User:Chrysophylax/Arha

Arha (Lit. ordered, structured) is a constructed language spoken in the Void Demesne, a dim, stellar region between the galaxies in our local cluster. It is a rigorously standardised language based on the dominant speech of the region 4000 years ago as recorded by the Information Cubes. Knowingly structured by conscious planners to achieve a more mellifluous speech, Arha in its current form has accumulated a divergence of over 200 features from the ancient linguistic soup it is based on. It is a moderately fusional language encoding 2-3 categories on average per grammatical affix, with the rare affix encoding up to five.

Arha uses a duodecimal counting system (nakarh safa, lit. 'long count') as the standard but an alternate senary system is in use in vast, largely desolate areas (nakarh resha lit. 'trade count' ).

Word classes

Arha divides the large, independent semantic units into ideophones, verbo-nominals, and adjectives. Adjectives pattern completely differently from other forms of words, a feature introduced by conscious planning in the language's history.

Verbo-nominal stems are distinctly identified by terminating in consonants without a known exception¹, unlike ideophones or adjectives who permit a larger variance in phonetic shape, cf. arh (order, to put in order).

Derivational morphology

Adjectives end in -a /a/ [ɒ] and can be formed from both ideophones and verbo-nominals, cf. renna heavily metallic sounding ( < renn dull clang of metal struck) and arha ordered, structured (< arh to put in order, an order).

Inflectional morphology

Verbal morphology

The verbal variants of a verbo-nominal stem are identified by various affixes that modify the categories of tense, person, telicity, definiteness, and mood.

Telicity

Telicity is marked by a pre-verbal component that can be split from the verb by other categorical affixes. However, this component can never carry accentuation and can only exist disjunct in a clause from its verbal parent, it cannot be displaced further, wherefore it's linked more intensely with the verb.

Definiteness

The verb can optionally be marked for definiteness with the infix -y- which is inserted to the right of the vocalic nucleus in the stressed syttibas before sandhi effects, e.g. //ayrh// → erh [æi̯rχ]. This leads to a situation of vocalic alternation patterns for the indefinite-definite axis. Note that when the verb is not accompanied by a telic pre-verb, the definiteness marker is obligatory.

The non-future tense

The non-future tense nfut affix //Ø// is unmarked but will be noted with the empty-set symbol for the remainder of this article.

This tense is used for past and present events with reference to the speaker.

The future tense

This tense is used for non-past-non-present events. d-, e.g. darh [dɒrχ] will be ordered