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