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The Elder Faeryn Language

(Base Dialect)

Copyright © 2000 C.E. by Dustin Jon Scott
[Last Update: November 24^th, 2018]

ELDER FAERYN — Base Dialect Introduction to the Proto-Borean Language

Linguistic and Dialectical Overview — History and Development

Glossogeny and Linguistic Prehistory

“The Eldertongue”, as it was known by speakers of its descendant languages, also known informally as Old Borean (OB) and more technically in modern linguistic studies as the Proto-Borean Language (PBL), was created ex nihilo, albeit very gradually, by a supposedly thereunto mute Anatolian people who at the earliest stages of linguistic development used a speech shockingly similar both to the natural manner in which the Corvus caurinus ~ Corvus brachyrhynchos (Crow) gradient/hybrid of the Pacific Northwestern United States communicates, and to the “uh-oh” theory of glossogeny among Homo sapiens: One type of vocalization might have meant “danger, predator!”, and another, “danger, rival!”, still another, “come hither, there’s food!”, and so on. This people was (like, and possibly inspired by, Crows) able to refine this process into an extremely complex system of vocal communication that enabled them to function cooperatively toward communal goals such as defensive and offensive measures and maneuvers, including complicated ambushes, and food-finding endeavors. The people believed this to have been divinely guided as one of the Primordial Charismata, and claimed to have had the ability to translate between local Crow populations and their own groups (which due to an astounding level of proto-syntactic similarity was likely possible, as many species such as the tool-manufacturing New Caledonian Crow have demonstrated feats of remarkably Human-like intelligence); this may have been the original source of common myths of future societies concerning divine inspiration for their own languages (cf. “Language of the Gods”, “Divine Language”) and anecdotal or legendary accounts of persons occasionally learning the language(s) of birds (cf. “Language of the Birds”). Hence was only an infinitesimal step to using certain consonants and vowels in association with gestures, tones, and possibly facial expressions to convey basic psychological concepts such as firmness, being, highness, etc., and stringing these together into simple monosyllabic words for things and ideas defined vaguely by their constituent “morphonemes”. As the language’s speakers, the Proto-Borean people, migrated westward along the European coast of the Mediterranean Sea, the language gained increasingly sophisticated syntax and grammar to govern how these words should fit together to form whole sentences. At first this process was simple: A speaker might have said the word for “me”, followed by the word for “go”, followed by the word for “up”, followed by the word for “hill”, producing “me go up hill”. This was an extremely primitive, very poorly analytical or isolating language that often used root-inflection of lexemes with a CVC ~ CCVCC morphology (where C = a consonant, an “h” digraph, or one of a limited number of consonant clusters treated as a single phone, and V= a monophthong or diphthong) to distinguish between passivity, intransivity, transivity, causality, time, aspect, frequency, and a host of other characteristics, and relied upon word order, tones, and possibly also gestures to indicate the difference between, for example, a passive, present-tense verb and an intransitive, past-tense verb. However, as this primitive and fragile syntax was evolving during a period of migration, the people who spoke the language found that other nearby bands and tribes were using different word orders, and using the same word forms for different lexical categories. While these “sub-dialects” were still somewhat inter-intelligible, these differing lineages of syntactic alignment based in the same morphoneme inventory and resultant overlapping of morphologies managed to cause sufficient confusion both between and within the various proto-dialects, that the need arose to mark words with affixes to clearly define each word’s grammatical and lexical role. Suffixes were added to mark verbs and nouns, and both the consonants and vowels of these suffixes could be changed according to the language’s inherent [morphoneme = vague meaning] morphosyntax, allowing for the creation of clearly marked verb tenses and noun classes that could be easily understood by the sounds used to express them; noun cases also began to appear, both grammatical and prepositional, and verb moods could be expressed by adding prefixes to verbs, as could a cornucopia of different verb aspects. Even affixes themselves, such as lexical category markers, could be inflected ad nauseum. Soon there were hundreds of thousands of (possible) word forms per each lexeme’s inflecto-derivational paradigm. Out of this sudden explosion of inflection and derivation emerged what would become known as the Elder Dialect — that is, the dialect spoken as the Proto-Borean Language was first beginning to evolve beyond its absolute proto-language state into a more thoroughly developed speech. Thus, by the time the nomadic Proto-Boreans had reached their new homeland in the historical area of Etruria, the speech of the Proto-Borean people had come into its own as a full-fledged and complex tongue: a concise, moderately agglutinative, highly fusional, oligosynthetic language — the relative proto-language of the Borean Language Family.

