Yrkyr

Yrkyr language
Jyrkyr
Pronunciation	[/ˈjər.kər/]
Created by	Raistas
Setting	planet Morev
Ethnicity	Jyrwutyr
Native speakers	70 000 (271 local year)
Language family	Yrharian Yrkyr language
Early forms	Proto-Yrharian Proto-North-Yrharian

Yrkyr (Yr: jyrkyr /ˈjər.kər/, or jyrharkyr /jər.ˈhɑr.kər/) is a North Yrharian language, spoken in the northeastern part of Mtovrex (Turix/tʷu.ˈrʲix/) in the Irgva continent (Kynon /kə.ˈnʌn/). The name of the language means "the speech of the local people". The other living Yrharian language is Yhkagur /jə.ʰka.ɣʷur/ spoken further north between the White Mountains and the Shallow Sea, which is unintelligible to Yrkyr. Both languages evolved from a common ancestor approximately 2 000 years ago and still remain in contact, allowing new words entering easily. Yrkyr also underwent a slight Mtari influence by the contact with the Mtari people. It is reflected by the presence of many Mtari loanwords in its vocabulary, however they were adapted to the Yrkyr phonology and thus may be almost completely unrecognizable to a Mtari speaker.

The Yrkyr language has approximately 70 thousand native speakers, most of whom are monolingual and illiterate. Some also learned Mtari due to the modern compulsory education policy, which requires children to get a basic education in boarding schools.

Yrhu

Yrhu (jyrhu /jər.ˈɦu/) is a dialect of Yrkyr spoken next to the Shallow Sea. While being intelligible with Yrkyr to some degree, it differ in vocabulary and grammar from the inland language. It shares some more lexical similarity with Yhkagur, while phonologically it is almost identical to Yrkyr.

Phonology

Consonants

Like other Yrharian languages, Yrkyr lacks a voiceless/voiced distinction in consonants, which is present in Mtari and thus makes a noticeable accent in Yrharians trying to speak it. Consonant clusters are not allowed word-intially and finally in native words, and only two consonants are allowed together medially, creating a steady rhythm while speaking the language. This rule is also applied to loanwords from Mtari, which allows long consonant clusters. Even the name of the language is Tari in Yrkyr. Syllables ending in a consonant are considered heavy and usually receive a stress, which is otherwise unpredictable.

	Bilabial	Dental	Post-alveolar		Velar		Glottal
			central	lateral	plain	labialized
Nasal	m	n			ŋ	ŋʷ
Plosive	p	t			k	kʷ
Affricate		t͡s	t͡ʃ	t͡ɬ
Fricative		s	ʃ	(ɬ)	x	xʷ	h (ɦ)
Approximant			j	l		w
Trill			r

Palatalization and labialization are two unique Yrharian features. In Proto-Yrharian almost every consonant had a palatalized and a labialized variants. But a sound change, that resulted in lowering of North Yrharian high vowels, allowed to eliminate them as phonemic everywhere, except for velars, which still preserve labialized counterparts. In modern language both palatalization and labialization occure before /i/ and /u/ respectively, but these features are not phonemic anymore. Instead new consonant alterations derived from the change.

Vowels

	Front		Central	Back
	long	short		long	short
Close	iː	i		uː	u
Mid			ə
Open-mid	ɛː	ɛ		ʌː	ʌ
Open			aː		ɑ

There are five vowels, four of which contrast in length. The quality of long vowels mostly overlaps with the quality of short vowels, except long ones are pronounced slightly more closed, while short vowels are slightly centralized. The only exception is /aː/ which is fronted noticeably comparing to its short counterpart. Long vowels are denoted with a silent "h" before consonants in the orthography, since the consonant /h/ appeares in this environment, while conjugating various words. In Yrhu the final "h" is pronounced as a weak aspiration, but it is still silent before other consonants, lengthening a preceding vowel.

