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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.
- Barn etar fisk barn et-ar fisk child.nom eat-3sg fish.acc A child is eating a fish
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.
- 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.
- Fisk etar barn fisk et-ar barn fish.nom eat-3sg barn.acc A fish is eating a child
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 clauses and dependent clauses, as shown below.
- 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
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.