Epic Northian grammar

Epic Northian grammar describes the usage of Northian language in the Northian Epic tradition, which lasted around 400 years between 650 and 250 BCE. The Northian Epics were a oral tradition of poetic storytelling that was practiced professionally and passed through cults and apprenticeships.

Linguistically, the Epics are the third and final corpus of texts of what scholars classify as Ancient Northian, which was spoken largely outside of the modern territories of the modern Northern States but in Acrea, Silua, and Shalum, where the Northian culture developed. This category stands in contrast to Recent Northian, which is related to Ancient Northian but is principally attested in Tazmuštərā, the modern Northian homeland. The two languages are indisputably related, though divergences are significant, and there is a gap of about 500 years between their attestations. Ancient Northian encompassed various stages of the language's evolution, from Early Galic of c. 1750 BCE to the last of the Epics, composed around 250 BCE.

Evolution

Epic Northian, as it emerges from the early Epics like Aēϑariyō (circa 650 BCE), is not a direct evolution of Galic or Didaskalic languages. This much is made clear by both modern study as well as places where Galic or Didaskalic materials were quoted, where their styles were felt by contemporaries to be different from the surrounding material in Epic language.

Nominals

Noun stems

Despite the astounding strength of the athematic nouns in Galic, their number were whittled down to about a dozen or so types in the Epic corpus. The non-productive suffixes and non-productive variations of productive suffixes tended to be eliminated in the Epics, in many cases being limited to a few examples of very common words.

See also

• Northian language