Old Kvembrian

Old Kvembrian is the ancestor of several languages spoken on the continent of Kvember including Kvembrian as the name suggests.

Phonemes

The phonemic consonants are as follows.

The phonemic vowels are as follows. Each vowel has a short version and a long version.

Romanization

Phonemes are romanized as their corresponding IPA symbols. Long vowels are marked with a macron (e.g. /aː/ is written ā).

Nouns

Old Kvembrian is a fusional language that suffixes nouns based on grammatical gender, number (singular or plural), and case (role within a sentence).

In keeping with Kvembrian as an accessible naming language for a fantasy setting, the vowels used for neuter, feminine, and masculine nouns are -i, -a, and -o respectively. Sometimes -a and -o are raised to -e and -u.

There are four cases, agentive, patientive, genitive, and dative. The active case is the lemma form, so when transliterating Kvembrian names into other languages, they typically end in -is, -as, or -os.

There are a number of pronouns in Kvembrian. In addition to the earlier factors we now need to consider grammatical person as well. Unlike English, there is a clusivity distinction in the first person plurals between exclusive (us but not you) and inclusive (me/us as well as you). There is also a distinction in number for the second person (as in you vs y'all or variations thereof).

Verbs

Old Kvembrian verbs are conjugated based on tense and mood. Participles function like adjectives and thus decline based on gender.

Verbs are either transitive, active, or stative. There is no marking to indicate which category a verb belongs to. It must be intuited or memorized.

A clause using a transitive verb marks the subject with the agentive case and the direct object with the patientive case if present. A clause using a transitive verb may not omit the subject. The word order is agent-verb-patient but may be freely rearranged if the case markings are unambiguous.

An active verb does not take a direct object as an argument but otherwise functions like a transitive verb. A stative verb is like an active verb, but the sole argument lacks volition and is thus declined for the patient case. The default word order for a stative verb clause is patient-verb.

An active verb may have its subject decline for the patientive case and vice versa if the speaker wishes to emphasize that the subject has a level of volition that is atypical for the verb (e.g. I fell (on purpose)). Since plurals do not decline differently for the agentive and patientive cases, this is only possible with singular nouns.

Ditransitive verbs mark the extra argument with the dative case and typically place it at the end of the clause.