Early Dialectical Developments

In its first stages as a true language, Old Borean was a highly fusional language with a limited number of morphemes, as each morpheme corresponded only to a single phoneme (hence the afore-used term, “morphoneme”) such as a consonant, digraph, or vowel, and used these morphonemes to define the lexemes and inflections that comprised them. Each morphoneme had a range of conceptually related meanings, so that an “arc-morpheme” (either a lexical root or affix) constructed of them might only be vaguely defined by its morphology, therefore both arc-morphemes and whole lemmas (canonical word forms with the most “neutral” inflections of a lexeme’s inflecto-derivational paradigm) were associated with much more specific concepts than one might have guessed by analyzing their constituent morphonemes. As time went on, many lexemes became so associated with the concepts they described, that they were used with little regard to the literal meaning outlined by the morphemes they comprised, allowing certain words to be used metaphorically, figuratively, or even just plain incorrectly, and subsequently undergo semantic drift, leading to a handful of cases in which the semantic meaning of a word seemed unjustified, or at least little justified, by its morphology (especially in the case of interjections), though this was the exception rather than the rule, and would only begin to occur on a truly noteworthy scale in subsequent dialects. This also allowed new words to be coined from old lexemes or specific word forms that would not necessarily have made sense according to the definitions implied by their morphologies, and could only be understood in the context of the older lexemes they were derived from. Additionally, a large number of roots were created via onomatopoeia (especially in the case of animal species names) and had no literal meaning discernible from the roots’ morphologies, though such roots were affixed and inflected just as any arc-morpheme root in the Old Borean language. All of these forces working together somewhat obscured the oligosynthetic origins of much of the language’s lexicon.

ELDER FAERYN — Base Dialect Introduction to the Proto-Borean Language

Linguistic and Dialectical Overview — Diagnostic Summaries

Syntactic Overview - Summary Contextual Diagnosis Lexical Overview - Summary Morphological Diagnosis

The Elder Dialect of Old Borean most commonly employed a subject-verb-object word order for independent clauses in the transitive, verb-object-subject for dependent clauses in the transitive, verb-subject-indirect object in the intransitive, subject-verb-object in the reflexive, object-subject-verb in the passive, and subject-object-verb in the causative. (This does not apply to stative verbs in the adjectival and adverbial moods, which were prefixed to whatever they modified.) The Elder Dialect most often used either a manner-place-time or place-manner-time order, with other arrangements being slightly less common but perfectly acceptable. Despite having a relatively free word order, the exact meaning of many words depended heavily upon the words around them: For example, a verb’s subject marked in the nominative case could be either the agent or experiencer of the verb if it was intransitive, the agent only if the verb was monotransitive or causative, or the patient if the verb was passive; if the verb was ditransitive or reflexive, however, the subject (agent) would be marked for the ergative case. Similarly complex rules governed the direct and indirect object of sentences. While context was certainly important, Old Borean was foremost a highly inflectional language rather than an analytic one. In informal speech and writing, Old Borean was a pro-drop language; in formal speech and writing, pronouns were obligatory. Morphology: Root arc-morphemes used a C, CVC, CCVC, CCVCC, or CVCC order. These were whole words early in Old Borean’s prehistory. V equals verb class. Verbs used a (C1)V1+[root]+V2C2V3C3(C4) order. C1 equals mood; if absent, implies indicative mood. V1 equals aspect. V2 equals voice and tense. C2, V3, C3, and C4 equal tense. Adjectives and Adverbs used a re-arranged verb order. Nouns used a (C1)(V1)+[root]+V2C2(C3)(C4)V3(’C5(C6)V4) order unless derived. C1 equals mood. V1 equals aspect. V2 equals number and class. C2 and C3 equal central declension. C4 equals determiner. V3 equals gender and number. C5(C6) and V4 equal peripheral declension. Roots could sometimes be doubled or used as prefixes: [root]+V+[root], where V equals intensity and class. Radicals generally used a simple (V)(C)CV(C) order. Allomorphy is almost nonexistent.

Morphosyntactic Overview - Summary Inflectional Diagnosis

The Old Borean language had the most complex system of inflection and derivation of any known language. Lexical category markers transformed verb roots into either nouns or full verbs. Nouns (including pronouns) could be inflected for noun class, number, person, gender, grammatical case, prepositional case, and also determiner. Verbs could be inflected for voice, tense, grammatical mood, intensity, verb class, multiple categories of aspect, and conjugation in gender, number, and person with their primary arguments. Verb inflections were so extensive, in fact, that the language had no need for either auxiliary verbs or copulas. Adjectives and adverbs were a sub-class of verb, created with the adjectival or adverbial mood in combination with the stative voice (for non-participles). This arrangement was highly conductive to the formation of adjectival and adverbial participles, created by changing the adjective or adverb’s voice. All verb forms could be easily transformed into verbal nouns, such as gerunds and infinitives, merely by adding the verbal gender morphoneme to the end of the verb. Nouns could be transformed into verbal nouns by using the verbal gender as well. Both nouns and adjectives could be given a stative gender, roughly equating to the English suffixes -ity, -itous, -ness, -ism, -ist, -ry, etc. There were also radicals — usually monosyllabic or disyllabic conjunctions, verb mood supplements, and interjections.

