Modern Northian grammar
Evidence of Modern Northian grammar began to emerge from the shadow of Medieval Northian grammar around 850. Two historical events are contemporaneous with the emergence of a new form of the Northian language, the receding influence of the Acrean Empire as well as the settlement of Vikings in the north of the Tazmustera peninsula.
Modern Northian can broadly be divided into two dialectal groups, Southern and Northern. The Southern dialects are more conservative and retain more vocabulary and grammatical features of the Medieval language, which in turn preserves Epic grammar in limited contexts. On the other hand, the Northern dialects show more innovative grammatical construction and a more advanced state of deflexion and analysis.
General characteristics
Relationship with Medieval Northian
It has been suspected for some time that Medieval Northian, which is attested in only a few forms, was a literary dialect and not reflective of the daily language used by Northians under Acrean rule. Nordic became the de facto language of administration and commerce, while Venetic was the language of the Acrean imperial army. Northian may have teetered on the edge of extinction as a language for a time. But laws were translated into Northian starting in the 4th century, and these form the main body of Northian literature until the 5th century, when Northian poetry and short stories began to appear in the form of Medieval Northian in the 6th. Medieval Northian probably developed from a dialect that already existed in Epic times but which was not used to write epic poetry and was therefore unattested.
Nordic influence
Owing to Acrean rule, Modern Northian starts a wealth of words of Nordic origin borrowed during the Medieval period, and the way these words were rendered into Northian is very predictable. Nouns terminating in Nordic -az entered the 1st declension -as type, feminine nouns in -ō into the 2nd declension -ō type; in doing so, all masculine nouns became feminine, and vice versa. After the collapse of the Acrean Empire and the arrival of the Nordics, borrowing from West and North Nordic branches continued without pause and under the same rules. Nordic nouns were never borrowed into the athematic declensions even if they were athematic in origin.
- Nordic -az > Northian -as
- Nordic -ō > Northian -ō
- Nordic -a > Northian -o
Register
Depending on the impression the speaker wishes to give, the Northian language can embrace more arcane or colloquial forms to a great extent without becoming ungrammatical. Generally, the more synthetic forms and fewer auxilliary verbs used, the more refined the register is. The entire subjunctive voice (which combines the ancient subjunctive and optative) is, after the middle of the 20th century, considered a mark of high register, since their functions are validly replaced by auxilliary verbs. The same is true for the usage of the synthetic perfect, e.g. koama "I have arrived, I am here", along with its proper participle (from the same verb, kokauuō, kogmušō).
However, not all forms that existed are stylistically acceptable in modern prose, e.g. the Galic perfect imperative, the acrostatic optative and participles, the w-stem presents, the genitive dual paired with strong stem, the feminine adjectives in -ū, the simplex animate nominative plural in -ā or the neuter plural in -ō etc. would not be considered appropriate.
Nouns
Modern Northian nouns are inflected for five cases, nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and vocative, and two numbers, singular and plural; a small number of nouns, mostly referring to natural pairs of things and then mostly body parts, may have markings that descend from dual morphology, but they are still treated as grammatically plural outside of set expressions. Nouns could be one of three genders, masculine, feminine, and neuter; with some notable exceptions where the gender of nouns reflect the biological gender of their referents, noun genders are defined only lexically. The dual number has been lost in Northian with the exception of body parts that are natural pairs; however, inflectionally they behave as plurals and agree with plural verbs and adjectives.
Aside from abstract categories, nouns are classified into three broad groups based on morphology—the 1st declension or ā-stems, 2nd declension or o-stems, and 3rd declension or consonant-stems.
1st declension
a-stem nouns may be masculine or feminine in gender and come in sigmatic and asigmatic subtypes, and both have simplex and complex variants. The asigmatic type in simplex characteristically has a nom.sg in -ā and gen.sg in -ō, while the corresponding sigmatic subtpye has nom.sg -ās and gen.sg -aō (uncontracted) or -ō (contracted). The sigmatic type is a derivative from the asigmatic type, adding hysterokinetic endings to the noun stem in -a/ā, and the same process underlies the Epic declensions of -īš, -iiō and -ūš, -uuō, or otherwise known as the vrkī-types. The sigmatic type is relatively litte-used in the older language, but it embraces the influx of Nordic nouns in -az and has since become a major and productive class.
