Grammar

Word Classes

Pronouns and Anaphoric Clitics

Personal Pronouns

The only notable change in written form from their Early Old Norse version is the regularization of the genitive plural second person yðar into yðr. Otherwise, most changes only happened regarding their phonology as explained in the evolution from Early Old Norse to Eittlandic.

Here we also have few changes from the Early Old Norse pronouns for the third persons, singular and plural.

An additional set of pronouns contains reflexive pronouns. This one is relatively small, as it does not agree in person, number, or gender. However, it still agrees in case. Note that there is no nominative reflexive pronoun in Eittlandic.

Demonstrative Pronouns

During its evolution from Old Eittlandic, the Eittlandic language lost one set of demonstrative pronouns, the one containing sé in Old Eittlandic and Old Norse, in favour of the sets containing hinn and þessi. Thus, we have these two sets in Eittlandic.

It is interesting to see that this set of pronouns retained some differences between their masculine and feminine form, which has become quite rare in Modern Eittlandic. These are used similarly to “that” or “those” in English, designating elements or things that are judged as distant by the speaker from themselves.

On the other hand, the following pronouns containing þess relate to the words “this” and “these” in English.

Again, it is interesting to see how these pronouns retained some distinction between the masculine and the feminine form.

Possessive Pronouns

Possessive pronouns in Eittlandic simply are the genitive form of the personal pronouns shown above. The pronoun agrees with the owner in person and number, and in gender when the third person is used, as in English.

They generally replace a whole nominative proposition, such as with the example below.

You can compare them to English possessive pronouns like mine, yours, or theirs.

Verbs

Eittlandic, as most if not all North Germanic language, is a V2 language. This implies that in most cases, the verb in sentences will come at the second position, possibly moving its subject right between the verb itself and the rest of the verb phrase. The only exception to this are questions and the use of imperative. More on that later.

Since Early Old Norse, Eittlandic evolved its verb both towards simplification on one hand, making the verb endings a lot more regular and predictable, and complexification with the addition of new moods and tenses.

Infinitive

The infinitive form of verbs in Eittlandic is generally used when the verbal phrase it is part of is treated as the object of another phrase, similarly to how infinitive works in other Nordic languages or English. For instance, “he likes to eat” translates to “hann líkar eta” (/hanː lèkar̩ et/), where “eta” is the object of the verbs “líkar”. This form is the one given in the dictionary and undergoes no inflexion.

Imperative

The imperative has the same form as the infinitive in Eittlandic. The evolution of the Eittlandic language made it lose the second singular and plural distinction, leaving the same form for both. Eittlandic verbs also evolved in such a way most, if not all, of them have the same form as their infinitive counterpart.

There is however a passive imperative voice in Eittlandic that does not exist in English. It is used to give commands or instructions where the subject is not specified or is implied to be a general “one” or “you”. It is generally formed by addink -ask after its infinitive. The imperative passive is particularly useful in instructions, recipes, or general commands where the focus is on the action rather than the agent.

Participles

Formation of participles is relatively simple in Eittlandic is pretty simple, as it simply adds -and and -it to the verbal root of the verb in order to form the present participle and the past participle respectively.

Indicative

Indicative the only non-irrealis mood available in Eittlandic. It is used to express events or facts that are happening or happened with certainty from the speaker’s point of view. This mood only exists for the present, progressive, preterit, and perfect tenses. Other tenses, such as future, exist in other moods as explained below.

The first two basic tenses are the present and past tenses. The present tense in Eittlandic is relatively similar to the English present tense, as it can describe what the speaker perceives as general truths, habitual facts, events that are happening at the same time as the time of speech, or current facts. It can also indicate events when the English language would use the progressive mood instead. Eittlandic does have a progressive mood of its own, though slightly different, see below. Lastly, it can also express near future when other clues are available in the discourse.

Here is how the typical verb is inflected in the indicative mood:

An important feature to note is -(V)r makes the underlying final vowel of a verb appear, while it is otherwise lost in all other contexts. For instance, the verb lík becomes líkar when in singular indicative present, but líkt when in singular indicative past.

Here are the indicative present declensions of the verbs far(a) (to go, a strong verb), and berja (to beat, a weak verb):

Note that the final vowel of berja gets replaced with the vowel from the inflexion, and the final j also disappears when it is immediately followed by an i.

Subjunctive

The subjunctive is the default irrealis mood of Eittlandic. It is therefore used to indicate various states of unreality, such as doubt (through other means than the dubitative mood), possibility, necessity, or desire (again, through other means than the optative mood).

