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.
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.
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.
Example
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 and dependent clauses, as shown below.
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
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.