Welcome to the Zevy grammar notes!

Mohu marnenrei!

So**, you may be asking, what is this all about?**

Well, Zevy is a constructed language, specifically an artistic one. I've created it to explore some of the many ways that a language could work, and in doing so have dreamed up a web of details to make this hypothetical language tick. As odd as it may seem, Zevy is here for the fun of it, which is to say that it exists for the pure enjoyment of myself and all others who like to play with the fabric of language.

If you're unfamiliar with all this "constructed language" stuff but are curious to see more, you're in luck: I've done my best to describe things in a way that'll bring something out for all levels of grammar experience, to include plenty of examples and sounds samples, and to have fun along the way. Feel free to jump ahead to the next section to get going 🚀

Already know the biz and want the good stuff?

For all you seasoned veterans of the conlanging arts, here's the dense version: Zevy is a mostly isolating, head final language with a fossilized orthography that makes for a very fun (or perhaps "fun") spelling system, as evidenced by the name of the language in the language itself: it's written Deevi, but it's pronounced /zevi/ due to years of sound changes. (The name in English and other languages tends to parallel the pronunciation.)

This wordbook catalogues the language from Middle Zevy, which is the language as it was spoken when the writing system was first being formalized, to the modern language, which maintains that writing system more or less unmodified to this day. This site documents the language using a romanization that closely follows what would be Zevy's own, in a manner similar to the Nihon-shiki romanization of Japanese kana.

Syntactically, Modern Zevy has collapsed many of the distinctions between nouns and verbs, while compounding, which was ubiquitous in Middle Zevy, is no longer productive outside of formal or scientific contexts. In contrast, the modern language relies heavily on postposition phrases and a small class of inflectional and derivational affixes.

As a result of all of these changes, the salient features of the modern language stretch to the following:

• an abundance of periphrastic constructions to run afoul of
• an alarming tendency for function words with different meanings to be homonymous, usually due to shared etymology (whether these words are better described as polysemes is up for debate)
• the language's extreme pro-drop nature, which not only allows topical subjects and objects to be removed whenever they can be inferred from context, but also allows elements like tense and mood to be left to the previously established conversational context, too

So, to make a long story short, there's a lot to see here. And that, my friends, is exactly why I've written out these notes. Read on!

Ready to roll, or jump ahead?

Here's where you can go:

Linking words: X is Y

Adding time: X does, X did