influenced the creation of an "urgent imperative" as it were, which led to the development of the future imperative. Similarly, when the meaning shift occurred from "if only" to "would commonly/usually", the formation of the pluperfect tense influenced the creation of a similar "pluperfect" conditional, although this was impossible: the closest one could get was the past historic conditional, which is what Sevvufery has now.

Bÿ

The word "bÿ" has a complicated history, considering all of its grammatical uses.