as a language of learning and education among the nobility of Essos and Westeros, with much literature and song composed in Valyrian. Phonology Notes: and are not native to High Valyrian but are present in some loanwords, such as the Dothraki arakh. Vowels with a macron over them (ī, ȳ, ū, ē, ō and ā) are long, held for twice as long as short vowels. Some words are distinguished simply by their vowel length in High Valyrian. The rounded vowels and may not be pronounced in modern High Valyrian, as a non-native or prestige language and did not survive into the descendant languages. As a result, while Daenerys Targaryen's first name may generally be pronounced by characters in Game of Thrones, in High Valyrian it would have been closer to , with a diphthong in the first syllable and a rounded vowel in the last. The long vowels have also been lost in some derived languages; in season 3 of Game of Thrones, Astapori Valyrian is heard, from which all long vowels have been lost. Syllable stress is penultimate unless the penultimate syllable is light and the antepenultimate syllable is heavy, in which case stress is on the antepenultimate. As a highly inflected language, word order is flexible (a feature lost in derived languages), but sentences with relative clauses are head-final. Grammar Nouns There are four grammatical numbers in High Valyrian—singular, plural, paucal and collective. For example: The collective can itself be modified by number as a new noun declension, for example: Nouns have eight cases—nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, locative, instrumental, comitative and vocative, though the instrumental and comitative are not distinguished in all declensions, nor are the genitive, dative and locative always distinguished in the plural. Both prepositions and postpositions are used to form other cases; for example, the ablative is formed with the preposition hen + the locative (e.g. hen lentot, "from a house") while the superessive is formed with the postposition bē following the genitive (e.g. lento bē, "on top of a house"). There are four grammatical genders, which do not align with biological sex. The Valyrian names for the genders are: hūrenkon qogror—"lunar class", vēzenkon qogror—"solar class", tegōñor qogror—"terrestrial class", embōñor qogror—"aquatic class". Animate and individuatable nouns are generally in the lunar or solar classes, while other nouns are generally classified as terrestrial or aquatic. The names of the classes derive from the nouns themselves, which