Marain poetic register v0.4

Community language extension — not recovered Banks canon. Ordinary forms remain valid and primary. The poetic register offers opt-in prosodic and sound changes that do not modify existing case, person, or predicate meaning.

For context see the v0.4 grammar. The accompanying article is kept as an unpublished Jekyll draft in _drafts.

Prospective/resultative cadence

Meaning	Canonical	Cadence a	Cadence i
Prospective, planned action	uprahay'wolug	uprahay'woluga	uprahay'wolugi
Resultative, consequent event	kabo'inayng	kabo'inaynga	kabo'inayngi

Final a has glyph key a and final i key E. The apostrophe represents a morph boundary in the romanization, not a native glyph. The ordinary rules for 'wolug and 'inayng stay in force: the stem is preserved. These variants reverse to their ordinary predicate stem and grammatical suffix; the endings have no independent aspect or modal interpretation. Hypothetical 'tcha remains unaffected, and suffix stacking is not defined.

Gaelic-inspired initial consonant change (opt-in)

After the existing adjective po (“small”), a known noun lemma may change its first glyph in the poetic register:

Original	Contextual poetic form	Initial glyph shift
po pren	po fren	p → f
po bin	po vin	b → v
po tasi	po thasi	t → T
po sewuk	po shewuk	s → S
po kotuk	po chotuk	k → H

The mapping borrows an idea from Scottish Gaelic lenition; it does not reproduce Gaelic grammar, pronunciation, or spelling. Generated forms are contextual surface changes, not new dictionary entries. The helper requires the po trigger, rejects ambiguous collisions with existing Marain words, and can reverse only to a known original lemma. Ordinary English-to-Marain translation never silently changes a word’s first consonant.

Rhythmic and semantic conventions

Internal rhymes inspired by Gaelic aicill, consonant echoes inspired by Welsh cynghanedd, rhyme-plus-refrain in Persian ghazals, Arabic rhymed prose, and pivot words inspired by Japanese kakekotoba are poetic options, not grammatical rules.

Existing gra means true/correct and can be proposed as a repeated affirmation in verse. luh means flow, current, and wind, a potential pivot without inventing new vocabulary.

Proposed dictionary vocabulary

Romanization	Internal glyph key	Meaning and derivation
lemihgra	lemigra	test/verify; lemi sense + gra true (reverse of proposed gralemih)
gaflemih	gaflemi	read; gaf word + lemi sense
saynowetsiki	sAnowetsEkE	still/continuing; sAno exist + wetsEkE after
hechrayspatsmaychrayti	heHrAspatsmAHrAtE	non-war/non-military; a rough approximation, not interchangeable with civilian
burach	bOraH	mess/shambles; adapted borrowing from Gaelic bùrach

Each new headword is marked proposed-extension with provenance. Heavy messing can mean large-scale interference, not just a disordered situation; hegayret burach (“serious mess”) must not be passed off as a verified Banks phrase.

Translator/API behavior

poeticCadence(stem, kind, cadence) and reversePoeticCadence(form) provide reversible, meaning-preserving forms for selected suffixes. poeticMutate(po, lemma) and reversePoeticMutation(po, form) implement the narrow initial consonant change. Invalid forms or missing context return no mutation. No default prose translation is changed.

Validation: node --test tests/marain-phrases.test.cjs checks dictionary round-trips, canonical and poetic forms, context and collision rules. Poetic additions are proposals even if the code passes its tests.

Try the forms on the website

The Marain dictionary includes a dedicated Poetry tab. Enter a romanized dictionary headword and choose a prospective/resultative cadence or mutation after po. The controls use the opt-in helpers directly and display both romanization and glyphs. The automatic English phrase translator remains unmodified in behavior. A transformation is unavailable when a word is unknown, a form is not supported, or a surface mutation would collide with a dictionary headword.