vintre

Vintre is a term used in speculative linguistics and worldbuilding to describe a class of grammatical markers that encode the source, reliability, and evidential status of information in the verb phrase. The concept is commonly employed in fictional or theoretical discussions to illustrate how language can encode epistemic stance alongside action.

In vintre systems, verbs may carry affixes or particles called vintre markers that indicate whether the information was directly observed, inferred, reported by others, or common knowledge. Some variants separate evidentiality (direct vs. indirect) from venue-based or temporal aspects, while others fuse them into a single 'vintre' slot. The typology can be suffixal, prefixal, or clausal; repertoires range from simple two-way contrasts (direct vs. indirect) to multi-way systems with several evidential nuances.

Vintre is typically described as a theoretical construct rather than a widely attested natural language feature. It is used to explore how epistemic information interacts with tense, aspect, and mood, and to model how speakers manage credibility in discourse. In worldbuilding, vintre can be employed to give a fictional language a distinctive texture or cultural specificity, by showing how communities differentially treat firsthand experience versus hearsay.

See also: evidentiality, epistemic modality, mood, affixation.