Yivrian was the language spoken by the Yivriindi, the largest and most politically powerful ethnic group found in Yivras. Yivrian is the most well-documented of the languages of Yivras, with abundant textual attestation and a long history, and it is also the only language (at present) in which we can present long translated texts.

Yivrian was spoken throughout the fertile central valley of Yivras, from the coastal highlands in the west to the forests of Vanavar in the east, and stretching from the Prasa river in the north to towards the lowlands around the river Tsingris. The Yivrian capital city of Kendilar is found roughly in the center of this area. In the south, there is a dialect continuum between Yivrian and Tsingrisil, while the north presents a much more abrupt transition to speakers of the Praseo language.

The variety of Yivrian documented here is the prestige dialect of Kendilar as it was spoken at the height of the Yivrian classical period, around 2000 AB.

Grammatical overview

Yivrian is an agglutinative, nominative-accusative language. Its morphology is predominantly suffixing, with prefixes used for a smaller number of grammatical categories.

Phonology. Yivrian has a relatively small consonant inventory and a seven-vowel system with a tense/lax distinction in the front vowels. Stress is penultimate by default but shifts to the antepenultimate when the penult is light and the preceding syllable is heavy. A morphophonemic rule of consonant haplology deletes a stem consonant when affixation would produce two identical consonants separated by a single vowel. See Yivrian phonology.

Nouns. Nouns inflect for five cases (nominative, genitive, ablative, dative, malefactive) and two numbers (singular, plural). Case markers are suffixed to consonant-final stems but infixed before the final vowel of vowel-final stems. There are several declension classes (C-class, V-class, U-class, and minor variants) distinguished by their plural markers and stem alternations. A rich set of possessive suffixes encodes pronominal possessors directly on the noun. See Yivrian nouns.

Pronouns. The first and second person have dedicated nominative forms, while the third person uses demonstrative pronouns for nominative reference. In the oblique cases, all pronouns are built from a common oblique prefix ei- plus a person-specific consonant plus the regular case endings. There are no genitive pronouns; possession is expressed through the possessive suffixes on the noun. See Yivrian pronouns.

Verbs. Verbs are lexically classified as stative, durative active, or punctual active. The verb is agglutinative, with slots for voice (active, passive), tense (past, present), negation, and temporal aspect (simple, progressive, cessative, prospective for durative verbs; simple, perfective, prospective for punctual verbs). Modal prefixes (interrogative, imperative, debitive, conditional, volitive, potential, intensive) may be stacked before the verb stem. Nearly all verbs are derived from noun stems through one of several derivational suffixes: the base -ya, the habitual -vva, the causative -nya/-hya, and the copular -(i)nya. See Yivrian verbs.

Participles and adverbs. Yivrian does not have adjectives as a distinct word class. Adjectival functions are served by participles: the stative participle -il, the active participle -en, and the passive participle -es. Comparison is analytic, using the conjunction iin. Adverbs are formed with the suffix -on. See Yivrian adjectives.

Numbers. Yivrian has a decimal counting system. Numbers are prefixed directly to nouns and disallow other determiners when present. Ordinals are formed with the adjectival suffix -il. See Yivrian numbers.

Syntax. Default word order is SV for intransitive verbs and SVO for transitive verbs, with VS order for passives. Causative constructions introduce a new agent as subject and mark the demoted object with the preposition eth. Complement clauses are introduced by the complementizers em (volitive), ef (verbal), and eth (causative). The pro-verbs eya (stative) and atya (active) serve an anaphoric function analogous to pronouns. See Yivrian syntax.