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• Typological Outline of the Eittlandic Language

Typological Outline of the Eittlandic Language

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.

::: tip Example

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.

::: tip Example

• 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

:::

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.

::: tip Example

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.

::: tip Example

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.