hwhatting wrote: ↑Thu Mar 03, 2022 11:21 amDo you have more details on this language? Background, grammar?
The background is simple: I was imagining a book or TV-series that needed a language that sounded familiar to the (English or other Germanic language speaking) reader, but was yet not understandable enough to fully grasp. Probably because I read an article about some Nextflix? series in which the Romans spoke Latin but the Germanic characters plain German (which I thought was a bit of a cop-out). So I searched for Proto-Germanic grammars, but couldn't find any, but I did find a Proto-Germanic dictionary. So I just quickly cooked up some declensions and conjugations, and I was happy :).
The grammar is pretty simplistic, nouns have two numbers (sg/pl), three genders (m/f/n) and seven cases (nom/gen/dat/acc/loc/ins/voc), adjectives agree with nouns (so have the same numbers, genders and cases). Verbs have two tenses (present/past), two aspects (perfective/imperfective) and two moods (declarative/subjunctive), but no aspectual distinction in the subjunctive. Verbs can be strong, in which case there's a present declarative and a non-present delclarative form (i.e. past and subjunctive) or weak. There's also a number of irregular verbs, most notable to be/to have. There's seven auxiliary verbs (want, shall/will, can, must, may, need, dare).
There's a table of correlatives for person/object/place/time/manner vs. question/negative/some/few/many/all/any/that.
Oh, the phonology is also pretty basic. Just five vowels, no diphthongs, one long vowel /i:/ (because it sounded cool :D), most consonants of English except no /θ ð v z/, but [ç] and [x] (not phonemically different, cf. German), and /w/ is probably more like [ʋ].
And that's basically it (I have described some things about negation, questions etc., but not too extensive).
JAL
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