Phonotactics

Most basic Yrkyr word roots are monosyllabic. Typical syllable structures are V, CV and CVC, where C is a consonant and V is a vowel. The first two types are called light syllables, which take part in vowel alterations and don't receive stress, when there is a heavy syllable of a CVC structure nearby. There are no limitations to which consonant may appear word-initially or in consonant clusters, which are only possible on syllable boundaries. Root final clusters are not allowed, an epenthetic [ə] being inserted between the consonants, when such a cluster would appear. Vowel sequences are also not allowed, except between different words. Nearby consonants and vowels are affecting each other, creating a comlex system of alterations, some of which became unpredictable with time, for example: lyči /ˈlə.t͡ʃi/ - "to see", lyteŋ /lə.ˈtɛn/ - "I see it", where /t/ always palatalizes to /t͡ʃ/ before /i/; kʷocawun /kʷʌ.t͡sɑ.ˈwun/ - while bathing, lykwos /lə.ˈkʷʌs/ to wash (something) - kwoskyŋ /ˈkʷʌs.kəŋ/ "I wash up", laxkwohŋ /lɑx.ˈkʷʌːŋ/ - "I took a bath", where /t͡s/ becomes /s/ and dissappears.

Morphology

All Yrkyr words fall into one of three, clearly differentiated, classes; verbs, nominals, and particles. The latter class is a collecting term for various non-inflecting words. Nominals may be derived from verbal stems but apparently no verb is derived from a nominal stem, instead a nominal root is attached to an existing verb - a process, called noun incorporation. Nominals may be derived from verbal stems but. Adjectives and adverbials derive from either verbs or nominals, but all of them behave like stative verbs, so they are not listed as a separate class. Yrkyr is between agglutinative and fusional types of language and inflections are often essential to clear understanding and transmission of information. It is also fairly regular in its nominal morphology, but more irregular in the verb one. There are dozens of old irregular verbs with completely unpredictable conjugation patterns, resulted from various sound changes. Proto-Yrharian is considered to had been far more regular polysynthetic, but over time all of its descendants gained more and more irregularities.

Nominal morphology

Yrharain has two nominal declensions based on animacy: animate and inanimate. Each declension has its own set of case markings. Most animals, people, some weather fenomena like thunder, and supernatural entities are animate, while most non-living things, insects, abstract and collective nouns, plants, and sky/weather features are inanimate. Animate nouns typically take the ergative case, while inanimate - either absolutive or instrumental cases, when two are present in a sentence, regardless of their actual role as a subject and an object.

Nominals are inflected for seven cases and three numbers (singular, dual and plural). Any animate noun can take dual number, while only naturally paired inanimate nouns can take it. The rest usually take plural. Reduplication is a non-productive element of derivation. It is occasionally used to indicate a collective group. Mass nouns do not have plurals but new nouns can be derived from them by attaching a plural marker. They would still be declined as singular ones, while the plural marker becomes a suffix. This process is called suffixaufnahme. It can also occure with genitive and dative markers, which become suffixes and can receive new endings. For example, toj - "side", tojiha "sideways" (of the side), become tojihka "to the side", tojihcan "suddenly" (out from the side).

Case endings

	Animate			Inanimate
	Singular	Dual	Plural	Singular	Plural
Absolutive	-Ø	-Ø/-i	-x	-Ø	-x
Ergative	-an/-ahn	-yn	-iŋ	-i/-ih	-nyŋ
Dative	-ka	-yŋka	-iŋa	-ki	-nyŋa
Instrumental	-o	-(u)jo	-no	-o	-jo
Genitive*	-aha(t-)	-yjxa(t-)	-iŋka(t-)	-iha(t-)	nyŋka(t-)
Commitative	-oš	-uš	-noš	-	-
Ablative	-acaŋ	-ycaŋ	-incaŋ	-icaŋ	-yncaŋ

• Genitive case can serve a locative case function when a -t suffix is added and then a locative particle is attached to the suffix.

In order to mark possession, genitive case is used. But Yrkyr does not have separate possessive pronouns like English "my" or "her". Instead there are possessive suffixes, attached to the end of a word. Possessive suffixes are almost the same as person markers in verbs, which they are derived from.

