Valian

Pretty much Estonian if it were spoken by a sleep-deprived conlanger, high on insane morphosyntax. Välyatalle (A compound of välya 'good, noble' and talle 'speech') is strongly inspired by Estonian regarding the phonology (I have seen the light, listen to the female vocals) as I have come to find it one of the most phonaestetically pleasing languages.

The grammar is a mash up between agglutinative trends, weird case retention, a half-broken gender system (inspired by Swedish debates about forcing the use of a gender neutral pronoun to not 'offend' anyone), and appositional genitive constructions (with trends to state differences for nouns) and Spanish-style object/subject marking on verbs (e.g. entregandotelo 'giving it to you'). As a bonus, there's a lot of sandhi going on at morpheme boundaries to spice up the mix and a seeming Ablaut-style system in effect for many of the verb stems.

It is currently being quickly codified as I spend more and more sleepless nights running different sounds through my head and deciding on morphological and syntactic features.

Phonology

Vowels

Vowel phonemes of Välyatalle

	Front		Back
	Unrounded	Rounded	Unrounded	Rounded
Close	i iː	y yː		u uː
Mid	e eː	ø øː	ɤ ɤː	o oː
Open	æ æː		ɑ ɑː

Word and sentence final short vowels are often pronounced slightly longer than their non-final counterparts (e.g. salma 'faith' [ˈsɑlmɑˑ]).

In verbs certain vowels may alternate in the stem, e.g. a-alternation in the verb magaan (to eat in an uncivilised manner, to gobble up) gives magaan ~ mähtama ~ memme.

Consonants

Consonant of Välyatalle

	Labial	Alveolar		Post- alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
		plain	palatalized
Nasal	m	n	(nʲ)			(ŋ)1
Plosive	p	t	(tʲ)			k
Fricative	v	s	(sʲ)			(x)2	h
Approximant		l	(lʲ)3		j
Trill		r

Notes:

1. [ŋ] only occurs as an allophone of [n] before [k].
2. [x] is a word-final allophone of [h] (e.g. ragah 'wound' [ˈrɑg̥ɑx]).
3. [lʲ] is encountered in free variation with [ʎ] in certain varieties of speech (e.g. Sanahta dialect leia 'while' [ʎeiɑˑ~lʲeiɑˑ]).

Consonants may be palatalised; this occurs for p, t, n, l, s before i, e.

There is only one series of plosives in Välyatalle. These are the unaspirated, unvoiced stops /p t k/ which may be realised differently depending on where they occur. While they are generally unaspirated, they may receive aspiration at the end of sentences, e.g. päht 'stone' non-final [pæht] becoming sentence-final [pæhtʰ]. Furthermore, they may also be semi-voiced intervocalically and after [n], [m] and [l], e.g. sede 'path' [ˈsʲed̥ʲeˑ]. The semi-voiced allophones are collectively referred to as being 'weakened'.

Phonotactics

Like other languages by Chrysophylax Välyatalle seems to have a strong dislike for syllable-initial consonant clusters - that is, no onset consonant clusters have been discovered so far.

Syllables can at most be reduced to (C₁)V(C₂), where C₁ can be any valid onset consonant (see list), V can be any single or valid combination of vowels (see list of tri- and diphthongs), and C₂ can be any valid onset consonant or cluster (see this list).

Clusters

Clusters are primarily allowed word-medially; there are no initial clusters and only very few coda clusters.

• • /kt/ is forbidden, use /ht/, thus mähtamatu 'I ate myself up' instead of **mäktamatu but mäkkamatu 'you ate me up' and männamatu 'he ate me up'

Orthography

Vowels in Välyatalle are a straightforward process to write. They are written with 9 different graphemes which correspond one-to-one to 9 different vowels. ⟨a e i o u⟩ all represent /ɑ e i o u/ while for the more unusual vowels /æ ɤ ø/ ⟨ä ë ö⟩ are used. As vowels may be long, so too may the graphemes be doubled to indicate this, e.g. tää 'snow' [tæː].

Consonants

At its core, the language writes the plosive series as ⟨p t k⟩, the nasals as ⟨m n⟩, the trill as ⟨r⟩, the voiced labial fricative as ⟨v⟩, the palatal approximant as ⟨y⟩, the lateral one as ⟨l⟩, and the glottal fricative as ⟨h⟩. Palatalisation is not indicated in writing as it is the result of a regular process.

