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❖ Using infinitives on purpose

There are two main situations in which you'd actually want to use the infinitive form of a verb: when you're translating a sentence that uses compound verbs, and when you're wanting to convey a vague and/or bitchy sort of mood.

Compound verbs:

• We already know that verbs always come last in HV sentences (unless there's a negation). This gets slightly more complicated when there are several verbs in the same sentence. Consider for example when Rhaenyra says to Daemon, "Kastoti mērpī naejuragon koston daor" (I cannot face the Greens alone). There are two verbs in that sentence— "naejuragon" meaning "to face", and "kostagon" meaning "to be able". Notice how only kostagon gets conjugated (into the first-person-sing. "koston") whereas naejuragon stays in the infinitive. This is because kostagon is the "primary" verb in the phrase whereas naejuragon is the object of the primary verb.

• English uses the same rule, more or less! Here's an easier example: "I want to swim in the river." There are two verbs in this sentence: wanting and swimming. However, we need to convey that swimming is the object of wanting, and not the other way around, thus, we only conjugate "want" and we leave "to swim" in the infinitive. (Sidebar, we wouldn't ever conjugate both. That would look like "I want I swim" which clarifies nothing and makes no sense.) Other examples of this include:

  • "I try to find my keys" (finding is the object of trying)

  • "Arya likes to chase cats" (chasing is the object of liking)

  • "One can see the castle from here" (seeing is the object of being-able)

  • ^^ that last one is a little sneaky in english! The verb "to see" doesn't look like an infinitive because it doesn't have the word "to" in front, but it still is! (If we were to conjugate it in third-person-sing, that would give us "one sees". It wouldn't make any sense unless we took out the compound verb altogether— that sentence would be "One sees the castle from here.")

• Anyway, back to our example with Rhaenyra and Daemon. Now that we understand that naejuragon (to face) is the object of kostagon (to be able), the two things we must remember are: 1) the primary verb is the only one that gets conjugated, and 2) the primary verb always comes after its infinitive object. An easy way to remember this is to say your phrase out loud to yourself in english— the verb that comes out of your mouth first in english will have to go last in your HV sentence.

Compound verbs bonus level:

• Plenty of sentences have more than two verbs in them. For example, "And every time we kiss, I swear I can fly." This sentence has FOUR! Kissing, swearing, being-able, and flying! Oh boy! Let's break this down:

• This sentence is made up of two conditional clauses separated by a comma, meaning we can divide and conquer! That first part "And every time we kiss" is easy enough (in the interest of staying focused I won't show my work right this second) it's "Se ōñapot tolviē vūjī" and it takes one of the four verbs off our hands.

• The second part "I swear I can fly" is all verbs, linked together in a rigid primary-to-object order. Think of them like russian nesting dolls. "I swear" is the biggest and outermost doll, it's the primary verb of the entire phrase and its object is "that I can fly". (In this case, the correlative "that" is implied.) It's the biggest nesting doll, so we know we're going to have to conjugate it and we know it has to go at the end of the sentence. Let's do that now:

• (to fly) (I am able) (I swear)

• There's no word for "to swear" in the HV dictionary, so I could either do "I feel like I can fly" or "It seems I can fly." I'm gonna go with the second one, since it preserves the insistent tone of the original phrase. (Sidebar: "it seems" is a special use of the verb "vestragon" (to say). When being used in this way, vestragon only gets conjugated in third-person-singular and it takes its object in the dative. Our object in this case is not a noun at all, but rather two more layers of compound verbs, so we're going to need to throw the dative first-person pronoun "ynot" in there just to tie it all together— this means the literal meaning of the phrase will change to "it seems to me (that) I can fly".) Anyway, vestragon 3rd-sing. is "vestras", we plug that into its proper spot in the sentence, here's where we stand currently:

• (to fly) (I am able) ynot vestras.

• Moving on! We are straight coasting from here, it's so so chill. We already know the word "koston" (first-person-singular of "kostagon" meaning "I am able") so we'll use that again here. And it's okay, we can still conjugate it even though it's technically the object of vestras, because ynot is the real object. It sort of takes the heat off of koston. Ynot = oven mitts as far as we're concerned. That brings us here:

• (to fly) koston ynot vestras.

