Coeric language

The Coeric language is an Asatic language spoken mostly in Coedor and its former colonies. It is classified as a Central Asatic language, closely related to Nelean and sharing more distant relations to other Asatic languages.

Earlier forms of Coeric in Asàel were spoken by the lower classes (typically farmers and craftspeople), while people of higher status used Classical Arazi in stead. Coeric language rose to prominence after Asáel broke up and Coedor became an independent state. Since then, Coeric has become an important cultural language of high prestige in Gondala.

Etymology of the name
The name Coeric is an Anglicised form derived from the Arazi name for the Coeric people, coer [kɔˈɛr], which in turn is a borrowing from Coeric itself, where it is a demonym coaer [ˈkoːər] (plural: coara [ˈkoːrə]). The actual Classical Arazi term for the language is Metsa Coerizi [ˈmɛtsa kɔˈɛrɪzɪ] (language of the Coers) or just Coerizi.

In Coeric itself, the language is usually referred to as Mat Coara [matˈkoː rə] (language of the Coers) or Coaruíg [ˈkoː riːg] (Coer-ish)''. The word coara seems to originally just have meant "the people" in Proto-Asatic, as it cognates are present in other languages as demonyms: cāvarī and variations thereof in the Cāvarī languages and hoveres ''in some northern regions in Between-Rivers, Aradór.

Orthography
The Coeric language is written using a variant of the Asatic alphabet.

The romanisation uses a version of the Latin alphabet, omitting letters k, z, w, q and y and making use of three diacritics: The Coeric orthography, native or romanised, generally does not use any diacritics on consonants. It does, however, make extensive use of digraphs. For instance, i + vowel is mark palatalisation on the preceding consonant and h after t, d, c, g is used to represent the corresponding fricatives.
 * the acute - used to indicate (some) long vowels, used on á, é, í, ó, ú;
 * the grave - used to indicate an elision of a consonant on an affected vowel, used on à, è, ì, ò, ù;
 * the dot - used only on ė and sometimes on ȯ, used to mark long vowels that are tenser than the ones marked with acute.

Likewise, the Coeric language has a fair share of silent letters, most notable word final -e, which is ever pronounced but may reflect on the pronunciation of the preceding syllable's nucleus (generally lengthening vowels or barring their reduction) and syllable-final gh and dh, which are silent but lengthen the preceding vowels. Both the e and the dh/gh are there for diachronical purposes and used to be pronounced historically.

History
Coeric is an Asatic language and, as such, gradually evolved over time from the Proto-Asatic language. The ancestor forms of Coeric have been spoken in what is modern day Coedor since well before the beginning of the Fourth Age, as the various dialects of Archaic Coeric.

A more definite form of the language, however, emerged only in the middle second millennium of the 4th Age, as the Asatic Empire conquered and consolidated the territories held by numerous Coeric tribes. At this point, the first attempts to write the language - Middle Coeric - emerged.

As time went on and many linguistic changes happened, Modern Coeric slowly emerged as the language spoken in most of Coedor, eventually eclipsing and driving to extinction the myriad of sister languages it had had.

Linguistic changes
The linguistic changes the language underwent has lead to the Coeric language being a rather typical member of the Gondalan Sprachbund - it is moderately inflected but has lost the majority of its historical inflected forms, it has developed a set of definite and indefinite articles, and has verbal tenses and aspects formed primarily with the help of auxiliary verbs and modal particles.

Grammar
Over the course of millennia, the Coeric language has underwent many changes to its grammatical system. Some of them are:
 * loss of the neuter gender, which merged with the masculine gender;
 * complete loss of noun cases (vestiges of the declension paradigms remain in the pronouns and articles) and the creation of analytical forms;
 * loss of inflected past and future forms, including perfective and imperfect forms, which were substituted with innovative analytical constructions involving auxiliary verbs;
 * loss of gender agreement in the verb conjugations;
 * and finally, loss of a rigid tense system, which is supplanted by an aspect-based system with tense (past / present / future) optionally marked with particles, adverbs and lexical items.

Phonology
Coeric language and its sister languages are notoriously innovative when it comes to phonology. Some of the historical changes that the language has undergone include, but are not limited to:
 * vowel mutations, merging /e/ with /a/ in front of an /a/, fronting /u/ and /o/ in front of /i/ and, occasionally, palatalised consonants, as well as merging of /a/ and /o/ before /u/ and, occasionally, labiolised consonants.
 * fricatisation of Proto-Asatic aspirated voiced stops to the corresponding fricatives;
 * debuccalisation of word-final /s/;
 * merging of nasal-stop sequences with geminated nasals;
 * nasalisation of vowels and subsequent denasalisation, yielding either long monophthongs or diphthongs;
 * aspiration of /sp/ /st/ and /sk/ and following fricatisation of these sequences to /f/ /θ/ and /x/;
 * several instances of word-final vowel loss;
 * merging of diphthongs into monophthongs and vice versa;
 * loss of fronted /u/ and /o/, as they merged with /i/ and /jo/, respectively.