Like the indicative mood, it has two tenses, present and past, in which verbs get inflexions. Below is the table showing how verbs typically inflect in the subjunctive mood:

As you can see, the subjunctive past form of verbs is identical to their indicative past form, as shown below.

Perfect

The perfect aspect in Eittlandic is relatively similar to the modern past form of the language. It also uses the verbs ver and hav before the verb, which both agree in number, tense, and mood instead of the main verb which appears in its participle form. The present participle is used when the event relates to the present or the future, while the past participle is used when the event relates to a time in the past.

It also uses the verbs ver and hav before the verb, which both agree in number, tense, and mood instead of the main verb. The latter, on the other hand, appears in its participle form, present or past depending on whether the action is happening or will happen, or if it happened in the past.

Passive

The passive voice, inherited from the -sk form in Old Norse, has some more regular declension than the other moods. However, this is the last declension where we can still see the remains of the distinction between strong and weak verbs inherited from Old Norse.

Due to this uniformization of the passive voice in Eittlandic, Eittlanders began using the verbs ver(a) and hav(a) (respectively to be and to have) as auxiliaries preceding the verb in order to convey the subject, tense, and mood agreement. The verb ver(a) is most often used in active verbs, while the verb hav(a) is generally used with stative verbs. While all verbs have a default auxiliary, such as ver(a) for a verb like et(a) (to eat), the speaker may choose to use the other auxiliary in order to increase or decrease the agency of the semantic agent (not the syntactic agent), even if it is not present in the sentence.

Progressive

The progressive mood is generally used to express an ongoing action at the time of speech. Note that its usage is a bit different from English, as Eittlandic progressive is rarer in spoken Eittlandic and even rarer in written Eittlandic. It is generally used to disambiguate a sentence that could be either indicative or progressive, but is usually omitted when the speaker feels like the progressive mood should be obvious enough.

To mark the progressive, the word ná is placed just after the verb, without any other word between them.

Conditional

The conditional mood allows speakers of Eittlandic to speak about conditional events while marking them as such. This translates into several strategies.

The first strategy adds -(u)þ(a)- between the verb root and its indicative declension. It marks conditionals the speakers estimates to be unlikely.

The second strategy, which is the default strategy and holds a neutral stance towards how likely the hypothetical situation is, uses the verb skal(a) as an auxilliary in the conditional mood.

The third stategy, which indicates some confidence by the speaker that the situation is likely, is to use the verb man(u) the same way as skal(a) is used in the second strategy. This strategy is also sometimes used to express a softer future, though one that still might not happen.

Jussive

The jussive is percieved as a more subtle, more formal form of the imperative. It is formed by adding -(i)l at the end of the verbal root.

Dubitative

The dubitative mood in Eittlandic is a mood used by the speaker to express doubt or uncertainty. The doubtfulness of the speaker is treated more seriously than when using a simple subjective sentence.

It is formed by inserting -(a)kki between the verbal root and the indicative declension. It translates to this declension table:

Modifiers

Descriptive Adjectives

Similarly to verbs, adjectives in Eittlandic underwent a simplification since Early Old Norse. They now all inflect the same way, as the difference between strong and weak adjectives disappeared over the years. It is also worth noting distiction between masculine and feminine disappeared, merging into a common gender, while neuter remains distinct.

If an adjective root ends with a rounded vowel, all -um and -ar endings become -vum or -var instead respectively. Otherwise, the consonant is doubled before the declension’s vowel if there is one.

The adjectives agree in declension, number, and gender with the noun or noun phrase they describe. In terms of word order, they always precede the noun or noun phrase, regardles whether the noun is in its indefinite or definite form.

What you will find most often in Eittlandic dictionaries is the accusative singular common form of the adjectives, which is its unmarked form, while some older or more traditional dictionaries will instead use their nominative singular common form.

Standard Eittlandic does not use declensions and will always use the unmarked adjective root instead. A few dialects do not use adjective declensions either, but they are relatively rare, such as the dialects found in the Úlfsaug valley in Northeastern Fjallheim.

Participal Adjectives

Taking the root of a verb and adding the declension of definite articles creates participal adjectives. For instance, sov(a) (to sleep) becomes sovin (sleepy) while hleð(a) (to make noise) becomes hleðin (noisy).

Possessive Adjectives

Similarly to possessive pronouns, possessive adjectives mark ownership or relationship from an element with another. However, possessive adjectives modify a noun or noun phrase and are not free forms.