• Our last word is "to fly"! It's the smallest nesting doll, it's the object of being-able, meaning it gets to stay in the infinitive. HV actually has two words for "to fly" (likely thing for a culture of dragon-riders to have) there's lytȳbagon and sōvegon. Based on the examples provided in the dictionary, it seems like sōvegon places more emphasis on the "going" aspect of flying, whereas lytȳbagon is more like "being aloft". Lytȳbagon fits our purposes better. It sounds prettier, also. Here's our finished sentence:

• Se ōñapot tolviē vūjī, lytȳbagon koston ynot vestras.

• Ta da!! (Can't you feel my heart beat fast, I want this to laaaast, need u by my siiiide)

Being vague/bitchy:

• Just a straight-up infinitive verb, when used as the one and only verb in a given phrase, is always going to come off very vague, contextless, and confusing. Sometimes, though, this is exactly what you want. Consider for example the part where Aemond switches into fluent HV just to fuck with Aegon: "Lo koston, qurdalbri pradagon, brōziapot aōle iderēbagon, se īlvo Dāromīsȳrto mittiri piktī ivēttegon." (If I may, setting court, choosing yourself a sobriquet, and naming imbecilic lickspittles to our Kingsguard.) Infinitive! Infinitive! Infinitive!

• Aemond easily could've phrased all of these in the indicative and conjugated them in the second-person imperfect (pradilē, iderēbilē, ivēttīlē). By keeping the verbs in the infinitive for no goddamn reason, he's avoiding offering any judgement whatsoever about the factuality or person of the events in question. Grammatical bitch move.

Note on looking up infinitives:

• Okay so, the infinitive is always the form that you encounter first whenever you look up a verb in the dictionary, however, this is only the present-active infinitive. There are more flavors. If you want the present-passive infinitive or the perfect-active or whatever, you're gonna expand the conjugation chart and scroll all the way down:

• Just FYI, in the course of my moderate exposure to HV, I have only ever needed to use the present-active and the present-passive forms of infinitives. (I've never used the perfect-passive, for instance. That one has a very theatrical sort of feel. Like, the literal translation of "ivēttetakson" is "to have been named" which sounds like the beginning of a grandiose as fuck monologue. It has its place, yes, but it's very specific.)

❖ Particle words

• "Particles" include conjunction words such as "and", "but", "or", "if", "as", "like", etc. It's nice to have them all in one place:

  • Se — and

  • Yn — but

  • Iā — or/either

  • Lo — if/when

  • Sepār — thus/just as/as (lo and sepār can be used together to make an if/then construction)

  • Sesīr — also/even/and now/and so

  • Kessyt — so/so that/in order to

  • Loador — otherwise/or else

• The other subcateogry of particles are called "adpositions". These take a certain noun as their object, and necessarily go in front of their noun (prepositions) or after their noun (postpositions), and generally have to do with some sort of physical relation, so, words like "toward", "between", "through"; but they also include "about/concerning", "on account of", "for", etc.

• On the whole, HV tends to use far fewer adpositions than english does, thanks to the extensive noun-case system. However, there are certain instances where the noun case by itself is insufficient— this is where adpositions come in.

• For example, when Daemon says to Rhaenyra "Mine (my marriage) was recently dissolved" he uses an adpostion: "Ñuhon hen ñāqē qertaks." The literal translation of this phrase is "mine has dissolved since dawn". The word "ñāqē" is the locative form of ñāqes— Daemon is already using the case to specify "dawn/recently" as the locus of the event, but he adds the adposition "hen" meaning "since" for extra emphasis. Without the adposition, the phrase would mean "mine has dissolved at dawn".

• The other thing to be aware of with adpositions is that each of them takes their object (a noun) in a specific case. You know how the object of the whole sentence has to be in the accusative case? Yeah, well, because accusatives are typically reserved for the object of the whole sentence, adpositions tend to take their objects in the genitive or the locative instead. (Let's go back to our Daemon example for a second— the object of "hen" (since) is the noun "ñāqē" (dawn). Hen always takes its object in either the dative or the locative case. You couldn't use the comitative "ñāqome" for example, unless you were prepared to defend it as a bold artistic choice.)

List of prepositions (these go in front of their noun-object):

• Hae — as/like/in the manner of (takes object in the genitive)

• Hen — from/of/since (takes object in the locative) OR out of/because of/thanks to (takes object in the dative)

• Va — towards/at/near (takes the locative) OR to/all the way up to (takes the dative)

List of postpositions (these go after their noun-object):

• Syt — for/intended for/on behalf of (takes the genitive) ← I use syt all over the place, she's very very useful. A good phrase to know is "skoro syt?" meaning "what for?"

