LotM - Nov 14: Edievian: view article

I admit, this is going to be difficult... writing about my own language, that is. Edievian is an a priori language that inhabits an alternate history where it (and its sister languages) exist in Eastern Europe. Its geographic location has resulted in the language being full of loanwords from Latin, Slavic (mainly Old Church Slavonic, but some others as well), and Hungarian.

[top]Ablaut

One of the most distinguishing features of Edievian is the use of ablaut. Ablaut mainly is used in singular/plural distinctions in both nouns and adjectives. Each of vowel (with two exceptions) has a counterpart the denotes that the word in question is plural. They alternate as such:

a > a ɛ > e e > i ɔ > o o > u

Due to strong regularization that occurred, only the vowel in the last syllable of the word will change. Also due to the ablaut patterns, no contemporary Edievian noun or adjective has /i/ or /u/ in the final syllable in the singular form.

[top]Orthography

Personally, I love Edievian orthography. I find it intuitive but graceful. Irish was a strong inspiration for the orthography, as unaccented <i> is used to indicate palatalization of consonants. I could go on forever about it, but instead, read here.

[top]Heritage

Edievian is a member of the Gevian language family. Much like Edievian, the entire family (with one exception) is full of ablaut and is mainly VSO in structure. Because the speakers of the mother language, Colian, did not like the Greeks, Edievian did not inherit many Greek loans (unlike

Colese). Edievian, like its sisters, can be pretty agglutinating (though most inflectional suffixes are fusional). Compound words are common and often used where other languages would use adjective+noun.

[top]Verbs

The verbal paradigms of Edievian are fairly regular (in fact, there are really not irregular verbs, just a few workarounds for verbs ending in non-permitted consonant clusters due to a lack of inflectional endings), but are complex in number. There are three tenses, past, present, and future; two aspects, perfect and progressive (which in the present change to gnomic and progressive), plus three persons and two numbers. That alone creates 36 forms for verbs. On top of that, all transitive verbs can be made passive with the suffix bao-, or change to the volitive with ciáe-, or causative with al-. The negative is also a suffix, na-. Most of these can be used together, creating potential verb forms like:

náicpaonopdodcargaeciáéis NEGNegative (polarity)
not.VOLVolitional (role)
volition, with intention, not by accident.PASSPassive voice (valency)
be verb-ed-mistranslate-FUTFuture (tense)
action occurring after the moment of speech.PROGProgressive (aspect)
be verb-ing.3Third person (person)
neither speaker nor addressee.SGSingular (number)
one countable entity He won't want to be being mistranslated

[top]More

Check out

Edievian's page for more information, or check out articles tagged for Edievian.

[top]A Note on LOTM

Got suggestions for how the next LOTM should be written? See something in Edievian that wasn't covered and you wish it had been? Hate my guts and want to tell me? Feel free to shoot me (argylegasm) a PM with your thoughts, suggestions, and hate mail. Also feel free to drop by the LOTM clan if you have other feedback, want to join in the voting process, or nominate a language!