18 Comments
In case you're using mobile, the tips and notes say:
"High Valyrian doesn't use a word like "and" when coordinating two nouns or two adjectives. Instead, the last word in a pair trio of nouns, adjectives, or even verbs is modified in some way to indicate that it is participating in a coordinative structure. One common strategy is to lengthen the final vowel of the last word in a list and shift the word's stress to the end. Watch out for word-final long vowels in sentences with coordination!"
2011
It reminds me of Japanese. Instead of "verb and verb", the first verb (or non-final verbs in the sequence, I suppose) get a special conjugation. I wonder if that's where DJP got the inspiration from to have a special declension for nouns instead of using the word "and".
- 416
Also Zapotec does so with nouns, and to some extent Latin and Quenya. I guess DJP's inspiration was from Japanese and Latin, maybe Quenya also influenced (even when I doubt he would admit it). I doubt Zapotec is the inspiration, even when it fits more the gramatical characteristics of High Valyrian coordination.
Thanks for the comment. This is what I find so interesting about High Valyrian--seeing where the creator drew from to invent this language.
- 2011
I'm a conlanger myself and that's why I'm taking such a broad survey of languages on Duolingo: to pick up interesting grammar bits.
I dabbled in Hungarian last summer so most of it is forgotten, but I'll tell you what I remember. It's not an indo european language, but a finno-ugric, so the grammar is very different to me (and I like it). I like that it's a highly agglutinative language, so "I go to house" is something like "houseto go". It feels very intuitive to me. I love agglutinative languages! You can form long words that are actually whole sentences! I just like the grammar because it's so different from anything I had ever known. (I'm not a linguist, so I hope "agglutinative" is the right term)
I do that out of linguistic curiosity too. Hungarian has some interesting grammar...
- 2011
Lea.1717 I can't reply to you directly, so I hope you see this.
I'm very interested to hear about Hungarian grammar if you could tell me what you know about it.
- 2011
Yes, that's the right word. :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutination
I love this overview from Tom Scott:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxARj07jFp0
For the word "vala" but also every other noun, when do i knowthat its plural or not? Halp please
- 428
It depends on which class the noun belongs to. But in the case of the word "vala", the plural form is "vali". The same goes for ābra/ābri, taoba/taobi and riña/riñi.
- 2011
Yes and no. "Vala" is the singular and "vali" is the plural, so "vali" is wrong because it's "man", not "men".
But it's "valā" rather than "vala" because that's how the "and" is expressed in "the boy and the man".
https://www.duolingo.com/skill/hv/Basics-1/tips-and-notes
SIMPLE COORDINATION
High Valyrian doesn't use a word like "and" when coordinating two nouns or two adjectives. Instead, the last word in a pair trio of nouns, adjectives, or even verbs is modified in some way to indicate that it is participating in a coordinative structure. One common strategy is to lengthen the final vowel of the last word in a list and shift the word's stress to the end. Watch out for word-final long vowels in sentences with coordination!
