conlang.phundrak.com/docs/eittlandic/typology.org

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* Typological Outline of the Eittlandic Language
# - Is the language dominantly isolating or polysynthetic?
# - If the language is at all polysynthetic, is it dominantly
#   agglutinative or fusional? Give examples of its dominant pattern
#   and any secondary patterns.
# - If the language is at all agglutinative, is it dominantly
#   prefixing, suffixing or neither?
# - Illustrate the major and secondary patterns (including infixation,
#   stem modification, reduplication, suprasegmental modification, and
#   suppletion).
# - If the language is at all polysynthetic, is it dominantly
#   "head-marking", "dependent-marking", or mixed?
# - Give some examples of each type of marking the language exhibits.
Over the last centuries, Eittlandic evolved to become a language
leaning more and more towards an analytic language, losing its
fusional aspect Old Eittlandic once had. Its grammar now greatly relies
on its syntax as well as on grammatical particules rather than on its
morphology. Let’s take the following sentence as an example.

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Barn etar fisk

barn et-ar fisk

child.nom eat-3sg fish.acc

A child is eating a fish
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In this sentence, the word order helps us understand the child is the
subject of the sentence while its subject is /fisk/, although we have no
information on their number; the sentence could also very well mean
/children are eating fishes/. Unlike in Old Eittlandic where we could
have the following sentences.

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- Barn etar fiska

  barn et-ar fiska

  child.nom eat-3sg fish-pl.acc

  A child is eating fishes
- Fiska etar barn

  fisk-a et-ar barn

  fish-pl.acc eat-3sg child.nom

  A child is eating fishes
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Both have the same meaning as the Eittlandic sentence. However, the
near-complete (or even complete in Standard Eittlandic) loss of case
marking makes the sentence /fisk barn etar/ much more gruesome.

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Fisk etar barn

fisk et-ar barn

fish.nom eat-3sg barn.acc

A fish is eating a child
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Eittlandic is a V-2 language, meaning in most cases, finite verbs are
in second position in their clause and may be in first position
interrogative and dependent clauses, as shown below.

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Han talð mér þat kom han hér í gær

han talð mér þat kom han hér í=gær

3sg.m.nom tell-3sg.pret 1sg.dat that come.3sg.pret 3sg.m.nom here yesterday

He told me he came here yesterday
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Loss of case marking also affected adjectives which share most of
their declensions with nouns. The parts where Eittlandic retains its
fusional aspect is with verbs, where loss of its words’ final vowel
had much less impact, as we could see in /barn fisk etar/. In this case,
/etar/ is the third-person singular declension of the verb /et/, a weak
verb.

Eittlandic, as most other germanic languages, tend to compound words
together in order to create new words. The name of the country itself,
/Eittland/, is a good example: the word /eitt/ (neutral of /einn/) used to
mean /lonely/ in Old Eittlandic, while /land/ has the same meaning as in
English, therefore creating a word and place name meaning “lonely
land”. Another common example is the word for “wolf”, /noregsúlf/. While
this word is a compound of /Noreg/ (“Norway”) and /úlf/ (“dog-wolf”), the
word uses an «s» in order to create a relationship between the two
words, defining /úlf/ with /Noreg/. The litteral translation of /noregsúlf/
is therefore /Noway’s wolf-dog/, though this took on the meaning of
simply “wolf” as Norwegian wolf-dogs are not called /noregsúlf/ at all.