Languages of Fantasia (Outdated)

All the nouns in Áredian belong to one of three genders. Masculine nouns end in -o or have no ending at all in their nominal form, feminine nouns end in -a, -e or -é and neuter nouns end in -i. The trend is that neuter gender is gradually disappearing from the language: there's no neuter form for adjectives (if neuter nouns are modified by an adjective, they take the masculine form), the corresponding personal pronoun ó is shifting its meaning towards "common gender" (used when the gender or the sex of the person is not important), many neuter nouns have acquired an alternative way of declension (mostly the masculine one).



Áredian nouns are heavily declined for case. The grammarians usually split all the forms into the basic cases (whose endings may differ depending on the type of declension) and the additional cases (which use the same suffixes for all the nouns). Though this classification is largely subjective, we will stick to it in order to give the quick overview of the case forms in Áredian.



The basic cases are as follows:



In order to avoid ambiguity it should be noted that, unlike in Kerwanese, the partitive case is never used as an object of the verb to express unfinished actions.



Below are some more examples of different declension paradigms of Áredian nouns:



* - also amma in colloquial speech



It is necessary to mention that the endings are slightly different in the more conservative Énárian dialect (e.g. the silent declension preserves ě in the subjective case - nom. gal, subj. ei galě, acc. gale - or there's no homonymy between the nominative and accusative cases of the feminine -e declension - nom. ama, subj. ea amea, acc. ame)



The additional cases are really numerous, around 15-20 depending on who's counting. For the quick overview we'll take the bunch of locative cases which are formed from the locative forms of the nouns + case suffix.



For example:



Most of the other cases are formed with the help of the accusative and dative forms.



Despite the complex case system, the formation of the plural is really simple in the standard Áredian. All you have to do is to insert the plural suffix -ed- between the stem of the noun and the case ending. Thus for example, the nouns gal and álo decline as follows in the plural:





The conservative Énárian dialect however preserves some of the distinct plural endings, for example, -este for accusative plural and -eksis for dative plural.



The last thing to mention in this quick overview of the Áredian nominal morphology is the subjective marker. It is actually the vestige of the definite article which could be declined for all the basic cases (and it still does perform this function in the Énárian dialect), however nowadays it is used in order to define the subject of the sentence. It is still declined for two cases:





The instrumental subjective marker is used in the structure which serves as the substitute for the non-existent passive voice in the Áredian.