Table of Contents

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The Naretvei Language
a. Conventions used
Header
b. Glossary of Abbreviations
1. Introduction
1.1 In-World Introduction
2. Phonology
Sounds of Naretvei
Consonants
2.2 Vowels
2.2.1 Dipthongs
2.3 Other Orthography
2.4 Phonotactics
Onset
Nucleus
Coda
3. Morphology and Syntax
3.1 Nouns
3.1.1 Pronouns
Pronouns
3.1.1.1 Honorific affixes
3.1.2 Gender and Pluralization
Class
3.1.3 Other Affixes

The Naretvei Language

C. LaCourt
4 April 2015

a. Conventions used

Some prior knowledge is required before reading this document for full comprehension, and certain conventions are used in compliance with field standards.

Please forgive the lack of proper usage of small-caps for abbreviations found in code blocks. There is no current workaround. Number markers may also be found in lowercase instead of small-caps, this is a bad habit formed over months of improper practices.

Some further conventions are used to label affixes when they stand alone:

Lastly, the abbreviation "f.r." may be used to refer the reader to the Further Reading section, noting that additional material is available. Example:

The cat is in may cultures considered to be divine in nature, and the subject of worship (f.r. cats, cat worship).

For readers of the web version of this document, no link will be provided in these circumstances, and the Further Reading section must be navigated to manually with the Table of Contents on the left.

In-world texts will be marked with an red header, like so:

b. Glossary of Abbreviations

In this section are located the non-standard glosses used by this document. A more complete list of standard glosses may be found on Wikipedia. These abbreviations are the ones used in this document.

Abbreviation Meaning

1. Introduction

The Naretvei language was begun in February 2015, as another re-imagining of the Saadan language I'd been concocting for over a year. Though intended to be spoken by a fictional race known as the Oran found in a series of stories yet to be completed, it is designed to be both learnable and speakable by real human beings^™^, though different enough to English to be confusing.

The language features a Verb-Subject-Object sentence order. It is primarily a synthetic language by way of agglutination, though it does feature numerous analytic-style appositions and particles and a single fusional affix, -nen. It incorporates ideas and features from mutliple previous language sketches going back about two years to the very first version of "Plû'ua'sv'dýner" that popped up during NaNoWriMo 2013. In-world text is written from the point of view of a scholar going by the name "Dacci", if there's any interest.

1.1 In-World Introduction

The Naretvei language is the last surviving branch of the so-called "True" languages, the Greater Tayme family, descended from the early Savidenyrr language spoken on the shores of Anared's Koylum-Savahos region. It is by far the most wide-spread of that family, spoken even on the homeworld itself all the way out to the furthest reaches of the Ossinn arm of this galaxy. Most famously, it is the native tongue of the colony Naret, imaginatively named for the language's word for 'planet'. The native term for the language derives from that name, appending the suffix '-vei', meaning 'language' or 'speech'. In turn, the people are the 'Naretyan', though in this case it applies strictly to inhabits of Naret itself, the whole still being Oran of the empire as same any found on the homeworld.

This document is a collection of notes I have produced after years living among and studying the Naretvei-speakers. I hope it will provide insight to both non-speakers and speakers alike.

2. Phonology

The phonology of Naretvei was heavily inspired by Japanese, with influence from French and English.

Sounds of Naretvei

Naretvei's sound inventory is overall a simplification of its ancestor's, losing not only the sound /l/ but /f/, /θ/, /ð/, and /ɴ/ as well. The vowel inventory lost many similar sounds as they merged, but has developed a kind of vowel-harmony in their place, maintaining approximately the same number of sounds, but in more reasonable locations, and never more than from a set of five at a time.

Consonants

Phonemes Bilabial Dental~Palatal Velar~Uvular Glottal
Plosive p b t d k g
Nasal m n ŋ~ɴ
Fricative v s~ʃ z~ʑ [ç] [x] [ɣ] χ h
Affricate t͡s d͡z
Other w ɾ~ɺ j [ɥ] ʁ~ʀ
Orthography Bilabial Dental~Palatal Velar~Uvular Glottal
Plosive p b t d k g
Nasal m n nq
Fricative v s z (h) (h) (g) x h
Affricate c j
Other w r y (w) rr

2.2 Vowels

The vowel system was inspired by Finnish, with later influence from Japanese. It features vowel harmony, where back vowels become fronted. The line can be drawn as <a o u>/<ä ö ü>, with <e> neutral and tending toward fronted, and <i> also neutral but tending toward <a o u>. Affixes take the fronting of the stem. Compound words are treated as distinct words, not subject to fronting assimilation.

Phonemes Front Center Back
High i y ɯᵝ~u
Center e̞ ø̞ o̞
Low æ ä~ɑ
Orthography Front Center Back
High i ü u
Center e ö o
Low ä a

2.2.1 Dipthongs

When combining affixes with stems, the affix takes the rounding of the stem. However, when combining stems with other stems of different roundings, one of two things may occur:

2.3 Other Orthography

Diacritics are used to break apart clusters of vowels across syllable boundaries that may be confused for dipthongs. The diacritic is placed on the first vowel of the new syllable. For <e i>, the diacritic is ◌̈, the umlaut or diaresis. For <a o u ä ö ü>, the diacritic is ◌́, the grave accent. The grave accent is used in preference to the umlaut on those letters to prevent confusion with rounding. The combining high tone mark may be used if full diacritic support is not available. If no diacritic support is available at all, ignore all extra orthography.

