[conlang_learners] Comments on Feayran

[Jim Henry]

Feayran by David Edwards is an artlang with a non-Terran fictional
setting.  There is a fair amount of concultural information on the
website in addition to the reference grammar and lessons; my brief
comments here are based mainly on the reference grammar.

http://feayran.webs.com

The phonology is pretty well documented, with X-SAMPA notation; the
phoneme inventory is about average, with twenty consonants and five
vowels.  I'm not sure the phonotactics are as well documented as the
phoneme inventory, allophony and tone -- most languages with syllables
as complex as this have more restrictions on what consonants can
cluster than the restrictions enumerated here.  Feayran is a tonal
language -- I think perhaps the only one nominated for the project
besides Ithkuil/Ilaksh.  There are three tones, and moderately complex
rules for when particular vowels have particular tones.  One oddity is
that the grapheme <y> doesn't seem to occur in either the tutorial or
the reference grammar's account of Feayran orthography, so I'm not
sure how to pronounce the name "Feayran" itself.  Presumably it's an
anglicization of a native word.

The inflection system of Feayran is interesting, unique as far as I
know; instead of affixes having an inherent prefixing, suffixing, or
infixing behavior, roots instead have "inflection points" which
determine where their inflectional affixes go.  The same affix can
apparently go at the beginning of one root, the middle of another, and
the end of a third.

"Stance" is a Feayran category roughly equivalent to politeness of
verbs and formality of pronouns in Japanese; it manifests as both
noun, qualifier and verb inflection.  Verbs also inflect for person,
number, aspect, mood, mode, voice, and polarity.  Some subsets of
categories are marked fusionally; for instance, one set of fusional
markers show stance of speaker toward the subject, stance of speaker
toward listener, person, and number.  Nouns, in addition to stance,
are marked for ten cases and two numbers; qualifiers are only marked
for stance.  The case system, though it's basically
nominative/accusative, has interesting nooks and crannies and seems
well documented.

With all these inflectional categories, word order is fairly free.

There are six texts on the website, totalling around 800 words; they
have smooth English translations but no interlinear glosses.  That's a
respectable corpus, though not as impressive as Vabungula's or
Alurhsa's.

The website design is generally very visually pleasing, although I'm
not fond of the choice to devote about a fourth of the screen real
estate to a marginal background image.  The reference grammar is
generally very clear, well-organized and well-written; there are many
example phrases and sentences, with interlinear glosses (though the
glosses aren't formatted as clearly as they could be).  The navigational
linking is a bit lacking, with some subpages not having links back to the
top-level page, but for the most part it's an easy site to find one's
way around.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/