However, not all nouns that show ending -ā in the nom.sg are ā-stem nouns, since this ending also occurs for neuter nouns in n-stem. There are also two variations of ā-stem nouns that do not show -ā in the nom.sg, and these terminate in -ī and -ū. Commensurately, these sounds also manifest as -ii- and -uu- before ā-stem endings are applied.
2nd declension
o-stem nouns may have all three genders. nom.sg -ō signifies masculine or feminine, and -õm, neuter; however, terms ending in -nō, -rō, and -trō are obligatorily masculine. Regardless of gender, gen.sg ending is -ōiio. Not all nouns that have final -ō are o-stems. The ā- and o-stems are known as thematic nouns, since in most their case-forms these two vowels persist.
3rd declension
The consonant-stem nouns encompass all nouns that are declined from the root (even if terminating in a vowel sound) or have a persistent consonant rather than vowel. These nouns can have all three genders. Nouns do not have a specialized ending in the nom.sg, with the animate ones usually having an underlying long vowel in the final syllable and neuters short or zero vowel. Owing to ancient phonetic changes, athematic animates and neuters can both show -ā and -ō in nom.sg, while the gen.sg form gives more information about a noun's formation.
Endings
For the sake of comparison, the endings of the main noun classes are shown below. As can be seen, the vast majority of distinct endings are found in the 3rd declension
| sg | I decl |
II decl |
III decl | ||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| i- | u- | n- | n- n. | mn- | ōn- | s- n. | t- | nt- | tāt- | stop | r- n. | ō- | |||
| nom | -ā | -ō | -iš | -uš | -ō | -ā | -ō | -ō | -ō | -ōt | -at | -tā | -ō | -arō | -ō |
| voc | -ā | -o | -i | -u | -en | -an | -ā | -ot | -Ø | ||||||
| acc | -ō | -im | -um | -ēnā | -anā | -ōna | -ō | -ta | -ata | -a | |||||
| dat | -āi | -ē | -inē | -nē | -anē | -ōnā | -ā | -tē | -atē | -tāi | -ē | -nē | -wē | ||
| gen | -ō | -ō | -inō | -nō | -anō | -ōnō | -ō | -tō | -atō | -tō | -ō | -nō | -wō | ||
Columns cells coloured green indicate that the root tends to take a strong grade in this form, and those coloured red, the weak grade. Root ablaut is an ancient feature of the language inherited from the Proto-Erani-Eracuran ancestral language and is no longer productive.
Note that for the t-stems, the only noun still in common use in nepōt "offspring" with the gen.sg aptō; the vast majority of other t-stems are loans from other languages which do not show ablaut in the root, notwithstanding efforts to add ablaut for various reasons which never become widely accepted. A case in point is the proper name Šabawōt, with gen.sg Šabawtō, "Sabaoth".
Verbs
In general, Modern Northian finite verbs exhibit a regular contrast between two aspects, namely imperfect and perfect, and three tenses, namely future, present, and past. These six permutations can in turn be expressed in the indicative, subjunctive, or imperative moods. Distinct forms exist for three persons and two numbers (singular and plural), and for active and passive voices. The imperative mood has no tense distinction, and the subjunctive mood inherits its forms from both subjunctive and optative moods of the Epic language, though the difference in meaning has been neutralized.
| Imperfect aspect | Perfect aspect | |
|---|---|---|
| Future time | future tense | future perfect tense |
| Present time | present tense | perfect tense |
| Past time | past tense | pluperfect tense |
If the all forms of one verb can be predicted with one form, that is considered a "regular" verb, and those which need to be defined by multiple principal parts are considered "irregular" verbs. Diachronically, the latter are regular developments in linguistic terms: there are very few genuinely irregular verbs in Northian. Generally, all verb forms can be adequately generated by the provision of three principal parts, for the present, past, and perfect tenses respectively.
