Innocence Seekers: The Black Rose – Languages (fourth post)

It’s the last day of April, and I have released episode 18 of Innocence Seekers: April Light. However, this is yet another post on the languages of Innocence Seekers: The Black Rose. And again, it will focus on the Likkran languages.

For this post I will be specifically talking about Blylandic, although some of the other languages will be mentioned. As I mentioned, Blylandic is a Germanic language distantly related to English, and indeed, one can spot similarities if one looks closely. However, Blylandic is in a separate branch of Germanic, one characterised by the complete absence of a-mutation (a feature common to many Germanic languages) and incomplete rhotacisation of Proto-Germanic /z/ (namely, it does not change to /r/ after /n/ and /r/). Like the North and West Germanic languages, it features umlaut (namely, i-umlaut, u-umlaut and n-umlaut), although the Blylandic branch’s umlaut only affects stressed syllables.

Before I discuss Blylandic, I will talk about its ancestor, Old Blylandic. The Blylandic branch is noted to be unusually conservative in its early history, which means that even though Old Blylandic was spoken at around the same time as Old Norse and Old English, it retains more archaisms than both those languages. It is hypothesised that Proto-Germanic was a null-subject language (that is, subject pronouns could be omitted); however, the conflation of personal endings resulted in this null-subject property being dropped in most surviving Germanic languages, even by 1000 (in some branches of West Germanic, the first and second person plural forms ended up falling out of use). Today, on Earth, the only Germanic language that distinguishes personal endings for all six person-number combinations is Icelandic; (High) German conflated the first and third person plural forms, to the point where the first person plural form of sein is sind (the -nd ending is characteristic of the third person plural, and never appeared in any first person forms). English (and Scots), all Frisian languages, Dutch, Low German and Faroese conflated all plural forms with each other (in Dutch the loss of du caused a shift in person and number conjugation), and Afrikaans and the rest of the North Germanic languages abandoned personal endings entirely.

Old Blylandic retained this null-subject property. As an example, “I love you” can be rendered in Old Blylandic as þek friju, where the first person pronoun ek is left out (compare German Ich liebe dich, which means the same thing, but retains the subject pronoun). Note that contemporary Blylandic actually retains this property, as a result of influences from other Likkran languages such as Namari (a context-dependent pro-drop language) and Guruni (another pro-drop language with verbs conjugated for person and number); even though conjugation by person was lost at some point in its history, the influence of these languages allowed Blylandic to continue omitting subject pronouns (and even developing the suffixes -em and -et, derived from copular forms, to replace the lost person inflections). In Modern Blylandic, the same sentence can be rendered either as ek þek fris or þek frisem (the -s ending being derived from the old third person singular ending).

As a corrolary, the copula still retains personal inflections to an extent in Modern Blylandic ((ek) em, (þu) irt, (wir) irem, (jur) iret, compared to is and sint). The original personal forms are nowadays only used in subjectless clauses; clauses with explicit subjects still typically use is and sint (note that these forms never take -em and -et), regardless of person, with the use of personal forms seen as archaic.

Another archaic feature retained in Old Blylandic is SOV (subject-object-verb) word order. Most terrestrial Germanic languages had moved to V2 (verb second) word order by 1000, but in Likkra, SOV was virtually omnipresent throughout the continent. In fact, Modern Blylandic retains SOV even when the nominative and accusative cases had been conflated in many declensional classes.

