A Reference Grammar of the Feayran Language

This document provides a comprehensive grammar of the Feayran language. It is by no means complete, as I am continually growing the language into new applications. Furthermore, I hope that the learners community will soon become proficient enough to begin adding their own innovations. Contributors should keep to the spirit of the language and avoid contradicting this document where possible (and should therefore have a working knowledge of the language as described here), but Feayra is a big continent of many peoples and many languages ranging from the closely related to the scarcely similar. Technically, this grammar only concerns one of them.

For sake of presentation, and frankly because it's awfully fun, the grammar is written from the point of view of a hypothetical researcher having done fieldwork among the feayr. I have not yet decided precisely to what extent the grammar may be considered a canon artifact of the Domhantir setting; I have done my best to incorporate it into the culture and climate of its world, but in order to provide a useful resource for other authors, I have allowed it to be informed by a lot of linguistic theory from Earth, some of which (most obviously, Leipzig glossing conventions and X-SAMPA notation) is not present in Domhantir. Hopefully, I have found a happy medium between technical description and narrative cohesion.

Technological Notes

If I've done my job correctly, the grammar should display correctly on all major browsers. However, I've found that some Internet Explorer browsers are not displaying the outline numbering in the Table of Contents or on section headers, and Mozilla Firefox tends to put frivolous scrollbars on all the example boxes. I'm working to remedy both of these issues.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the folks at the CBB and ZBB for their expertise--to Rickard, for reminding me I had something cool worth pursuing, and for helping sort out my mood nomenclature; to Cedh Audmanh and others for helping with syntax; to Dauyn for critiquing my noun class and incorporation systems; to Tom H. Chappell for walking me through basic phonotactics; and to everyone else for tips along the way.

Feayran in its current form and presentation owes a lot to Jim Henry, who reviewed my old website and grammar back in the summer of '09. To the others on the CONLANG mailing list, thanks for the monumental self-esteem boost that was the '09 learner's project, and for patiently suffering through all my inane questions.

But perhaps most importantly, I'm grateful for all my crazy friends who thought the notion of an invented language was exciting--to Lissi, thanks for sticking with me, rebounding ideas, and kindly whacking me upside the head when I got carried away, and to Riv, 'Nare, Eliav, and the rest of the Domhantir and CP crew, thanks for all your enthusiasm and support. Thanks to Arayley, for helping inspire the feayr so many years ago. My mother in particular deserves mentioning for patiently listening whenever her son came home babbling about his latest idea for a verb conjugation system.

And last, but certainly not least, thanks to the PN section of Green library for providing shelves upon shelves of addictive stimulants in the form of grammars for languages I'd never heard of.