Possessive adjectives are very similar to possessive pronouns, their base root is the same but possessive adjectives agree with the possessed element in person, number, gender, and declension. Agreement in number follows both the number of possessor and possessed. Hence, várt is a possessive adjectives marking one nominative element being possessed by several people in the first person, while mínar is a possessive adjective marking several nominative elements being possessed by one individual in the first person.

In the third person, gender of the possessor is also followed by the possessive adjective when there is a singular possessor. This means the gender of the adjectives must also agree both with the gender of the possessor and the possessed when the former is singular.

Constituants Order Typology

Questions

Questions in Eittlandic are formed by inverting the syntactic subject with its verb in a normal sentence. For example, the sentence hann komr í dag með faðin hans (he’s coming today with his father) becomes a question when inverting hann and komr. This is generally regarded as a formal way of forming questions.

A more formal way of creating a question is by suffixing -vit at the end of a verb without any change to the word order of the sentence. If there is any declension at the end of the verb, -vit will bear it instead of the stem of the verb itself. It is somewhat similar to asking a question in English by simply raising the sentence’s tone.

The verbs ver(a) and hav(a) both cannot use this construction. Instead, Eittlandic speakers may instead simply add vit as a standalone word at the end of the question.

This also applies to general questions as shown below, where the question word takes the place of either the syntactic patient or syntactic dative of the verb.

Yes/No questions

Yes/no questions are generally answered by já or nei (yes or no respectively), sometimes with a repeat of the core of the sentence to confirm the reply.

The interjections já and nei are often ambiguous when replying to a question employing a negative verb and are often avoided; Eittlanders will prefer to reply with part of or the entirety of the question with either a negative marker or not to confirm or deny the assumption of the question.

Another strategy, a lot more common when replying to negative questions, is to reply using counter-factual interjection eng meaning yes, while speakers will consider a simple nei as an approbation of the assumption of the question.

Similarly, when a question with a positive assumption is asked, Eittlandic speakers can answer with a counter-factual náng to insist on its erroneous nature.

Some yes/no questions are sometimes asked in a very reduced form, without a full verbal sentence and only consisting of a noun phrase. Think of questions like Coffee? or Another cookie? in English. Such questions in Eittlandic require the final word vit.

General questions

General questions that are not yes/no questions will most of the time begin with a question word such as hvar (who), the equivalent of WH words in English.

Structure of a Nominal Group

Grammatical Case

Cases in Modern Eittlandic

Although seldom visible, as described in Case Marking, cases still remain part of the Eittlandic grammar, expressed through its syntax rather than explicit marking on its nouns and adjectives. Four different grammatical cases exist in this language: the nominative, accusative, genitive, and dative case.

• The nominative case represents the subject of a sentence, that is, the subject of intransitive clauses and the agent of transitive clauses. As we’ll see below, it is morphologically marked only in dialects other than Standard Eittlandic, and only if the word is a strong masculine word.
• On the other hand accusative, like Old Norse, usually marks the object of a verb, but it can also express time-related ideas such as a duration in time, or after some prepositions. It is also the default case when a noun has no clear status in a clause, and it can as such serve as a vocative.
• Dative usually marks indirect objects of verbs in Old Norse, though it can also often mark direct objects depending on the verb used.

Case Marking

Although present in Early Old Norse, the use of grammatical cases has been on the decline since the Great Vowel Shift (see Phonology: Great Vowel Shift). Due to the general loss of word-final short vowels and to regularization of its nouns, Eittlandic lost almost all of weak nouns’ inflexions and a good amount in its strong nouns’ inflexions. On top of this, the root of most nouns got regularized, getting rid of former umlauts. Hence, while in Old Norse one might find the table below presented in Cleasby and Vigfusson (1874), Modern Eittlandic is simplified to the table following it.

As you can see, a good amount of declensions disappeared from nouns, with only four marked cases for strong common nouns and two for strong neuter and weak nouns. The declension system completely merged weak nouns which are no longer distinguished by gender. Strong masculine and strong feminine also got merged into strong common.

We end up with the following declension system in Eittlandic.

The -ar ending drops the a when an underlying ending vowel is present in a word, as with dótt (daughter) becoming dóttir in its genitive form. In some regions of Eittland, such as in the area of Vátrsteinn, a strong neuter / weak noun merger is in effect, where strong neuter merged into weak nouns. In the area of Hvítvall in North Western Eastern Eittland, a complete merger between the three types of nouns happened around the 1850s, where everything is declined as a weak noun.

