inflectional morphology
(bethfennar vasenimind)
" 'Yes, I think I shall express the accusative case by a prefix!' "
"A memorable remark! ...Just consider the splendour
of the words! 'I shall express the accusative case.' Magnificent! Not
'it is expressed' nor even the more shambling 'it is sometimes
expressed', nor the grim 'you must learn how it is expressed'.
What a pondering of alternatives within one's choice before the final
decision in favour of the daring and unusual prefix, so personal, so attractive;
the final solution of some element in a design that had hitherto proved
refractory. Here were no base considerations of the 'practical', the easiest for the 'modern mind', or
for the million — only a question of taste, a satisfaction of a personal pleasure, a private sense of fitness."
(from The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays - A Secret Vice by J.R.R. Tolkien
[Houghton Mifflin Company 1984])
This section will explain the inflectional morphology
of various word classes in ámman îar. Derivational morphology
is covered separately in an appendix.
ámman îar is an agglutinating language, i.e. words consist of one or more morphemes, but the
boundaries between morphemes in a word are always clear-cut.
Moreover, a given morpheme has at least a reasonably invariant shape, so
that the identification of morphemes in terms of their phonetic shape is also
straightforward.
This section describes the internal structure of ámman îar lexical categories that
can be described as nominal, verbal, adjectival, adverbial, and postpositional
depending on the type of morphological operations that can be performed on them.
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