Faelish Grammar

This article is about the grammar of the Faelish Language.

Syntax

Main article: Faelish Syntax

Word order in Faelish is variable, but traditionally of the form SOV (Subject-Object-Verb) so that, for example, "The cow eats grass" is ohwn foárming (The cow) foárm (foár- grass, in the objective case) itith (eat, in second person singular).

Many bilingual Faels will often use the word order of the other language they are familiar with. For example in middle and eastern Faeland, people tend to write Faelish in SVO order.

Nouns

Typically only proper nouns are capitalized.

Declension

Faelish has four cases: Subjective, Objective, Genitive, and Dative.

Subjective

The subjective is used as the sentence subject.

ohwn fiorsuíl biagadhm teighith. (The cat chases the mouse.)

Objective

The objective is used as the sentence object.

ohwn biagadh fiorsuílm teighith. (The mouse chases the cat.)

Genitive

The genitive indicates possession and material of composition:

Certain prepositions take their nouns in the genitive:

Dative

The dative is used with the object of most simple prepositions.

Declension

There are two recognized declensions in Faelish. The makeup of the declensions depends on the ending of the word being consonant or vowel. Consonants are the larger and simpler declension, adding to the word, whereas the vowels tend to undergo a shift in pronunciation.

Gender

Faelish has two genders, masculine (firen) and feminine (vahnd). The neuter (nóderích), which existed in Çelathi, survives in a few words such as rus (thing) considered as masculine.

The gender of a noun is mostly arbitrary and can vary from place to place. There are however some suffixes that have always the same gender:

• masculine for words ending in for example -ohr
• feminine for words ending in for example -ezh or -enn (see "singulative" below)

Plural

Most (nominative & objective) plurals are formed with -ean, but other common suffixes are -ien, -en, -een, -i, and -ahn.

Singulative

A distinctive and unusual feature of Faelish is a singulative marker, which is in Faelish marked with the suffix -an. For example the noun orvóhl means "tree", the word orvohlán means "a single tree". The latter can even be made into a singulative plural orvóhlenán meaning "several trees (individually)".

Verbs

There are 2 conjugations, and also a handful of irregular verbs. Tenses or moods are formed by inflecting the stem, and in the past and habitual past tenses and the conditional mood also by leniting any initial consonant. The inflected tense and mood forms are: present indicative; present habitual indicative; future indicative; past indicative; past habitual indicative; conditional; imperative; present subjunctive; past subjunctive. Verbs also have a verbal noun and verbal adjective, and continuous constructions similar to those using the English present participle may be formed from the verbal noun and an appropriate tense of "to be". Examples of tense conjugations: (all third person forms without subject pronoun):

Articles

In Faelish, unlike other Celtic languages (except breton), there are two forms of the article, definite and indefinite. The definite article is "owhn" (the), and the indefinite article is "en". The final consonant, 'n', in these articles changes depending on the following consonant. It is realized as 'm' in front of 'm', 'b', 'p', and vowels, and as 'r' in front 'r'. Although it is not required, articles can be elided to the nouns they precede.

Examples:

• owhn orvóhl (the tree)
• owhm pairg (the park)
• er rósich (a rose)

Adjectives

Adjectives in Faelish, for example "mor" (big) inflect as -a (stative), -oh (comparative), -án (superlative). Adjectives do not reflect number or gender.

Adverbs

Adverbs are formed with a prefix: a-, and do not inflect.

Prepositions

Prepositions are typically attached to the words they modify. In some cases the words they modify must be declined to match.

Some common prepositions are:

• pils- (with)
• le- (by or near)
• argol- + genitive (behind)
• arvhor- + genitive (on top of)
• aghad- (in front of)
• óf- (from)
• gó- (to)

Pronouns

	Singular	Plural
1st person	h'O	sohwn
2nd person	sivh	sivhen
3rd person	se (masculine) sa (feminine)	ahd