Valian: Difference between revisions

|+Vowel phonemes of Välyatalle

|+Consonant of Välyatalle

There is only one series of plosives in Välyatalle. These are the unaspirated, unvoiced stops {{IPA|/p t k/}} which may be realised differently depending on where they occur.

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 {{IPA|/ɑ e i o u/}} while for the more unusual vowels {{IPA|/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' {{IPA|[tæː]}}.  

The "weakened" variants of ''p, t, k'' (see [[{{FULLPAGENAME}}#Phonology#Consonants|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.

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.

Words in Välyatalle can belong to either a masculine {{sc|(m)}}, a feminine {{sc|(f)}} or a neuter {{sc|(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.

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 ''{{term|pää}}'' 'snow'.

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.