o yis     Nouns and names

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Honorific words

Labelling words play an important part in the language. A person's name must always be introduced with an honorific word which is placed immediately before the name; for the most part these are words that have degraded over time to the extent that they have no meaning beyond the honorific:

The choice between de/dzeo and di/dzir is set by the relative age of the listener compared to the age of the speaker; in cases where the speaker is unsure of the listener's age, most speakers will use dzeo/dzir or, just to be on the safe side, jóct.

Proper nouns are lexical-class-mobile: people's names usually take the authoritative or relative articles, while names for pets will use the communal class; names for businesses and associations are generally placed in the group class; place names take the locational articles.

Proper nouns can drop their articles in some situations, for example when the noun is the subject of a clause; any modifying particles acting on the proper noun will cliticise to the honorific when the article has been dropped.

Common (non-proper) nouns can also act as honorific words - these are often words associated with professions; when used as an honorific the noun loses its article and gains the prefix tz (which is syllabic before other consonants):

The convention is to capitalise proper nouns when using the Cheidran orthography, but there is no rule requiring capitalisation. The native script does not possess an uppercase/lowercase distinction, rendering the convention moot for most O Yis speakers and writers.

Note that O Yis verbs make no distinction between second and third person, and there are no separate third person pronouns. Proper names, or the honorific that the speaker has associated with a name, are often deployed as pseudo-pronouns for third person and, in more informal registers, second person pronouns.

Personal names and family names

In Istran Society, a person will take two formal names during their lifetime. The first is the name given to the person when they are born (ni bvoenib em veoc) which consists of three parts: the child's given name, the mother's chosen name (genetive) and the neighbourhood or settlement where the birth took place (relational oblique). For instance if a mother called Lír had a baby boy in the city of Yi Xoc and chose to call him Rato then the child's full name would be:

A second, more formal naming ceremony takes place on the child's 12th birthday, when they get to choose their own forename and surname (ni bvoenib em attej). Most often the forename will be the same as, or a more archaic version of, their given name (for example Ratter is a more archaic version of Rato). The choice of surname will vary: many people choose to honour their mother and/or father by using their forename - with the suffix -(k)od (son), -(l)yd (daughter) - as their surname; others may choose to use the place of their birth appended with the suffix -(v)ec (child). In some cases a person may choose a different given name as their forename, or take a nickname as their surname. For example:

The following personal names all appear as part of a major place name in the Land of Yistrjalje: Ratter (Rato); Tval (Tala); Xetti (Xeto); Bav (Bana); Cúr (Cuci); Tiur (Tí); Xoc (Xoci); Rux (Ruke); Lír (Lili); Tyen (Teni).

Geographical labels and names of settlements and cities

Many geographical locations are given descriptive names. More important locations, however, are treated in a similar manner to personal names, complete with special locational honorifics - shortened, archaic forms of modern words. These honorifics include:

Key places in jyict raallex Jyict Rállex (the Land of Yistrjalje) include:

This page was last updated on Tecubestuu-14, 531: Salhkuu-20 Gevile