Phonetic Overview - Summary Phonological Diagnosis

• Phonology is at the heart of the Proto-Borean tongue’s innermost workings. Each of the language’s limited number of perceived phonemes corresponded to its own set of vague yet interrelated psychological concepts; these morphonemes were then strung together into verb-based word roots and inflections. The result is a language that was not only highly fusional, but also oligosynthetic with surprising brevity. This was made possible by what one might call active fusion: A morpheme would take only one or two of all its interrelated meanings depending upon its relative position within a root or affix. The language’s “morphoneme oligarchy” (phoneme inventory) included 30 monophthongs and diphthongs, 13 consonantal monographs, and 13 consonantal digraphs, for a grand total of just 56 morphonemes (not including consonant clusters perceived as single phones) providing all the various shades and nuances of a morphosyntactic and semantic complexity unparalleled by any other known language. Because of this complexity, there was little if any room for allophony among word forms, though the language had evolved so by virtue of its own internal features that morphonemes of phonetic similarity were also relatively close in semantic similarity, meaning that occasional mispronunciations probably wouldn’t have caused an unreasonable or intolerable amount of confusion.

• While the Old Borean language expressed grammatical moods morphologically, it probably also used some degree of intonation, as does English — but unlike English, it would have used intonation to supplement morphological distinctions whose meanings may not have otherwise been obvious. It is also possible that intonation was used to supplement the language’s massive inventory of vowels and diphthongs to prevent any overlapping that may have confused listeners, though even if this were true it is unlikely that it was practiced consistently enough to qualify the Eldertongue as a tonal language. However, it is relatively safe to assume that the Proto-Borean tongue was an intonation language.

Pro-Dropping and Diglossia

Within the Elder Dialect existed a certain amount of diglossia, which could be loosely divided into an acrolect and a basilect. While non-expletive pronouns were obligatory in the acrolect, expletives such as the pleonastic pronoun (an example in English: “it”, as in “it is good to work”, also known as the “preparatory it”) were typically found only in the basilect. Within the acrolect, these forms were avoided (for example in English: “to work is good”) although, strangely, they were not considered incorrect (per the English example: “it” refers to the to-infinitive, “to work”; since infinitives are considered verbal nouns, “to work” can logically be the referent of “it” — in other words, the “it” isn’t truly an expletive). The pleonastic pro-adverb (an example from English: “there”, as in “there are many people here”) was likewise avoided in the acrolect, and had its own rationale in the basilect (in this case, a special ambiguous form of “there” was used, so that the word for “here” could be its referent). So while the basilect dropped many non-expletive pronouns, the acrolect avoided the so-called “expletive”, “pleonastic” pro-forms.

ELDER FAERYN — Base Dialect As transliterated from the Elder-Runes alphabet

Verb Inflections — Voices and Tenses (Exemplar: eredenele, root: red)

• Note: The transitive verb forms, monotransitive and ditransitive, are morphologically indistinguishable. Reflexive verbs are treated as passive.

• Additional Note: The Aorist Atelic, Aorist Telic, progressive, perfective atelic, perfective telic, and perfect progressive verb aspects should be considered tense functions rather than true aspects, as the “aspect” in the morphology of the Proto-Borean Language had its own, distinct morphological place at the beginning of the verb (unless said verb was also inflected for mood, in which case the aspect followed the mood inflection).

ELDER FAERYN — Base Dialect As transliterated from the Elder-Runes alphabet Verb Inflections — Conjugation (Exemplar: eredelen, root: red)

? Mood Supplements — Radicals

The Elder Dialect’s verb morphology made it impossible to express more than one mood with a single verb. Therefore, it was impossible to express, for example, a “negative dubitative” (“I doubt it doesn’t”) mood using the Elder Dialect’s standard rules of verb morphology. However, there existed in the Elder Dialect a lexical provision for just such a contingency: the mood radical. Syntactically, mood radicals were the Old Borean language’s closest equivalent to auxiliary verbs and copulas. (Usage of these is exampled above.) Using mood radicals for whole phrases, sentences, or clauses, while never inflecting a verb for mood to begin with, was very common in casual writing and conversation, however, and became the standard in some of the more analytical dialects that later developed. Even in the Elder Dialect, a few moods could not be expressed without the use of mood radicals (most such are not listed here, as they are created merely by combination of the moods above; examples of these that are listed above include the prohibitive and deliberative moods). For more information, see the section on Radicals.

Verb Inflections — Aspects (Exemplar: eredelen, root: red)

OLD BOREAN — Elder Dialect As transliterated from the Elder-Runes alphabet

Verb Inflections — Adjectives and Adverbs (Exemplar: nelene, root: n)
? Adjectival agreement with Nouns (Exemplar: nelne, root: n) — Nouns presented in the singular, dual, trial, paucal, plural, and mass.
? Adverbial agreement with Verbs (Exemplar: enelenen root: n) and Adjectives (Exemplar: nelne, root: n)