| Part | Tenses formed | ed- "eat" |
|---|---|---|
| I | Present (singular), future | 3sg es-ti |
| II | Present (plural) | 3pl d-en |
| III | Past | 3pl ess-at |
| IV | Perfect (singular) | 1sg ōd-i |
| V | Perfect (plural) | 3pl ēd-r |
| VI | Pluperfect, perfect middle, future perfect | 3sg ēd-et |
Present
On the basis of the present tense or I principal part, verbs can be sorted into the "thematic" first conjugation and the "athematic" second conjugation and take the following personal endings in the active.
| Thematic (1st) conj. | Athematic (2nd) conj. | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| sing | pl | sing | pl | ||
| 1p | -ō | -omen | 1p | -mi | -māhe |
| 2p | -ē | -ete | 2p | -hi ~ ši | -te |
| 3p | -asi | -oni | 3p | -ti ~ si | -eni |
And in the passive voice.
| Thematic (1st) conj. | Athematic (2nd) conj. | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| sing | pl | sing | pl | ||
| 1p | -ō | -amahe | 1p | -ē | -mahe |
| 2p | -etē | -ewe | 2p | -tē | -swe |
| 3p | -etō | -eno | 3p | -tō | -eno |
Thematic
The thematic conjugation is by the far the most numerous, and it contains several sub-classes that are conjugated in similar ways, accounting for phonetic developments; class 1 -ēsi, class 2 -āsi, and class 3 -yasi are all from the same suffix -y-, with the first two being contractions of -aya- and -āya-.
Athematic
The athematic conjugation has only a few members remaining in use, amongst which are aiti "goes" and ešti "is"; it also provides a few classes of verbs that are used in the archaicizing or poetic register, namely those ending in -nāmi and -nammi.
Broadly, athematic verbs can be divided into those whose stems end in vowels (historically in laryngeals) and those in consonants. Vowel-stems systematically contract with endings in the 2sg and 3pl in the indicative, as well as with all subjunctive endings and singular optative endings. For vowel stems, the operation of the rules of vowel contraction will generate a quasi-thematic vowel that has been inserted in that guise or assumption where it does not etymologically belong.
Consonants stems interact with endings according to euphonic (Sandhi) rules. In many cases the alterations are arbitrary or analogical and must be learned. The most important consonant stem, arguably, is ešti "is".
Past
The past tense is either provided via the present or a distinct II principal part. This is because the past has different sources, some being derived from the imperfect and others from the aorist, both of the ancient language. Diachronically, secondary verbs are often defective in the aorist and always have the imperfect tense evolving into the modern past tense, while primary verbs can retain the aorist, though it does not always.
The aorist had several different forms in the ancient language, the most common of which being formed by the addition of -s- to the present stem; this is the dominant method for forming aorists in the Epic period. Another form of the aorist uses the zero-grade form of the present stem. Other times, the aorist had no distinct feature. Because it is not predictable which type of aorist corresponds with the present, the past tense when provided by the aorist is considered a distinct principal part that must be learned. If the past tense is derived from the imperfect, however, the verb is considered not to have a II principal part.
If there is a distinct past stem, then there is also a participle from it in -sən. The ancient athematic participle, without theme vowel (-at), is no longer used, even though it is more etymological.
Perfect and pluperfect
The perfect tense is provided either periphrastically, from the present, or by distinct III and IV principal parts. This is derived from the ancient perfect, which had stative or resultative function. Again, present classes I and II mostly do not have an original perfect since they are secondary in origin. Present class III in -yasi often do have III and IV principal parts, specifying an original perfect stem.
The perfect stem, where it exists, always shows reduplication of the initial consonant (subject to some rules of modification) and the vowel /e/. Since ablaut distinction between the singular and plural is conserved, the perfect must be defined with not one but two principal parts. In the singular, given by III principal part, the root vowel will be an o-grade, which will not be distinguishable from the present if it is a sonant stem (-r, -n, -m); in the plural, given by IV principal part, the root will be in zero-grade. There is a distinct set of perfect endings attached to these stems.
While the present and past participles active are always thematic, the perfect active participle is athematic and ends in m -uuō f -ušī.
The pluperfect is formed either periphrastically, with the past tense of the auxiliary verb and participle, or by adding secondary endings to the perfect stem. The pluperfect does not have its own participle.
Subjunctive
The subjunctive is formed by adding the thematic vowel between the verb stem and the ending. For thematic verbs, this means the subjunctive ending has a lengthened thematic vowel.