The "weakened" variants of p, t, k (see Välyatalle phonology) encountered after certain consonants and intervocalically are written as b, d, g something which may confusion at first as they are not fully voiced sounds (unlike say English).Like the vowels, the basic (non-weakened) consonants can all be doubled for the long versions of the consonants. Note, this means that there are no double ⟨b d g⟩ at all. The voiced labial fricative ⟨v⟩ is counted among the "weakened" consonantal sounds as it too cannot be doubled even though there is no 'full' form of it.

Morphology

Nouns

Nouns in Välyatalle can be inflected for number, gender, and possession. Unlike the pronouns, they are not inflected for case ever. Instead, Välyatalle requires noun-heavy sentences to obey a quite fix word order to mark objects and subjects.

Gender

Words in Välyatalle can belong to either a masculine (m), a feminine (f) or a neuter (n) gender. This is grammatically determined and does not always correspond to natural gender. For example, siit 'hope' is masculine, vilya 'cloud' is feminine, and aegast 'needle' is neuter. Generally, it can be said that nouns that end in a stop often are masculine, while nouns with final vowel sounds often are feminine. While there are some exceptions, this holds true in more than 70% of the cases. Determining if a noun is neuter is much more difficult as they may appear similar to both feminine and masculine nouns. The only sure way of knowing if a word is neuter is by memorising it.

Number

Nouns can be inflected for three numbers: singular (s), dual (dual), and plural (pl). The singular is the unmarked form.

Singular

The singular is the default, unmarked form of the noun. It is worth noting that there are many nouns which cannot be pluralised in standard Välyatalle such as pää 'snow'.

salma

"faith"

Dual

The dual is used only for things that naturally form pairs such as eyes, twins, etc. It is thus not very common outside a very specific semantic area. Nevertheless, it is often utilised when referring to body parts. Care must be taken to remember that only the dual is correct here. The dual marker -id may seem a bit strange at first to those who have delved into the phonology of Välyatalle. It is not too surprising when one takes into account that this is a relatively new development – the old dual was -idü – traces of which can be seen in certain set phrases such as "riimidüinä!", 'an attractive person, a hottie'.

nee suurana haaval-id rangaha-id

3sg has leg-dual long-dual

"He/she has long legs!"

Plural

The plural is formed by the addition of -in. If a plosive (p, t, k) is "trapped" between a preceding vowel and the plural it weakens to b, d, g (e.g. siit → siidin).

taevana silma-in.

worships star-pl.

"He worships the stars."

Possession

Nouns can be marked directly for possession, absorbing the role possessive adjectives have in many European languages. The markers are -itä, -ikä, -inä corresponding to the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd singular and follow the number marker. Thus siidinä 'his hope' and siiditän 'our (excl.) hope'. Although they are written with "unweakened" consonants they are to be pronounced as if written with the weakened set.

E.g. Template:Välyatalle silma declension

Pronouns

Pronouns are quite distinct from nouns in morphological analysis. For one, they decline for three cases: nominative (nom), genitive-dative (gen-dat), and oblique(obl). They are also inflected for number, but unlike true nouns they never receive marking for possession nor gender. This means that pronouns are one of the freer elements in Välyatalle and sentences composed primarily of pronouns need not follow the otherwise so rigid subject-verb-object word order.

Välyatalle personal pronouns
number		person		nominative		oblique		genitive-dative
singular		first		tee		tu		tä
		second		kee		ku		kä
		third		nee		nu		nä
plural		first		teen		tun		tän
		second		keen		kun		kän
		third		neen		nun		nän

Verbs

Verbs in Välyatalle are inflected for three tenses (distant past, past, present, although some analyses point to a future tense in the passive voice), three moods (indicative, optative, imperative), two voices (active, passive), polarity, number and person. Furthermore, many verbal stems alternate between several vowel qualities depending on things such as mood, voice and tense. They can also be marked for verb objects, similar to Georgian and Spanish.

Tenses

Present

The present is generally used for denoting actions that are taking place in the now and is also used for forming the future tense in conjunction with specific adverbs. Unlike English which has a distinction between "I'm going" and "I go", Välyatalle uses the same form for both. For thematic verbs, the present tense set of inflexions consists of -te, -ke, -na, -teen, -keen, -nän For athematic verbs, add the linking vowel -i- and the thematic endings. Thus magate, magake, magana, magateen, magakeen, maganän for the verb magaan.