Khunyer language

Khunyer
khunyernyelv (Khunyer)
Region	predominantly northwest Levantia
Ethnicity	Khunyer
Native speakers	c.18,400,000 L1 in Hendalarsk (2021)
Language family	Samo-Khunyer Khunyer-Mori Khunyer
Early form	Őskhunyer
Official status
Official language in	Hendalarsk
Language codes
ISO 639-3	–

Khunyer (khunyernyelv) is a Samo-Khunyer language spoken predominantly in Hendalarsk and to a lesser extent in neighbouring countries. It is the most westerly of the Samo-Khunyer languages, located thousands of miles away from the family's Urheimat in northeastern Levantia, and is also the most widely-spoken language of the family, with around 18.4 million first-language speakers across Hendalarsk proper and the Pentapolis and millions more diasporic and second-language speakers around the world.

Grammar

Khunyer is an agglutinative language, in stark contrast to the Occidental languages that predominate in Levantia. It uses various affixes - primarily suffixes, although prefixes and a circumfix are also employed, to change a word's meaning and its grammatical function.

Vowel harmony

Khunyer uses vowel harmony to attach suffixes to words. That means that most suffixes have two or three different forms, and the choice between them depends on the vowels of the head word. There are some minor and unpredictable exceptions to the rule.

Nouns

Nouns have 18 grammatical cases, mostly indicated via suffixes. The nominative case is unmarked (az afa 'the apple') and, for example, the accusative is marked with the suffix –t (az afát '[I eat] the apple'). Half of the cases express a combination of the source-location-target and surface-inside-proximity ternary distinctions (three times three cases); there is a separate case ending –ból / –ből meaning a combination of source and insideness: 'from inside of'.

Possession is expressed by a possessive suffix on the possessed object, rather than the possessor as in English (István's apple becomes István afája, literally 'István apple-his'). Noun plurals are formed with –k (az afák ‘the apples’), but after a numeral, the singular is used (két afa ‘two apples’, literally ‘two apple’; not *két afák).

Unlike Junglish, Khunyer uses case suffixes; prepositions are also extremely uncommon, with pospositions preferred in almost all cases except some Hendalarskisch loan phrases.

There are two types of articles in Khunyer, definite and indefinite, which roughly correspond to the equivalents in Hendalarskisch. Some linguists argue that this feature was not present in Őskhunyer, and that the neat definite:indefinite distinction is a further marker of Hendalarskisch influence on the language.

Adjectives

Nouns are preceded by adjectives (a piros afa 'the red apple'), which have three degrees: positive (piros 'red'), comparative (pirosabb 'redder') and superlative (a legpirosabb 'the reddest').

If the noun takes the plural or a case, an attributive adjective is invariable: a piros afák 'the red apples'. However, a predicative adjective agrees with the noun: az afák pirosak 'the apples are red'. Adjectives by themselves can behave as nouns (and so can take case suffixes): Melyik afát kéred? – A pirosat. 'Which apple would you like? – The red one'.

Word order

The neutral word order is subject–verb–object (SVO). However, Khunyer is a topic-prominent language (as in some respects is Hendalarskisch), and so has a word order that depends not only on syntax but also on the topic–comment structure of the sentence (for example, what aspect is assumed to be known and what is emphasized).

A Khunyer sentence generally follows this structure: topic, comment (or focus), verb, all other components.

The topic shows that the proposition is only for that particular thing or aspect, and it implies that the proposition is not true for some others. For example, in "Az afát István látja". ('It is István who sees the apple'. Literally 'The apple István sees.'), the apple is in the topic, implying that other objects may be seen by not him but other people (the pear may be seen by István). The topic part may be empty.

The focus shows the new information for the listeners that may not have been known or that their knowledge must be corrected. For example, "Én vagyok az apád". ('I am your father'. Literally, 'It is I who am your father'.) In this example, the pronoun I (én) is in the focus and implies that it is new information, implying that the listener had previously considered someone else to be their father.

Although Khunyer is sometimes described as having free word order, different word orders are generally not interchangeable, and the neutral order is not always correct to use. In the following examples, the topic is marked with italics, and the focus (comment) is marked with boldface.

• István látja az afát. - 'István sees the apple'. Neutral sentence.
• István látja az afát. - 'István sees the apple'. (Salamon may not see the apple.)
• István látja az afát. - 'It is István who sees the apple'. (The listener may have thought that someone else saw the apple.)
• Látja István az afát. - 'István does see the apple'. (The listener may have thought that István didn't see the apple.)
• István az afát látja. - 'What István sees is the apple'. (It is the apple, not another fruit, that István specifically sees. However, another observer, Salamon, may see the other fruit.)
• Az afát látja István. - 'It is the apple that is seen by István'. (The other fruit may not be seen by István, but it may be smelled, for example.)
• Az afát István látja. - 'It is by István that the apple is seen'. (The apple is not seen by Salamon, but another fruit may be seen by Salamon.)