Aazh Naamori Grammar
Aazh Naamori is a language with both analytic and synthetic characteristics. The word order is subject-object-verb (SOV). Nouns are inflected for number and case, and verbal morphology is mostly handed by verb auxiliaries, which inflect for tense.
Background
The Old Moroi language, or Aazh Naamori, is a collaboration between David and Jessie Peterson for the television series Vampire Academy. David Peterson was asked by Y. Shireen Razack, one of the writers on Vampire Academy, to create a language for the show. They faced a tight schedule, as the art department required written elements in two weeks' time, even though the spoken language would not be needed for several months.
At the outset, the Petersons offered the production team the option of them creating an a posteriori language in the form of a Slavic creole, or an entirely original language. The production team opted for the latter. In crafting the language, they drew inspiration from the cultural and geographical setting of Eastern Europe. With limited source material from the books, the language is mostly a priori, but was allowed to borrow from neighboring languages in Europe, such as Russian, Bulgarian, Romanian, Latin, and Greek. An example of this can be seen in the following phrase:
- Santazhonga se dulon nari oshi.
- "May the Saints guide her home."
This sentence includes both a borrowing, Santazhonga "the Saints," with native morphology applied, and completely a priori elements like the vocative particle se and dulon ("home," dative case).
Nouns
Nouns decline for five cases, two numbers and three degrees of definiteness. The cases of Aazh Naamori are nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, and locative. The numbers are singular and plural. Nouns have indefinite, definite proximal and definite distal forms.
Verbs
As opposed to large verb conjugations, the language uses verbal auxiliaries to convey information about occurences and states. Verb auxiliaries conjugate for four tenses (or, more specifically, four tense-aspect combinations): present, preterite, imperfect, and future.
Word order
The language has SOV (subject-object-verb) word order, which can be seen in the following example:
- Dori ma risii zhoman.
- /vampire me bite did/
- "A vampire bit me."