Nethertheless, declensions are no longer productive in most Modern Eittlandic dialects. They are still mostly used in formal and written speech, but they are less and less frequently used in less formal circumstances and in oral speech. The Royal Academy for Literature, which authored the Standard Eittlandic, even recommends not using grammatical cases when using this dialect as they are seen as reduntand with other syntactic strategies. While the recommendation is mostly followed, speakers still tend to use the singular genetive declension oraly. Younger folks at the time of writing even tend to regularize it as -ar for strong neuter and weak nouns.

One exception to declensions no longer being productive is in and around the Hylfjaltr Kingdom exclave in southern Eittland where speakers of its local dialect tend instead to favour strong nouns for newer terms. Hence, while most dialects agree on “internet” (pl.nom internetr, pl.dat internetum) being a weak noun, this dialect treats it as either a strong feminine (sg.gen internetar, pl.nom&acc internetr, pl.dat internetum) or a strong neuter (sg.gen internets, pl.dat internetum) — the difference is due to subdivisions in said dialect, mainly between rural and urban areas favouring the former and the latter respectively.

There are some regular exceptions to the declension system. The first one, inherited from Old Norse, is the -r suffix becoming -n or -l when a noun ends with an «n» or an «l» respectively, hence the table below showing the declensions of strong masculine himn (heaven) and strong feminine hafn (harbour, haven).

During the last five centuries, the root of the word got regularized so that only one or two forms are allowed. Due to umlaut or ablaut, it is possible the main vowel of a word changes between its singular and plural form, even sometimes affecting its dative form. These changes are due to old vowels long gone since — with most even gone by the time of Old Norse. These changes mainly remains in a few common words. The table below gives some examples of such irregularities. These words are marked as irregular in the dictionary.

Articles and Demonstratives

When the noun of a nominal group is not a mass noun or a proper noun, an article must accompany it, except for indefinite plural nouns.

Indefinite Article

The indefinite article is einn, the same term as one in Eittlandic. It agrees in declension with its noun, though it is to be noted its declension is irregular, as seen in table below. Similarly, other numerals have declensions as discussed in Word Classes: Numerals.

Indefinite articles are not required in Eittlandic the way they are in English. The sentence hann át fisk (he ate a fish) is absolutely correct and does not required. Instead, indefinite articles are used as intensifiers, as in hann át ein fisk, eng fiskin (he ate a fish, not the fish).

Definite articles

As in other Scandinavian languages, definite articles in Eittlandic act as suffixes to the noun and fully replace its declension as it has case marking itself. The full declension table of definite articles can be found in the table below. As we can see, the definite articles underwent an important regularization as well as merging strong neuter and weak nouns together.

The initial i is only used when using the definite articles as a suffix would cause a consonant cluster forbidden by Eittlandic phonology, otherwise it is omitted. An example of the former case is with vatn (water) which becomes vatnits when in its definite singular genitive form, while øy (island) becomes øyns in the same form. Like the indefinite article, the suffix agrees in gender, agreeing either with strong masculine or feminine words (or as established before, strong common) or with strong neuter and weak nouns.

The use of definite articles with nouns is further discussed in Definiteness.

Definiteness

Definiteness in Eittlandic serves multiple purposes. Its most obvious one is to distinguish between an indefinite and a definite entity, as in English a dog or the dog, respectively einn hundr and hundinn, as discussed in Articles and Demonstratives.

However, definiteness is also necessary with suffixed possessives and demonstrative.

Possessives

Gender

Eittlandic inherited from Old Norse a gender system divided into three genders: male, female, and neuter. Although the number of elements marking it declined during its evolution, Eittlandic still marks gender in its strong nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and to a certain degree in its articles. However, as mentioned in Case Marking, case marking and by extensions gender marking is slowly disappearing in Modern Eittlandic nouns and adjectives.

Due to the presence of declensions with strong nouns and adjectives, its pronouns, and to a certain degree different articles, it can still be said Eittlandic is a gendered language, although it doesn’t hold much importance in its grammar any more. Since strong nouns aren’t productive any more and weak nouns lost all obvious gender differences, we can even consider gender as not productive any more in Eittlandic and bound to eventually disappear. In fact, the loss of gender is even stronger in Standard Eittlandic due to the theoretical absence of declensions in this dialect.

In case a strong noun is used with a strong adjective, both will agree in number and gender.