80 lines
2.7 KiB
Org Mode
80 lines
2.7 KiB
Org Mode
#+setupfile: ../headers
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* Typological Outline of the Eittlandic Language
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# - Is the language dominantly isolating or polysynthetic?
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# - If the language is at all polysynthetic, is it dominantly
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# agglutinative or fusional? Give examples of its dominant pattern
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# and any secondary patterns.
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# - If the language is at all agglutinative, is it dominantly
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# prefixing, suffixing or neither?
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# - Illustrate the major and secondary patterns (including infixation,
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# stem modification, reduplication, suprasegmental modification, and
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# suppletion).
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# - If the language is at all polysynthetic, is it dominantly
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# "head-marking", "dependent-marking", or mixed?
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# - Give some examples of each type of marking the language exhibits.
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Over the last centuries, Eittlandic evolved to become a language
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leaning more and more towards an analytic language, losing its
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fusional aspect Old Eittlandic once had. Its grammar now greatly relies
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on its syntax as well as on grammatical particules rather than on its
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morphology. Let’s take the following sentence as an example.
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- Barn etar fisk
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barn et-ar fisk
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child.nom eat-3sg fish.acc
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A child is eating a fish
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In this sentence, the word order helps us understand the child is the
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subject of the sentence while its subject is /fisk/, although we have no
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information on their number; the sentence could also very well mean
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/children are eating fishes/. Unlike in Old Eittlandic where we could
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have the following sentences.
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- Barn etar fiska
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barn et-ar fiska
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child.nom eat-3sg fish-pl.acc
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A child is eating fishes
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- Fiska etar barn
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fisk-a et-ar barn
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fish-pl.acc eat-3sg child.nom
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A child is eating fishes
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Both have the same meaning as the Eittlandic sentence. However, the
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near-complete (or even complete in Standard Eittlandic) loss of case
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marking makes the sentence /fisk barn etar/ much more gruesome.
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- Fisk etar barn
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fisk et-ar barn
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fish.nom eat-3sg barn.acc
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A fish is eating a child
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Eittlandic is a V-2 language, meaning in most cases, finite verbs are
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in second position in their clause and may be in first position
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interrogative clauses and dependent clauses, as shown below.
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- Han talð mér þat kom han hér í gær
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han talð mér þat kom han hér í=gær
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3sg.m.nom tell-3sg.pret 1sg.dat that come.3sg.pret 3sg.m.nom here yesterday
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He told me he came here yesterday
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Loss of case marking also affected adjectives which share most of
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their declensions with nouns. The parts where Eittlandic retains its
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fusional aspect is with verbs, where loss of its words’ final vowel
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had much less impact, as we could see in /barn fisk etar/. In this case,
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/etar/ is the third-person singular declension of the verb /et/, a weak
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verb.
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