Phonology
The Coeric phonology is characterised in broad strokes by contrast between palatalised and unpalatalised (slender and broad, soft and hard) consonants and a very strong tendency to reduce unstressed vowels.

Consonants

 * [ç] is an allophone of /x/ before and after front vowels, present in many but not all dialects, as well as the palatalised form of /x/;
 * /p b t d/ can be palatalised to /pʲ bʲ tʲ dʲ/ respectively, /k g/ to /c ɟ/ ;
 * /v/ is the only fricative that is palatised to /vʲ/, /f θ/ are never palatalised, /s/ is palatalised to /ʃ/, /x/ is palatalised to /ç/ and /ð ɣ/ are palatalised to /j/;
 * the velar nasal is found only as an allophone of /n/ in front of velar stops and fricatives;
 * /j w/ are never palatalised.

Vowels
Coeric vowels show a large difference between the permitted values in stressed and unstressed syllables. The table below shows only the vowel phones that are encountered in stressed, unreduced syllables. In addition to these long and short monophthongs, Coeric also has a some diphthongs, these being: /aɪ aʊ ɛʊ ɔɪ/.
 * [ɑː] is generally an allophone of /a/ before /sC/ and is usually, but not always, pronounced long.

Reduction
All short vowels and diphthongs are reduced in unstressed syllables, attaining a more centralised pronunciation. The resulting vowel values is different after palatalised and unpalatalised consonants.

For vowel reduction after non-palatalised consonants: The vowel and diphthong reduction after palatalised consonants is much more extensive and simpler: As a result, the only vowels permitted in unstressed syllables following a palatalised consonant are either /ɪ ʊ/ or, in the case of some dialects and particularly casual and informal speech, simply /ɪ/.
 * the close vowels /i u/ are realised as near-close /ɪ ʊ/;
 * the diphthongs /aɪ ɔɪ/ are similarly reduced to /ɪ/ while /aʊ/ is reduced to /ʊ/;
 * the front open-mid and open vowels /ɛ a ɑ/ are reduced to /ə/;
 * the back open-mid vowel /ɔ/ is reduced to a rounded schwa, /ɵ/;
 * the diphthong /ɛʊ/ is likewise reduced to /ɵ/.
 * /a ɛ ɔ ɛʊ/ get reduced to /ɪ/, too;
 * in many dialects and modes of speech, /ʊ aʊ/ get further reduced to /ɪ/.

Grammar
Coeric is a fusional, moderately inflecting language that overwhelmingly prefers suffixation for the expression of various grammatical categories and functions. Coeric has two grammatical genders (masculine and feminine) and two numbers (singular and plural), though vestiges of an earlier, now unproductive dual remain in some nouns and determiners.

Articles
Coeric has both indefinite and definite articles both in singular and plural, with the additional "partitive" article substituting the indefinite for uncountable and mass nouns. Articles agree with the noun they modify in gender and number, as well as are marked for one of two cases - nominative and oblique. In the table above, the forms before the slash represent nominative forms, while the forms after the slash - oblique forms. If only one form is present, it serves both functions.

It serves to note that the designation oblique is rather incorrect for articles, since the oblique articles are rarely used in the accusative function, serving more often as dative or prepositionals, while noun phrase in the accusative take the nominative articles instead.

Both definite and indefinite articles are often omitted from existential constructions:
 * Ia sai puellsall - I am a healer;
 * Se sad dhegh - You are a / the king;
 * Sai calt - It is a book.

Pronouns
Like articles, Coeric personal pronouns demonstrate vestiges of the older declension paradigms. Pronouns have three cases - nominative, oblique and possessive / genitive. All personal pronouns agree with their referents on their number (sng vs pl), while third person pronouns agree with the grammatical gender, too.

Overall, Coeric is partially a pro-drop language, allowing subject pronouns to be elided rather frequently. In some cases the elision may appear to be obligatory, since Coeric does not have a dummy pronoun; utterances such as It is raining are expressed simply through the verb: lúi.

Nominative pronouns
The nominative or subject pronouns are as follow:
 * jen and en and their respective plural forms are in free variation; the choice of one over the other is largely dependent on stylistic considerations (the former being more formal, the latter being less pretentious) and linguistic background (jen is popular in northern and western Coedor, en - in the East and the larger central cities);
 * another third person pronoun jej is often encountered in written, formal language, as well as when deliberately imitating archaic language; this pronoun used to be the catch-all pronoun for inanimate objects (essentially it) but was gradually replaced by en / iane respective to the referent's grammatical gender.

Oblique pronouns
The oblique pronouns take the roll of both direct and indirect pronouns and are usually used with prepositions, at least those that do not forms special conjugated forms.
 * for the third person oblique, forms ane and nane exist that are unambiguously feminine; the usage of these forms is, however, very dated and even archaic;
 * historically, the oblique forms of dha and ma had been dhu and mu; these were substituted by the innovated forms dhon and mon, created by analogy to the ia --> ion and se --> sen paradigm;
 * despite Coeric largely being a SVO language, oblique pronouns always come before the verb: such sentences are essentially SOV.

