The Pages of The Gray Wizard

Morphology

Nominals Predicates Adjectives Adverbs Postpositions

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inflectional morphology 
(bethfennar vasenimind)

" 'Yes, I think I shall express the accusative case by a prefix!' "

"A memorable remark! ...Just consider the splendour of the words! 'I shall express the accusative case.' Magnificent! Not 'it is expressed' nor even the more shambling 'it is sometimes expressed', nor the grim 'you must learn how it is expressed'. What a pondering of alternatives within one's choice before the final decision in favour of the daring and unusual prefix, so personal, so attractive; the final solution of some element in a design that had hitherto proved refractory. Here were no base considerations of the 'practical', the easiest for the 'modern mind', or for the million — only a question of taste, a satisfaction of a personal pleasure, a private sense of fitness."

(from The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays - A Secret Vice by J.R.R. Tolkien [Houghton Mifflin Company 1984])

This section will explain the inflectional morphology of various word classes in ámman îar. Derivational morphology is covered separately in an appendix.

ámman îar is an agglutinating language, i.e. words consist of one or more morphemes, but the boundaries between morphemes in a word are always clear-cut. Moreover, a given morpheme has at least a reasonably invariant shape, so that the identification of morphemes in terms of their phonetic shape is also straightforward.

This section describes the internal structure of ámman îar lexical categories that can be described as nominal, verbal, adjectival, adverbial, and postpositional depending on the type of morphological operations that can be performed on them.