Castellan

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# Gramatas Kestehilal: Castellan grammar

## Introduction

Although of unclear origin, Castellan is known to be an ancient language predating the Great Migrations into Rathnir by the Castellan People. Almost immediately it suffered the effects of the loss of the castellan diaspora, diminishing in number of speakers and consistency of vocabulary and grammar.

The language reflects this troubled history of a nation nestled between more powerful empires, adopting lexicon and foreign expressions to facilitate commerce and understanding, although some pockets survived. The city of Konushum ruled by the dynasty that Skavier Castellan founded, became the focus of a new castellan revival that endures to this day, evolving further  with the expansion into Sparwood, to the east, and specially with the dynastic union with Lozarii royalty and nobility, which in turn have introduced a new wave of changes to the language.

The present text intends to make sense and standardize what has been a mostly an oral castellan tradition, and to make this language stand in equal footing with other imperial and royal languages of our surroundings.

And now: *apar oss!*  Let’s begin!

## Castellan sentence structure and cases

As we covered in the introduction, Castellan is an old language, and as its common in these older languages, it depends heavily on Grammatical Cases. This means that the function or cases of every word in a sentence is determined, not by prepositions, but by suffixes at the end of every word. Therefore, when reading or hearing a sentence in castellan, you shouldn’t pay as much attention to prepositions and the order of the sentence, but how each word sounds. Yet this doesn’t mean that there’s no preferred sentence structure which usually is as follows:

For an indicative sentences

SUBJECT + INDIRECT OBJECT + DIRECT OBJECT + (ADVERB +) VERB

Let’s see an example:

*Hrossbir’  denema Eskabireir ady*

Crossfire pays money to Skavier

This is more of a convention though, as the grammatical cases and the declination of words allow quite some freedom to arrange the sentence. This freedom is more restricted in interrogative, imperative and subjunctive sentences, which we will discuss in later chapters.

### Castellan grammatical cases

There are five cases in Castellan:

**NOMINATIVE**: subject

**ACCUSATIVE**: direct object

**GENITIVE**: possession

**DATIVE**: Indirect Object

**LOCATIVE**: place, physical origin

**INSTRUMENTAL**: company, reason for, means to

If you learn these case endings, the mystery of the castellan language will unravel before you. But watch out for differences! Even though cases look quite regular, these may change depending on how different words sound or are written in castellan. These different forms are called declinations.

### Adjectives and their declination

All adjectives in the castellan language end with an -l or an -il, such as kil, tehil, alril, hatl, imil, and so on.

Adjectives compliment other words, and as such, in the Kesstehilal language, go along with whatever their ‘boss’ word is saying. If the word they are complimenting is in a certain case, they will be transformed also. All adjectives use the 4t or irregular declination.

An example: *Ehatyl Phasatsah’ Kili Kasteil-Lozahri*

In this sentence we have two adjectives: ehatyl and kili, meaning ascendant and great respectively. Ehatyl remains in the nominative case because it is serving the word Phasatsah’ (Empire), which is the subject and therefore in the nominative case. Kili (great), on the other hand, serves the compound name Kasteil-Lozahri, which are the peoples the empire belongs to, it’s in their possession: the empire is of them. Therefore it is in the genitive case, and so is kil.

Ascendant Empire of Grand Castell-Llozhar

*Ehatyl Phasatsah’ Kili Kasteil-Lozahri*

 Did you know?
The castellan word for adjectives is nados. It means servant or vassal, and derives from the audalad name for a minor local official.

You may also find these adjectives very useful:

#### Demonstrative adjectives

 *welel* | there\*

\*Yes, *here* and *there* are adjectives in castellan, just go along with it.

## The verb

The verb, as in all languages,  is the motor of the sentence: the act itself. In kestehilal all verbs tend to have the endings -y or -r. Lucky for you there is no conjugation whatsoever in castellan, so all you have to do is learn these endings and the following basic time prefixes at the beginning of the verb to change the tense:

### Questions, ‘maybes’ and orders

We sometimes have to boss people around in Castell with the imperative, like everywhere else. Accept it!

Don’t you want to ask questions in castellan with the interrogative? Never?

And of course it would be really cool if we started talking in the subjunctive for no reason at all.

As we mentioned in previous sections, there is no rigid sentence structure when we are using the indicative so, although castellans prefer it at the end, the verb can be all over the sentence. The exceptions to this rule tend to be the interrogative, imperative and subjunctive modes.

#### Subjunctive

In castellan we usually construct a conditional sentence like this:

Subject +Object+ Verb + Conditional Subject in Instrumental case+ Verb in Present continuous+ Object

For example:

*Es selem aner wak ener walem*

I this do with you doing that (literally, ‘I do this if you do that’)

#### Imperative

If you see the subject at the end and the verb at the very start of the sentence, that’s a good indicator of an imperative sentence:

Verb + Object + Subject

For example:

*Asuter Kasteilem Myp’!*

Save Castell Meep! (common religious invocation)

#### Interrogative

When asking questions, sentence structure is not as important as intonation and ending the sentence with *fal*: ‘no?’ Even so, this is the most common disposition:

Subject + Verb + Object + *fal* clause (‘no’)

*Was iner selem fal*

You did this no? (Did you do this)