Erzya language

Consonants The following table lists the consonant phonemes of Erzya together with their Cyrillic equivalents. Palatalization is widespread in Erzya, but is contrastive only for the alveolar consonants. The labial and velar consonants have palatalized allophones before the front vowels , . The pairs – , – and – also often alternate depending on a following or preceding back vs. front vowel. E.g. the 1st person singular possessive suffix has allomorphs such as and . The palatalized consonants can natively occur also in a back vowel environment, e.g. the genitive suffix , providing minimal pairs such as 'my house' – '(a) house's'. Non-palatalized , , in a front vowel environment are limited to recent Russian loans such as 'whale'. Note on romanized transcription: in Uralic studies, the members of the palatalized series are usually spelled as , , , , , , , , while the postalveolar sounds are spelled , , (see Uralic Phonetic Alphabet). and are loan phonemes from Russian. The front vowels and have centralized variants and immediately following a plain alveolar consonant, e.g. "they", "blue". Vowel harmony As in many other Uralic languages, Erzya has vowel harmony. Most roots contain either front vowels (, ) or back vowels (, ). In addition, all suffixes with mid vowels have two forms: the form to be used is determined by the final syllable of the stem. The low vowel (), found in the comparative case () "the size of" and the prolative () "spatial multipoint used with verbs of motion as well as position" is a back vowel and not subject to vowel harmony. The rules of vowel harmony are as follows: • If the final syllable of the word stem contains a front vowel, the front form of the suffix is used: () "village", () "in a village" • If the final syllable of the word stem contains a back vowel, and it is followed by plain (non-palatalized) consonants, the back form of the suffix is used: () "house", () "in a house" However, if the back vowel is followed by a palatalized consonant or palatal glide, vowel harmony is violated and the "front" form of the suffix is used: () "with willow", () "with butter". Likewise, if a front-vowel stem is followed by a low back vowel suffix, subsequent syllables will contain back harmony: () "throughout its villages" Thus the seeming violations of vowel harmony attested in stems, e.g. () "axe", () "thread (string)", are actually due to the palatalized consonants and . One exception to front-vowel harmony is observed in palatalized non-final , e.g. () "with asphalt". == Writing ==

Cyrillic alphabet The modern Erzya alphabet is the same as for Russian: ::::a в c ç d ә e f g y i j k l m n o p r s ş t u v x z ƶ ь One of the modern Latin alphabet proposals: ::::a b c č ć d d́/ď e f g h i j k l ĺ/ľ m n ń o p r ŕ s š ś t t́/ť u v z ž ź == Morphology ==

Like all other Uralic languages, Erzya is an agglutinative language which expresses grammatical relations by means of suffixes. Nouns Nouns are inflected for case, number, definiteness and possessor. Erzya distinguishes twelve cases (here illustrated with the noun "ground, earth"). Number is systematically distinguished only with definite nouns; for indefinite nouns and nouns with a possessive suffix, only the nominative case has a distinct plural. Plural possessors follow the pattern of second person singular possessors. Verbs Erzya verbs are inflected for tense and mood, and are further conjugated for person of subject and object. Traditionally, three stem types are distinguished: a-stems, o-stems and e-stems. A-stems always retain the stem vowel a in the non-third-person present-tense forms, and in the third-person first past-tense forms (e.g. "kissed"). With many o-stems and e-stems, the stem vowel is dropped in these forms (e.g. o-stem "watched", e-stem "swallowed"), but there also o- and e-stem verbs which retain the vowel ( "slept", "cooked"). Rueter (2010) therefore divides verb stems into vowel-retaining stems and vowel-dropping stems. In indicative mood, three tenses are distinguished: present/future, first past, second (=habitual) past. The third-person singular form in the present tense is also used as present participle. The second past tense is formed by adding the past-tense copula to the present participle. The other mood categories are: • conditional ( + present suffixes) • conjunctive ((V) + past suffixes) • conditional-conjunctive ((V) + past suffixes) • desiderative ( + past suffixes) • optative ( + present suffixes) • imperative () == Vocabulary ==