Grammar of Silindion
Throughout the course of its development, Silindion has been influenced by a large amount of languages. To list all of the
influences would be extremely foolhardy, however among the major languages which have helped shaped the look and sound of Silindion, are the following:
- Finnish: This language provided me with the concept of agglutinative morphology which is a pervasive feature of Silindion. It also was the inspiration
for much of the phonology and the case system.
- Gaelic: This language provided me with the system of sound changes from Proto-Silinestic as well as the lenition which is present in some degrees in
Silindion.
- Quenya and other Tolkien Elvish Languages: I took from these languages the concept of an interelated system of languages and an underlying root system.
Also, although more as a simple byproduct of similar phonologies than any conscious attempt to produce facsimile, many words in Silindion are similar to
words in the Quenya lexicon.
Three Features of Silindion must be discussed before any other aspect because they are very integral to understanding the language.
- Firstly, Silindion is a VSO language, meaning that in all cases (except for poetry) the verb will precede both its subject and object. This has important
consequences for syntactic structure.
- Secondly, Silindion is highly agglutinating and allows for up to 13 cases (although a few of these are now regarded as derivational suffixes or
cliticized particles). It is a Nominative-Accusative language which means that the Subject of all verbs is in the Nominative and the object of all verbs is
in the Accusative.
- Lastly, the surface or spoken form of most lexical items is subject to a large amount of morpho-phonological variation. This means that affixes that
attach to stems as well as the stems themselves undergo a lot of phonological changes before the spoken form results.