Possessive pronouns
Possessive pronouns are used to show ownership and genitive relationship between the pronouns referent and the noun it modifies.

There are two parallel sets of possessive pronouns - one descendant from contracted na + pronoun, and one using the oblique pronouns as possessives. In common usage, however, the forms are mixed, using the obliques for first and third person singular and second person plural.

Nouns
Coeric nouns inherently have one of two grammatical genders - masculine and feminine. Unlike pronouns and articles, Coeric nouns are never inflected for case. For the vast majority of nouns, only two forms exist - the singular and the plural: There are, however, a handful of nouns that have retained another form - the dual. These nouns are typically things that naturally occur in pairs, particularly body parts: ruag and riój (hand), ameni and amioni (ear), sase and sose (breast). Although the dual is no longer productive or, in fact, found outside of these few fossilized forms, it seems to have a rather strong position in the cases where it does exist.

Genitive constructions are expressed in three separate ways for Coeric nouns:
 * preposition na: almost always used for geographical places, towns and cities, buildings and other localities, as wall as belonging to a certain family or a social group;
 * Sai lelt na Mardell - Those are the gates of Mardell;
 * Iane sai suerre n'Asàile - She is a woman of Asàel;
 * dative construction: formed by a possessor in oblique followed by the respective possessive pronoun and the possessed, this construction is frequently found with animates possessors; the possessed may be either animate or inanimate, though the latter case is arguably more common, and the construction is virtually exclusive to all cases where an animate possessor has an inanimate, inalienable possession;
 * Car suarr an dherna - the homes of the people;
 * Ia iomnė car briedh an derad - I pierce the deer's hide;
 * possession in phrase: common in any other case, it is formed by the possessed followed by the possessor, often in the oblique case;
 * Ca ruaiet ion mef - my brother's sword;
 * Sanė cė ėudė car magen - I keep / tend to the lord's sheep.

Adjectives
Coeric adjectives agree with the nouns they modify in gender and number; adjectives modifying dual nouns appear in their plural forms. Adjectives always follow the noun they modify; they may sometimes precede the nouns for an intentional dramatic or poetic effect.

Adjectives have both comparative and superlative degrees, formed with the suffix -ar, which is supplemented by the definite articles for superlative adjectives. Some adjectives, however, some suppletive degrees, some even have separate superlative forms, though these are rarely used and considered old-fashioned and overtly formal. Interestingly, for luen, vluar and ruid, the comparative forms form the bases of the adjective when used in a predicate: The adjectives drec (bright) and puegh (raw) also have separate attributive forms, derived from the attributive base: dreci and piagh, respectively.
 * ca bruóc luen (the bad boy) vs ca bruóc sai violl (the boy is bad);
 * ca ruid lór (the good dog) vs ca lór sai pliam (the dog is good);
 * c'uidil vluar (the stupid brute) vs c'uidil sai trull (the brute is stupid)

Verbs
Coeric verbs are roughly divided into three conjugational paradigms, the first two of which is directly related to and parallel to Classical and Bantazi Arazi's -oit and -ut paradigms. In Coeric, the endings of the infinitives for the 1. and 2. conjugation are -aid [ɪd] and -ed [əd]. The third paradigm has three possible endings and thematic vowels: -air [ɪr], -eor [ɵr] and -uír [iːr]. However, it is important to note that the infinitives are hardly ever encountered in the language - they are recorded as reference forms, while most of their functions have been supplanted by the verbal noun.

Conjugation
Coeric verbs agree with their subject in person and number, but the original Proto-Asatic gender agreement has long since been lost in the Central Asatic languages. Besides these basic conjugation patterns, a lot of verbs exhibit some irregularities:
 * some -aid verbs exhibit vowel breaking:
 * costaid --> cuestai;
 * remaid --> riamai;
 * some verbs have historically undergone palatalisation in their non-nominal forms:
 * droacaid --> dresai;
 * lagaid --> lerai;
 * a significant number of verbs have lost intervocalic consonants that may resurface in some or other circumstances:
 * -d-: blàid --> blài - bload - blài - bladen - bladod - blado;
 * -v-: trìaid --> trí - triad - trì - trien - trivod - trivo;
 * -s-: biàid --> biài - biàid - biàid - biaisen - biaisod - biaiso;
 * -b-: òed --> òė - òed - òė - òė - obiad - obia.
 * third paradigm verbs in general experience chaotic vowel mutations that historically have been completely regular but now are rather hard to predict and explain.

Tense, aspect and mood
Coeric verbs do not has a rigid system of grammatical tense - the distinction between past, present and future is gleamed primarily through context, use of time adverbials and some related particles that carry little lexical meaning.

In contrast, most temporal information is carried by verbal aspects,formed by auxiliary verbs or the lack thereof. The primary distinction is between imperfect and perfective verbs - ongoing and finished action, respectively.

The imperfect aspect, in most of its iterations, is formed by simply conjugating the root verb. It carries a strong connotation of ongoing action, a progressive aspect, though it is just as equally gnomic in its use:
 * Ia miallai - I sing / am singing / I was singing / I will be singing