Valyrio Bardion - Declination

[rodo]

Declination:


Preface | Phonograms | Declination | Conjugation | Logograms | Ligatures | Final Notes


Declination:


High Valyrian has quite a few cases – eight, to be exact – and besides singular and plural, it also has paucal and collective nouns. “Valar” would be an example of a collective noun, it doesn’t just mean “man” (vala) or “men” (vali), but rather all men. If High Valyrian is written using logograms, the case and number of the word is expressed by adding a marker to the noun or adjective in question. An exception are words in the singular (only plural, paucal and collective are marked), and the nominative case (only accusative, dative, genitive, vocative, locative, instrumental and comitative are marked). If only one marker is needed, the marker will be added in the middle, if two are needed, they are added beside or above each other, depending on the direction of the writing. The declination markers – and the conjugation markers – are added following the logogram they modify depending on the direction of the writing.

The markers indicate the pronunciation of the adjectives they are added to, but they are added strictly for semantic reasons, not for phonological ones. Whether it is “ñuha”, “ñuhys”, “ñuhon” or “ñuhor”, all four are written the same way, so long as the number and case are the same, as can be seen in the following examples.

ñuha muña	ñuhys zaldrīzes	ñuhon blēnon	ñuhor ānogar

In this case, the nouns are all nominative singular and no case or number markers are added to either the nouns or the possessives preceding them. All the case and number markers are based on a small circle:

plural	paucal	collective

accusative	dative	genitive	locative	comitative	instrumental	vocative

Let’s look at the example from last chapter again:



The second symbol from the left is “muña” – “mother”. But since the word is genitive – “of the mother” – a small Q-like shape is added after it. The symbol before it (“Valyrio”) and the two after (“ēngos” and “ñuhys”) have no such markers, since the two nouns are singular and nominative, and the adjective takes the case and number markers of the nouns it refers to, even if it is postpositive in this case rather than prepositive (High Valyrian allows both and there’s a difference in nuance).

Finally – and this is the part where I can’t really work with many examples – adjectives also have degrees of comparison – an equative, comparative and superlative. While I am writing this, Dothraki Wiki is (predictably) down again, so I could only find one single example of a sentence where an equative adjective is used: Ȳghāpī īlōn rāelza. In High Valyrian, it would look like this:



The markers for the degrees of comparison are a little more complex than the ones used for cases, number and conjugations. They are as follows:

equative	comparative	superlative

Conjugation