I have been staring (or not staring, more accurately) at Ai-Naidari verbs for weeks now, without being able to make them look right. Putting together rules, trying them, thinking they just look and sound wrong and tossing them.
And then, today, I realized why: the tense and the pronoun go in the middle.
I was trying to do this:
alav + e + l = alavel, I sleep
(verb infinitive: to sleep + present tense + “I” pronoun ending)
But it’s supposed to be this:
al – e + l – av = alelav, I sleep.
So, “you sleep” is aleqav (if you are nearby, otherwise it’s alenav). “I slept” is alalav, and “I will sleep” is alilav (and you slept, alaqav and you will sleep, aliqav).
I don’t know the rules for where in the verb the infix goes, but I suspect it’s the second to last syllable. So for a mouthful verb like ievanset, to call attention to things that shouldn’t be noticed, then it would be ievanelset, “I call attention to…” etc. It can be the second to last syllable if there’s a vowel in front of it, and the word is short? I am still poking at it. I suspect there are a lot of irregulars, but I finally feel like I have some part of it right. When it happened and who did it goes in the middle.
Because, naturally (*tired sigh*), the beginning and endings are taken. The suffixes seem to involve whether the action is ongoing or complete, and whether the verb is active or passive. The prefixes have to do with framing: is this a command, a request, a negation, a question?
I don’t have the rules for those. But at least this part, I know. So now you can play with the verbs listed in the lexicon and say simple things! So far, it looks like it goes thus:
present: eh
past: ah
future: ih
And the pronoun endings are manifold, but I think this is the list:
I: l
you (close): q
you (far): n
he (close): s
he (far): sh
she (close): d
she (far): jz
unknown: th
And no, I don’t have plurals yet for the pronouns, and these are only tentative. But hey, every little bit, right?
So you can grab a random verb and put it together this way:
first part of verb + tense vowel + pronoun consonant + final syllable of verb
So if you want to conjugate (simply) banaje, “to speak without verbal communication,” and say, perhaps, “you communicated”, then:
ban + a (past tense) + q (you, whom I am speaking to right now in the room) +aje
So: banaqaje. “You communicated without speaking.”
And no, don’t quote me on any of this. Yet. -_-
