Yinne

Author

Margherita Tobia

Yinne was originally created as part of the world-building for a story set in a distant future where humans have colonised space, but still lack the technology for hyper-speed, so travel between different settlements is a lengthy and difficult endeavour, and many settlements are very isolated communities. The main idea was to create a language that relies heavily on the speakers’ shared knowledge and their cultural understanding, a language where not much is said and lots is implied, something you could get away with in a close-knit community. The result is an agglutinative language with a relatively simple grammar, but lots of optionality when it comes to argument structure.

Mmota nnuyenni yaliseka

mmo-ta nnuyen-ni yaliseka

1SG-S rain-O hear

'I hear the rain.'

Nnuyenni yaliseka

nnuyen-ni yaliseka

rain-O hear

'The rain, I hear.'

Mmo nnuyen yaliseka

mmo nnuyen yaliseka

1SG rain hear

'I hear the rain.'

Grammar (PDF)