Possessive suffixes

	Singular	Dual	Plural
1st person	-ŋ	-(k)uŋ	-toŋ
2nd person	-š	-kus	-x(t)oŋ
3rd person	-(k)e	-we	-kʷoŋ

Nominal compounding was relatively rare but becomes more common and is generally used to refer to new elements and terms introduced by the Mtari people, for example: kʷottyš - "glass" ("ice stone" from kʷor "ice" and tyš "stone"). However, when a Mtari word is short and easy to pronounce, it would be used instead, like tarot "money" from Mtari dareot. Glass is pkraˁ in Mtari, which is very difficult to pronounce for a native Yrkyr speaker.

Derivational morphology

Yrkyr has a rather comlicated system of vowel and consonant alterations, which arose from various vowel contractions and consonant changes in clusters that formed afterwards. The system, depsite being very old, is still mostly productive and new words can be created using it. Traces of it are thought to have been present already in Proto-Yrharian.

Most common derivation types are listed in the table below. Stress is marked with an acute accent above a vowel.

Derivation types

Reduction	Full vowel	-aha- infix	-w- infix
jýr	háhr	hássar	wutýr
Yrharian	person	village	people
ewýn	éxʷa-	éxʷahan	k-exun
stream	to drag	sledge	wheel
ásna	ocán	ocanáhr	okʷín
tree	wood	forest	storage

Pronominal morphology

Yrkyr has no separate personal pronouns, like English "I" or "you", instead this information is incoded in verbs by using person markers. There is no separate pronoun class either - Yrkyr uses a special set of pronominal clitics that are attached to nouns in order to make a full pronoun. Those are called correlative clitics, some of which are present below.

Pronominal clitics

Indefinite			Demonstrative			Other
negative	ŋa-	no	proximal	taskʷ-	this (near me)	relative	te-	who/which
distributive	nu-	each	medioproximal	tat-	that (near you)	interrogative	kʷo-	who?/what?
elective	je-	any	mesiodistal	čit-	that (not far)	inalienable possessive*	ja-	my, your etc.
alternative	kʷi-	other	distal	tukʷ-	that (far)	emphatic	lhi-/le-	-selv/the one who...

• Inalienable possessive marker can be used either with or without a possessive marker, depending on the context. For example, one can say jatese wakynne "his/her eyes are blue", when he/she is a new topic, but jates wakynne when it is known from the context, which person is being talked about.

The most common nouns used with these prefixes are tlat "place, location", to "side", ne "way", šon "time, occasion", hahr "person". However, the prefixes may be used with any noun, so a large number of pronouns can be created this way.

Verbal morphology

Verbs are the most complex element of the Yrkyr morphology. They are composed of a stem to which inflectional or derivational prefixes are added. The stem itself is composed of a root and an aspect marker. Sometimes there is also a thematic suffix fused to the stem. The affixes that occur on a verb are added in specified more or less rigid order according to affix type. Positions of those types are called templates. A verb doesn't need to have all templates filled, but every verb must have at least one full template. Below is a table of all the Yrkyr verb templates:

disjunct prefixes

conjunct prefixes

stem

The prefix complex may be subdivided into 11 positions, with some of the positions having even further subdivisions:

Preverb	Prefixes				Stem			Suffixes
	-6	-5	-4	-3	-2	-1	0	1	2	3	4	5	6
thematic prefix	negation	evidentiality	valence	modality	aspect	root	thematic suffix	inverse marker	impersonal marker	verb type modifier	object	subject

Although prefixes are generally found in a specific position, some may change order via metathesis. Suffixes are typically more rigid and when a consonant cluster would form, /ə/ is inserted to break a prohibited cluster. Sometimes an unexpected vowel or consonant may appear and their appearance should be memorized, since such alterations are no longer predictable. Typically e appears after the root and before suffixes in some old verbs ending. For example: wynnu "to find out" - wynneweš "You've found it out".

Preverb

Some prefixes, put into this template, indicate various spatial and temporal relation. Their meaning is similar to English prepositions that are used with nouns, but in Yrkyr they are used with the verb instead. Some nouns are also incorporated into the verb and put into this template. Preverb can be analized as separate word from the verb but it always strictly precedes the verb it modifies. The noun incorporation of this type is falling out of use, instead nouns tend to fuse with pronominal particles when possible. The only frequent preverb is te-, which is used to indicate motion along something or that the action may progress. Others are he- indicating a downward movement and nam- indicating action on the surface of something.