Unlike most human grammars, Dryadic syntax is best thought of in terms of plant anatomy, broken down into roots, stems, and foliage. The following is a basic theoretical outline of the logic and structure behind the Classical Dryadic language. Each section will be covered in more detail in subsequent pages.
First of all, let’s take a look at plant anatomy, at least the parts that are relevant to understanding Dryadic grammar. Plants can be broken into roughly two parts: the root system and the shoot system. The roots system consists of the taproot—the primary root that grows vertically and provides the foundation for the system—and the lateral roots—the subsidiary roots that grow off the side of the taproot. The shoot system consists of the stem—the primary shoot that grows vertically and supports the rest of the plant—and various lateral shoots, some vegetative and some reproductive in nature, which support various types of foliage—leaves, fruits, and flowers. Dryadic grammar follows a similar structure.
All Dryadic languages’ sentence structure begin with a root system at their base. The root system typically encodes a tense or aspectual frame for the rest of the sentence and secondarily encodes mood, emotions, etc. In the case of Classical Dryadic, the taproot encodes a specific combination of tense and aspect and is mandatory in every sentence. There are two tense systems, a proximal/specific tense system and distal/general tense system, the former deriving from the time of day and the latter deriving from the seasons. Both tense systems rely on the actual time of day and season to correctly interpret their meaning (i.e. if right now was midday, then the ‘day’ root would mark present tense, the ‘dawn’ root would mark past tense, and the ‘dusk’ root would mark future tense.) The aspect system marks the integrity of the sentence, whether it should be viewed as a whole (holistically) with quantized reference or as having internal parts (incremental) with cumulative reference.
These taproots can then take prefixes, or rather, lateral roots encoding emotions and formality. There are three sets of lateral root prefixes, those that encode formality or speech level (high vs. low), those that emphasize the intensity of an emotion (active vs inactive), and those that encode the polarity and direction of emotion (negative vs positive + internal vs external.) These are all optional and may be left off of the taproot in certain contexts. Modal markers, typically the result of grammaticalizing foliage, can also be placed at the beginning of roots acting as lateral roots that modify the root system and sentence as a whole. Lastly, a suffix can be used to extend the taproot to express negation.
(Modal) (Formality)-(Intensity)-(Polarity+Direction)-Tense-Integrity-(Negation)
Following the root system, we have the second part of the sentence, the shoot system. There are two general categories of shoots based off of their syntactic properties: stems and foliage. The main function of the stem is to encode the relation between two foliage words (i.e. patient-agent, source-receiver, etc.) Stems can also take an optional prefix called a ‘node’ encoding its attachment, of which there are three types or ‘operations’ determining where the stem and its constituents are attached: the first encodes the stem as a lateral shoot attached to the preceding stem but disconnected from the preceding stem’s constituents, the second encodes the stem as a lateral shoot that includes the first constituent of the preceding stem as its own, and the last one encodes the stem as a lateral shoot that includes the second constituent of the preceding stem as its own.
Finally, the foliage follows a stem and encodes semantic states. There are three types of foliage: leaves, fruits, and flowers. Leaves typically encode active, animate and dynamic states. Fruits encode inactive, inanimate, and bound states, and flowers encode inactive, inanimate, and unbound states. In many cases, a semantic state can have separate derivational forms across the three types of foliage. Foliage can optionally take prefixes called ‘stipules’ that encode quantifiers and determiners.
[Root System] Stem1-(Stipule)-Foliage Stem1-(Stipule)-Foliage (Node)-Stem2-(Stipule)-Foliage…
It should be further noted, that unlike human languages that usually operate through a strict dichotomy of verbs and nouns, Dryadic languages operate through states. Instead of seeing a bound specific object or set of objects (nouns) that take on certain actions or states of existence (verbs, adjectives), a dryad sees a set of transient, overlapping states and attempts to describe the connection of these different states.
To get a better idea of how Dryadic languages work, lets look at a very basic example from Classical Dryadic with the following sentence: eres talaarid tageza eliderii. The first word, eres, is naturally the root of the sentence and encodes the time of day as “day” and the sentence frame as “incremental.” The second word, talaarid, is a combination of the stem ta(l)- marking an experiencer-experience relationship, and the leaf-type foliage aarid meaning “growing,” “one who grows,” or “an animate actor who grows” in an intransitive sense but in this case refers to “an autonomous or recently awoken sapling” or “a young (still growing) dryad.” The third word tageza again has the stem marker ta(l)- along with the leaf-type foliage keza meaning “looking,” “one who looks,” or “an animate actor that sees.” Finally, the last word eliderii is comprised of the node e- which connects it to the second constituent tageza, the stem li- marking a location or directional relationship, and the fruit-type foliage terii which indicates a bound state of “lacking autonomy and never having had it,” and refers to a non-dryadic tree. So, assuming the current time of day is midday, the sentence eres talaarid tageza eliderii together can be translated to English as “The young dryad is looking at a/the tree.”
To dig a bit deeper into the inner-workings of foliage, we can also look at the related foliage variants of each foliage present in the sentence. While aarid represents the leaf-type form or animate state of “growing,” there also exists the flower-type form aarde indicating the unbound inanimate state of “growing” (growing in a general, abstract sense or when applied to big, unquantified systems, i.e. a forest, the sea, etc.), and the fruit-type form aarre indicating a bound inanimate state of “growing” (growing of a static plant, sappling, or other bound system). The same forms exist for keza: keza (leaf-form indicating a state of looking or seeing, using eyes, or can even mean “eyes”), kezae (flower-form indicating “seeing” or “sight” in an abstract sense or even “to have the ability to see”), and keae (fruit-form indicating a state of “giving off an appearance” or “looking like something”).
This is more or less the basis of Dryadic syntax. Even though this particular explanation is based on Classical Dryadic, all other Dryadic languages follow a similar structure to this. In subsequent sections, a more in-depth analysis will be provided for each syntactic category.