Yivrian grammar notes

Almost all of the grammar is better explained at http://students.washington.edu/jaspax/yivrian

Word Order:

Sentence word order is SVO.
Within the noun phrase, order is Head-Adjective-Prepositional Phrase
Adverbs most frequently occur immediately before the verb
Subjects and sometimes objects are freely dropped when context is sufficiently clear about who the actors are

Noun Case:

Yivrian has five noun cases, four of which occur in this text. They are:

• Nominative/Accusative - unmarked
  Used for the subject and the direct object of verbs
• Genitive - prefix a-
  Indicates possession or association
• Dative - suffix -os
  Indicates the beneficiary of an action; may be used in place of the nominative to especially emphasize the direct object of a verb. Certain verbs require an object in the dative
• Ablative - suffix -on
  Indicates the instrument, time, or place of an action. The object of a preposition must be in the ablative case if the prepositional phrase is adverbal (but not when the prepositional phrase is part of a noun phrase). When added to a word that ends with a vowel, the final vowel follows the ablative ending, e.g. kenda > kendona (NOT kendaon).

Possession:

There is a set of possessive suffixes that are used in place of possessive pronouns in Yivrian. These are attatched to the so-called "long form" of the noun stem, which is formed by adding -i- after the last vowel. The vowels {i e} become {í é} under this transformation, and vowels that are already "long" are unchanged. If the word ends with a consonant, an epinthetic /e/ is added. Finally, the possessive ending itself is added.
Two such endings occur in this text:

-sa	yours (2sg masc)
-la	his (3sg masc)

Verbs:

In this area I especially urge you to check out the verb morphology and semantics sections in my online grammar, since they make much more sense.

There are six "aspects" of a Yivrian verb. Three of them occur in this text:

• Immediate direct, ending -ya
  The unmarked verb ending, indicates the base form of a verb
• Immediate causative, ending -nya
  Indicates that the subject acts on the object to cause it to perform the action of the verb. The object of the caused action, if any, is given in a clause beginning with "eth".
• Copular direct, ending -(i)nya
  This verb ending causes a lengthening of the previous stem, just like with the possessive endings. This form indicates that the subject *is* the thing given by the noun root, or has the *quality* of the thing given by the noun root.

Tense is given by a suffix after the main verb ending. The following tense endings occur in this text:

-a present progressive
-l past inchoative (affirmative)
-r past inchoative negative
-la past progressive affirmative
-ra past progressive negative

Tense in subordinate clauses is *relative* to the tense in the main clause. If the main clause is in the past tense, then the subordinate clause will be in *present* tense if it is also in past time. (Putting the subordinate verb in past tense implies past-in-past or pluperfect, while future tense implies future-in-past.)

Mood is too complicated to explain here, so I'll just give glosses of two of the modal prefixes that occur

mo- "can" or "could"
rode- "would like to"