Aud̄d̄aun̄yo - Concept
Aud̄d̄aun̄yo is an a priori conlang I’ve been working on for a while, originally with aim of creating a Semitic-like a priori language based on the misunderstandings of Semitic linguistics at the time. Since then I’ve drastically reduced the Semitic elements and there’s now a greater emphasis on its polysynthetic morphology and, in particular, its TAM marking which can be applied to most forms.
It has a large consonant inventory with labial, dental, alveolar, palatal, velar, and uvular series as well as a couple of glottals. The stops and fricatives come in voiced, voiceless, and emphatic (ejective) series; the alveolar and palatal series have an additional set of affricates (again voiced, voiceless, and emphatic); and the alveolar series also has a set of three lateral fricatives. The labial, velar, and uvular series also have phonemic gaps (all three lack ejective fricatives, and the labials lacks all stops except the voiced stop). There are fairly significant sandhi effects.
The vowel inventory is much smaller. There are 7 different vowel qualities each of which can be short or long, as well as two diphthongs. Syllable structure is CV(C) with long vowels only allowed in open syllables (or if followed by a geminate).
Aud̄d̄aun̄yo has ten different noun classes forming an animacy hierarchy placing the D̄un̄un̄aul (the speaker population, originally conceived as desert-dwelling nomadic human-sized carrion-beetles but now probably no longer beetles to allow for human-like speech) first, with other sapient people, then animate creatures coming before the seven other classes. Mixed groups agree as the most animate member of the group.
There is a certain amount of root+pattern derivation (the main remnant of the Semiticity) from (mostly) triliteral roots for both verbs and nouns, but the system is no longer fully productive with derivational affixes more common in recent strata of the lexicon.
The most important aspect of the morphology is the screeve (a term stolen from Georgian and used rather inaccurately) which defines a scope of relevance for whatever form it is attached to. It is a circumfix marking mood (one of the indicative, subjunctive, jussive, interrogative, imperative, tentative, abilitative, epistemic, or obligative) as well as two tenses (one of ancient-past, middle-past, recent-past, immediate-future, middle-future, distant-future) one for the start of the scope of relevance and one for the end of the scope.
There is an extensive system of fifteen cases, mostly marked with suffixes, but a few with additional prefixes. The dative is used for the object of singly-transitive verbs, the remaining argument of ditransitive verbs takes the thematic case. Additional cases are the genitive, benefactive, aversive, causal, instrumental, privative, locative, ablative, lative, essive, exessive, and translative. Like several other polysynthetic languages, it exhibits suffixaufnahme (i.e. “he shot a man of the people” > “he.NOM shoot.PAST man.DAT people.GEN.DAT”). Nouns may take one or more screeves before or after cases suffixes (or even after some and before others).
The verb complex is much more, well, complex. Ever verb must receive at least one screeve (with two screeves describing “perfect” tenses, three describing “doubly-perfect” tenses e.g. “I have had run” etc etc but more than two screeves being increasingly rare) together with any number of more optional affixes. A verb may take an affirmative or negative prefix, a telicity prefix (the telic prefix is only possible if the two tenses of the screeve are different, and the atelic prefix is only possible if both tenses are different). There are also optional evidential suffixes (distinguishing between direct, secondary, inferential, and hearsay).
Personal pronouns only occur as clitics, which may be used as an enclitic on nouns to mark possession, as an enclitic on prepositions to mark their object, as a proclitic to mark the subject of a verb, or as enclitics to mark the object of verbs. These occur in three persons and singular and plural. The third person clitics occur in all ten classes, the second person occurs in D̄un̄au, sapient, and animate classes and the first person occurs only in D̄un̄au and sapient classes.
Word order is generally VSO with indirect objects occurring before direct objects in ditransitive verbs, prepositions are used rather than postfixes, and genitive constructions place the genitive after possessed noun. There is no copula verb, instead the fully-declined predicate is conjugated as a verb and any modifying words (e.g. preposition, adjectives, etc) are placed on the exterior of the verb complex. As the predicate takes the form of a verb in copular statements, the predicate (and its corresponding verb complex) occurs before the subject.