Proto-Hiereti

Proto-Hiereti was a nominative-accusative, semi-agglutinative language, first spoken in Hieret in around ???. It was the ancestor of the Hiereti languages, such as ??? and ???.

Nounal Morphology
The base of Proto-Hiereti nouns was the root, which was almost always triconsonantal. Nouns in Proto-Hiereti inflected for three numbers (singular, dual and plural), six cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, locative and instrumental) and two genders (animate and inanimate), as well as for definiteness and indefiniteness. Nouns in Proto-Hiereti displayed a small degree of suffix absorption, where nouns in the instrumental case would agree with other nouns. There were five main ways in which nominatives could be formed from their roots, and each depended on the combination of vowels within them. The different combinations were C(')CeC, CeC(')C, CiCiC, CaCaC and C(')C(')C.

Morpheme Chain
Due to the large number of inflections in Proto-Hiereti, their positions in relation to one another were strictly ordered by a morpheme chain, which was as follows: 1. definiteness; 2. number marker; 3. case marker 4. root; 5. case marker; 5. gender. An example of this morpheme chain would be abṷ-a-ẓa-ḣrn-at-uṱu (abṷaẓaḣrnatuṱu), meaning by means of the walls.

Sub-roots
Within Proto-Hiereti, there were also a group of sub-roots, which could be combined to form larger roots. Most sub-roots consisted of two consonants, though many of the more general sub-roots consisted of only a single consonant. An example of a root formed from two sub-roots was ḓret, meaning camel, formed from the sub-roots ḓr-, meaning to go without, and -t, meaning thing. The precise arrangement of the consonants in a sub-root was not always fixed. For example, ḓr- in ḓrer, meaning hunger, was related to rḓ- in rḓet, meaning desert. This inversion generally had an intensifying force. rḓ- referred to deprivation, rather than a simple lack of something. This inversion stemmed originally from a reduplication of the first consonant of the root (ḓrḓ- > rḓ-; C1 C2 C1  >  C 2 C 1 ).

Verbal Morphology
Verbs in Proto-Hiereti conjugated for five moods (indicative, subjunctive, imperative, conditional and optative), four tenses (past, near past, present and future), three numbers (singular and plural), five persons (first-person, second-person, third-person and two honorifics) and two genders (animate and inanimate). Verbs using the same roots as nouns are distinguished from their counterparts with the addition of the postfix -iḥ.