At the time I was creating Avihalli, I had little to no idea how a language is constructed. Therefore, the grammar is in most cases exactly like English, with some influence from the little Spanish I had learned. Sentences follow a Subject-Verb-Object order, though adjectives and adverbs follow the words they modify. I have some notion that verbs were inflected by adding pronouns as suffixes, but I don't think I'd thought it out very thoroughly.
Nouns are very simple. They inflect only for the plural, by the addition of the suffix -homa.
Nouns can be concatenated with other words to form compounds, e.g. dunemis "land" + ahadama "dead" = dunemisahadama, "wasteland" and dunemis "land" + hanyane "I love" = dunemis-hanyane "home."
It seems nouns can be formed from verbs by the suffix -na, though the only example I have is hanya "to love", hanyana "lover." Still, this could perhaps provide a historical account for the Tegirenai noun suffix.
Nouns can also be formed from adjectives by means of the suffix -manha, which I described at the time as "+ one." In other words, adding the suffix gives a noun with the meaning of "one who embodies this descriptor." An example is avameha "evil", avamehamanha, "evil one." This may also be possible from verbs: aynaha "to hate", aynahamana "enemy." I suppose a better descriptor for this suffix would be "personificative," which I will use henceforth.
The pronominal system in Avihalli is structurally identical to that of modern English. There is no distinction between singular and plural "you," and the singular third-person pronoun distinguishes between masculine, feminine, and neuter forms. Disturbingly, it seems I never came up with a first-person plural pronoun, though I have constructed one by analogy with the third-person pronouns (though it is only a possibility, since the analogy doesn't work perfectly).
| Nominative | Accusative | Genitive | |
|---|---|---|---|
| I, me | ne | nu | ni |
| you | eha | eha | ehi |
| he | oha | ohe | ohi |
| she | ohan | ohen | ohin |
| it | wa | wa | we |
| we | *ane | *anu | *ani |
| they | aeha | aeho | aehi |
There is one attested demonstrative pronoun: wan, "that."
Verbs typically end in -a or -ha. This is about as consistent as I got when making Avihalli. I apparently had notes at some point which indicated that verbs took pronouns as suffixes for conjugational purposes, but I have no real attestation of how consistently this was applied.
Avihalli does mark verbs for several tenses/moods, with prefixes:
Negation is indicated by the word abos, following the verb.
Adjectives and adverbs follow the words they modify. Thus hemanhye hanyaro, "lovely woman." There is only one attested adverb, behad "now". However, there is a note in the manuscript that adjectives can act as adverbs when used to modify a verb. Thus, perhaps *emuha jotema, "to speak strongly." It is also noted that adverbs come before the negation particle abos.
There is evidence that adjectives can be formed from verbs by an -oi suffix, e.g. emioi "visible" from enya "to see", hanyoi "lovable" from hanya "to love", and aynahoi "hateable" from aynaha "to hate." I am uncertain of the origin of the n-m shift for emioi, apart from possible error on the part of my younger self in transcription. Perhaps it should be *enioi, but it could just as easily be the case that I mis-wrote *emya.
There is also another possible suffix to change verbs to adjectives, seen in hanyaro "lovely" from hanya "to love." There is no other example of this suffix, but if so it would indicate an analog to the "-ly" suffix in English. Perhaps *neanaro means "smelly" (from neana, "to smell")?