• Bē — on/onto/upon/concerning/about/regarding/with respect to (takes the genitive)

• Hēdrȳ — from/from out of/from amongst (takes the genitive)

• Iemnȳ — in/inside of/within (takes the genitive)

• Ondoso — by/at the hand of (takes the genitive)

• Rȳ — through/between/across/all throughout (takes the genitive)

• Harrī — while/during (takes the genitive technically, but oftentimes can be used without being attached to a specific object-noun, like it can modify the whole phrase, it's fine)

• Bodē — inspired by/in the spirit of (takes the genitive)

• Mijot — without (takes the gentitive, the comitative, or the instrumental)

• Gō — under/beneath/below/before (takes the genitive)

• Inkot — behind/in back of (takes the gentitive)

• Naejot — forward/in front of (takes the genitive)

• Geptot — to the left of/beside/next to (takes the genitive)

• Paktot — to the right of/beside/next to (takes the gentitive)

❖ Word order— hard mode!

PEMDAS. Do we remember PEMDAS? From algebra class? Parentheses, exponent, multiplication, division, addition, subtraction? Cool. I'm going to try to do something similar here but for HV sentences.

To start, we already know that HV uses subject-object-verb. This means our sentences must follow this order:

(nominative noun) (accusative noun) (verb)

But what do we do if our sentence also contains a genitive noun? Or a dative noun? Or an adverb? Do these have to go in a certain spot in the sentence? Great question. The answer is yes, but also no. For instance, in sentences that contain both an accusative noun and a dative noun, the dative tends to go in front of the accusative, but like, eehhhhhhh.

Here's a blueprint you can follow anyway. The stuff in square brackets are hard rules, the stuff in round brackets can be moved around if you want:

(Temporal or locative adverb) (Genitive noun) [Nominative noun] (Dative noun) [Accusative noun] (Manner adverb) [Verb] [Negation]

❖ Profanity

Lmao here's a list of every rude phrase I know (the vocative form is the same as the nominative unless otherwise specified):

• Mittys — fool/idiot/moron

• Hobres (vocative hobrys) — goat (much more offensive in HV than in english)

• Hunanne (vocative hunannys) — donkey/ass

• Nuttys — old person (derogatory)

• Quptys — heathen/infidel

• Vaogēdy (vocative vaogēdys) — defiled one

• Ilībio (vocative ilībios) — whore/slut/skank (can be applied to any gender)

• Ilībitsos — little whore/slut/skank

• Ilībōños — bastard

• Bratsio — bitch

• Jaoho trēsy (vocative jaoho trēsys) — son of a dog/bitch

• Nopāzmā jās — go to hell

• Ūī āzālās — damn it

• Aōle lykemās — shut up

• Qubroti jās — fuck off

• Aōle ojenillās — go fuck yourself

• Aōle vaogemās — go shit yourself

• Aōle qubemās — go lower yourself (slightly less rude)

• Yne morghot ojenillās — fuck me dead

• Votrītsos — vagina/pussy/cunt

• Hynga (vocative hyngus) — penis/dick

• Ñuhe hynge bībās — suck my dick

• Ñuhi naejos bībās — suck my tit

• Ñuhon inkon vūjīs — kiss my ass

• Vaogri ipradās se morghūljās— eat shit and die

• Bisi riñar zbēritusy— fuck them kids (the verb zbērigon means “to curse” or “to hang at the neck of”, I’m using it in the passive-subjunctive so it means “Let these kids be cursed/have it hung at their necks”)

• Hobrenkys — fucking (adjective modifier! append it to a noun or verb of your choice! as long as you remember to adjust it to the proper case, number, and gender!)

• Quptenka — uncivilized/rude/common/poor (adjective) ← fun fact, this word is used in the Valyrian name for the Westerosi common tongue (Quptenkys Ēngos) which may serve to shed a bit of light on the cultural sensitivities at hand. Lol.

• Not a rude phrase per se, but I like using "jaehossa" in instances where you might otherwise say "oh my god". It's just the nominative/accusative-plural of "jaes" meaning "gods".

I'll probably continue to update this guide sporadically as I think of more stuff. Feel free to request if there's anything you'd like me to go over in detail!

Cheers!