Riphean

Nithish (niδiske ṛstine, from the word niδya "one's own") is an Indo-European language in the Nithic branch, a satem branch in a clade with Azalic. It's spoken in a parallel-Earth Ukraine, Belarus, and Korea, and is influenced by Uralic languages. It's also spoken in the island of Nōye Ceme (Isle of Man in our timeline), and substantial Nithish-speaking communities exist in parts of parallel-earth Russia, Alaska and Tibet. More recently it has absorbed words and calques from various Mediterranean languages.

Nithish has many accents and there is even a creole of Nithish and Korean, Bamaej-eo (literally "mixed language"), with some Korean words and mostly Korean syntax. Bamaej-eo is notable for being the only modern Nithic language which preserves the stop system of Middle Nithish, reinforced by Korean's stop system.

Modern Nithish is notable for mostly preserving PIE's syllabic approximants, ḷ and ṛ. However, Nithish consonants display various innovations including Grimm's law taken a step further (as in Dutch in our timeline).

Todo

Kīwaiđaza kala in utnė vlōye - The living fish swims in water.

lauzme - world, from *lewk-mn; stem lauzmen-

vrirasti - nature

zaurasti - nurture

-wite - science

• vamēzwite, xīmye - chemistry
  • vamēzwitina panta - chemical bond
• sternawite - astronomy
• wistōrye - history (later coinage)

nepalaste - anesthesia

• nepalastwite - anesthesiology

trōkzaiđaste - synesthesia

zaiđna - sensory

trōkna - concomitant, trōken - together

yēre, lėđe, azanye, cīme - seasons

azaniđi - to harvest, to earn (semantics influenced by the English cognate)

lėđe - (poetic) year

weđa - year

ōster - morning

uđrni - noon

sletuđrni - afternoon

wespra - evening

naiđ - night

skīye - shadow

skēwiđi - to walk

wart - plant

cweri - animal

sēne - fungus

vratānik - prokaryote

zōtānik - eukaryote

Numbers

aina, twā, δriye, xeδure, vaixe, zes, zevu, astu, nȯ, teγu

Grammar

Nithish has three noun genders, termed animate, inanimate and collective by native grammarians. These correspond to masculine, neuter and feminine genders in other Indo-European languages. The correlation between grammatical gender and biological gender is much less in Nithish than in other IE languages, due to the influence of Uralic languages.

As in Latin and Greek, Nithish has various declension paradigms for nouns. Some common ones are:

• first declension nouns - inanimate suffixless, animate -a, collective -e
• second declension nouns - -i, independent of gender
• third declension nouns - -u, independent of gender

Gender has been almost completely regularized in Nithish, again due to Uralic influence -- it is correlated with morphology, so all nouns ending in -e are collective, even nouns like aste (bone), which derives from the Old Nithish neuter noun haste. Most notably, Nithish pronouns do not inflect for gender, as in Armenian and Persian, but adjectives do; adjective genders follow lexical animacy when the noun is second or third declension and they follow nominal morphology for first declension nouns. There is also a distinction between attributive and predicative adjectives, with predicative adjectives never taking suffixes:

• En sive atvėziδe. "It is a good document".
• Ene atvėziδe siv. "That document is good".

An example animate noun: kala "fish"

• Nominative: kala, kalė
• Accusative: kalu, kalė/kalō
• Genitive: kalas, kalō
• Dative: kalė, kalām
• Instrumental: kalam, kalėm

An example collective noun: pluze "flea"

• Nominative: pluze, pluzė
• Accusative: pluzai, pluzė/pluzō
• Genitive: pluzes, pluzō
• Dative: pluzēvi, pluzēm
• Instrumental: pluzai, pluzėm

A neuter noun: tėđ "child"

• Nominative: tėđ, tėđe
• Accusative: tėđ, tėđe/tėđō
• Genitive: tėđas, tėđō
• Dative: tėđė, tėđām
• Instrumental: tėđam, tėđėm

Adjectives

While Nithish doesn't have definite articles, Nithish adjectives inflect for definiteness. There are generally two forms for adjectives, the indefinite form and the definite form formed by postposing a clitic -za, -ze or -δa. The rules are as follows:

• -za after animate singular nominative nouns
• -ze after collective singular nominative and accusative nouns
• -δa elsewhere

Verbs

Verbs in Nithish do not inflect for aspect but there are lexical aspects, formed from prefixes (analogous to phrasal verbs in English), root extensions and sometimes suppletion. There are three tenses in Nithish: nonpast, direct past and inferential past, the latter deriving from an Old Nithish pluperfect tense.

Syntax

Syntax in Nithish is quite free.