One may notice that in many Germanic languages have undergone significant vowel reduction in unstressed syllables, sometimes to the point of having the vast majority of its native vocabulary being monosyllabic words. Old Blylandic, like the other Germanic languages, also displays vowel reduction in unstressed syllables, but the extent is less than other languages. While all unstressed vowels are shortened, vowels in word-final syllables are reduced to a greater extent, with the only sources of /o/ coming from overlong vowels and diphthongs. Bimoraic long vowels are reduced to /a/, /i/ and /u/, while original short vowels are neutralised to a schwa (which later merged with /e/ from overlong vowels and diphthongs). Word-final vowels undergo the same processes, but the schwa is deleted before it can merge with /e/. Modern Blylandic displays further reduction in unstressed syllables, reducing /a/ and /o/ to a schwa and deleting all other vowels (although a schwa may remain to conform to phonotactics). For example, the name *Sigiwarduz in Proto-Germanic becomes Sigiwarder in Old Blylandic (c.f. Old Norse Sigurðr), then Sigwerd in Modern Blylandic (the loss of -er is a result of the realignment of declensional classes).

Now, onto the modern language. Blylandic is spoken in the Republic of Blyland, a nation located in the north of the continent. It is also spoken in the parts of Namari bordering Blyland, and in the Kingdom of Likkra on the western side of Lobehaben Bay. The capital of the republic, Lobehaben (Blylandic: Lǫbehabn), located on the eastern side of Lobehaben Bay, is also the city with the most amount of Blylandic speakers, at 700,000 (as of Innocence Seekers: April Light). While it is still recognisably Germanic, the language has shown convergence towards other Likkran languages.

As of Innocence Seekers: April Light, Blylandic is written in the Latin alphabet. Before the Second Likkran War, Blylandic was primarily written in the Nodaimese alphabet (similar to Guruni), apart from around 700 runestones scattered around Blyland and northern Namari, which were, of course, written in a runic alphabet (the earliest inscriptions were in the Elder Futhark, while from the seventh century Blylandic futhork was used). However, following the war there was a movement to shift the writing system to something that was not associated with the “Guruni imperialists”. Shifting to a runic alphabet was considered, but the government of Likkra under Queen Emma, and later the government of Namari after Namari independence (at the time Blyland was part of Namari), promoted the use of a modified Latin alphabet, which was already used to write Germanic languages on Earth. By the time Blyland gained independence in 1772, the Latin alphabet was in wide use, and the original script was all but forgotten.

Blylandic still distinguishes four cases: nominative, accusative, genitive and dative (the order of the cases is based off Namari grammar, where they are the first, second, fourth and fifth cases respectively). The nominative case (namenfall) indicates the subject of a clause, the accusative (þildfall) the object. The genitive case (ęgerfall) denotes possessors or modifiers, while the dative case (fangerfall) denotes indirect objects. While the case system has partially collapsed (all but two declensional classes have merged the nominative and accusative; the dative is only distinguished from the nominative in the plural and the weak declension), the four cases are still distinguishable in adjectives (where the strong declension preserves more distinctions than the nouns).

As mentioned above, Blylandic lost the original person distinctions outside of the copula, but gained new suffixes to permit subjectless clauses. Other than person distinctions, verbs inflect for two tenses (present and past), three moods (indicative, subjunctive and imperative) and two numbers (singular and plural). While most weak verbs merged the indicative and subjunctive in the past tense, the conjugations are still distinguishable (especially given that the present indicative uses a different set of endings). Auxillaries such as hębben (perfect) and skullen (future tense) are also used.

Adjectives have both strong and weak declensions, so called because the strong declension has more distinguishable endings. In addition, they can form adverbs by replacing the suffix with -e (with some exceptions, e.g. goder becomes wel), comparatives with -re (which only has weak declensions) and superlatives with -ester (which declines as a normal adjective). Both the comparative and superlative display i-umlaut. Some adjectives (such as goder) have irregular comparatives and superlatives (e.g. bętre and bęster).

That’s all for now. Blylandic is a work in progress, and I’ll add more later.

Edit (2017-06-14): Actually, on second thought, I will include a-mutation in Blylandic. I was wondering how to create regular sound changes I could use, rather than the exception-riddled changes found in real-life languages (these exceptions initially deterred me from including it). In this case, it only affects short /u/ (lowering it to /o/), and is blocked if the /u/ is followed by a nasal or labial.


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