Punctuation is also used. The preferred method is listed first, with the alternate method listed in parenthesis following:

2.4 Phonotactics

Naretvei is a mora-timed language with a simple (h)(C)(R)V(V)(r|y|h)(C)(C) syllable structure. Orthographically, a final <y> may appear after long consonants in the coda to separate them from identical following consonants, i.e.: *<nnn> → <nnyn>.

Onset

The onset is patterned (h)(C)(R). The rules governing it are simple:

Basically, only one fricative is allowed, even if it's locked away in affricates.

The onset carries no morae.

Nucleus

The nucleus is simply V(V). If the vowel is short or a dipthong (the second vowel is present), the syllable carries 1 mora. If it is a long vowel, in which case the second vowel may never appear, the syllable carries 2 morae.

Coda

Similar to the nucleus, the coda is (r|y|h)(C)(C). Disregarding <r y h>, the first consonant may be geminate, in which case the second consonant never appears and one mora is added to the syllable. As for when the second consonant is present, far harsher rules restrict it. The following are the acceptable consonant clusters able to be found in the coda:

<r y> and <h> may be found before any of these, with <r> trending toward [l] rather than [ɺ] or [ɾ].

3. Morphology and Syntax

Naretvei features a Verb-Subject-Object(s) sentence order, with optional fronting of the subject with a nominative postposition, and optional fronting of an object with an oblique postposition. Inside the sentence itself, each piece is more or less head-final, with head-inital elements occuring when dealing with complements and appearing to occur with prepositions such as the oblique preposition or the locative prepositions. Beyond the numerous particles, adjectives, and adverbs, words are built agglutinatively with both prefixes and suffixes, and can feature noun incorporation, though verbs never directly link together.

3.1 Nouns

Nouns are marked for singular and plural numbers, and do feature a distinction with animate and inanimate gender, but for most use cases gender is unimportant. The number of affixes available for them is potentially greater than those for other parts of speech, as many small nouns are becoming grammaticalized as suffixes to others.

3.1.1 Pronouns

More prelevant than gender is register, at least in the pronouns. There are several registers available, the greatest number of which can be found in the second-person pronouns.

Pronouns

An innovation from Early Naretvei, many speakers of other Tayme languages like Saadan will be unfamiliar with the registers of Naretvei, which are realised the most in the pronoun system, which features up to five of the six registers: familiar, default, polite, formal, humble, and disrespectful. Only one of the three base persons achieves this count, the 2^nd^ person, with the 1^st^ person having four and the 3^rd^ three. I analysed another person, the 4^th^, which is used to refer to a vague non-present party. This category was deduced from the existence of the pronoun "bejin", and a similar use case for the otherwise 3^rd^-person pronoun "acanq".

1^st^ person:

2^nd^ person:

3^rd^ person animate:

4^th^ person:
These are used to refer to an unknown party, like the "they" in "what do they know?".

Demonstrative pronouns/adjectives/adverbs:
These, though treated as pronouns, can function freely as adjectives and adverbs.

3.1.1.1 Honorific affixes

In addition to the various registers of pronouns, a number of affixes exist to further refine them. These affixes can be placed on both pronouns, proper nouns, or regular nouns acting as titles. Many of these affixes cannot be attested to have existed before Naretvei. It is assumed that a local substratum of a long-gone species' language provided these, though no archaeological evidence has turned up in support of this theory.

These affixes are:

3.1.2 Gender and Pluralization

Naretvei has two grammatical genders, an animate and an inanimate. Every non-grammatical word in the language has a gender: all the nouns, all the adjectives, all the verbs; this leaves out appositions and particles.

Class

Another feature that will seem alien to speakers of other Tayme languages is classes. Noun classes are mostly vestigial, a recent innovation stemming from pronunciation changes that produced a second form of pluralisation that spread across the entire language to also cover nominalisation. Many outside learners find it an annoyance, though I see it as an interesting way to resolve the fluidity issues of the original pluralisation strategy.

The animate gender contains things such as people, animals, and active actions, though there are several exceptions as in any tongue having gender. Its pluralization strategy is the infix -em-, placed before the first nucleus like so:

In perfect contrast, the inanimate gender contains static objects and passive actions, with the same exceptions. It functions by the infix -Vv- before the first nucleus, where V is the first vowel in the word.

When a number is provided, the noun must agree with it: zero and one are singular, more than one is plural. Negative numbers are also treated in the singular, but seeing as they almost never appear in any communications it isn't terribly important to follow that rule. Some speakers even always use the plural in reference to negative numbers.

3.1.3 Other Affixes

This is a list of all current productive affixes. If a letter occurs in parenthesis, it only occurs when adjacent to a consonant. Unless noted, each affix follows the vowel harmony rules and is written with the preferred vowels. Examples will be indented below each point.