Vinnish

Introduction

Vinnish is a North Germanic language spoken in the Commonwealth of Vinland. When the Viking expeditions to the New World were launched in our world, the settlements that the Vikings formed died out, but in this timeline, they hold on and eventually fructify into a a country called Vinland. This is the language they speak, descended from Old Norse. While in some ways it resembles its cousins in Iceland, the Faroes, and Scandinavia, in many others, Vinnish has developed in its own direction due to its relative isolation from the other North Germanic languages.

Phonology

Orthography

Vinnish Alphabet
Aa	Bb	Cc	Dd	Ðð	Ee	Ff	Gg	Hh	Ii	Jj	Kk	Ll	Mm	Nn	Oo	Pp	Qq	Rr	Ss	Tt	Uu	Vv	Ww	Xx	Yy	Zz	Ææ	Øø	Åå

The Vinnish orthography is based on the Latin alphabet, with the addition of four extra letters, Ð, Æ, Ø, and Å. The alphabet was codified with the translation of the Bible into Vinnish by scholar Johan Goðmundsson around the time of the Protestant Reformation in Vinland. Until then, Vinnish was largely unwritten, with the exception of a few runestones written in Medieval Runes, as well as several documents in churches written in ad hoc orthographies based on the Latin script.

Morphology

Nouns

Vinnish nouns fall into one of two genders, common and neuter. The common gender comes from the conflation of the masculine and feminine genders in Old Norse. Nouns inflect for number and case.

Common Nouns

On the whole, common nouns show a much larger variance in declension patterns than neuter nouns. There are two overarching declension patterns among common nouns: strong and weak.

Note that "(u)" refers to the presence of u-umlaut and "∅" refers to a null ending.

Strong Common Nouns

	Nominative	Accusative	Dative	Genitive
Singular	-er, ∅	∅	-i	-s, -ar
Plural	-ar	-e	(u)-em	-e

Definite Article

Definiteness is shown via a cliticized definite article on the end of a noun. This definite article inflects for gender, case, and number.

Adjectives

Adjectives in Vinnish agree with the nouns they modify in gender, case, number, and definiteness. There are two inflections for adjectives: strong and weak adjectives.

Strong Adjectives

Strong adjectives are used attributively with indefinite nouns and predicatively with all nouns. They inflect for gender, case, and number.

	Common	Neuter
Singular
Nom	-er	-t
Acc	-en
Dat	(u)-em	(u)-e
Gen	-s
Plural
Nom	-ar	(u)
Acc	-e
Dat	(u)-em
Gen	-re

Weak Adjectives

Weak adjectives are formed by adding an ending of -e to the stem of the adjective, and do not change form for case or number in Modern Vinnish. They are used with definite nouns and nouns modified by a demonstrative.

In more archaic texts in Vinnish, a naturally or semantically masculine noun can optionally take the ending -i in the nominative singular case. In all other cases of the noun, the ending -e is used.

Verbs

There are two overarching types of verbs in Vinnish, strong and weak verbs. Weak verbs form the past stem via a dental suffix on the present stem, while strong verbs form the past stem via vowel alternation. Vinnish verbs inflect for two tenses (past and present), person, and number. In addition, they make use of certain auxiliary verbs to show aspect, and one of two moods: indicative and subjunctive. Verbs also have both a past and a present participle, and inflect for active and mediopassive voice.

Weak Verbs

Weak verbs are characterized by their usage of a dental consonant to form their past stem. This dental consonant can be either -d, -ð, or -t. Which consonant is used is not always readily predictable for a weak verb, and so must simply be memorized along with the verb; however, the majority of Vinnish verbs use -ð.

The below table shows the basic inflection pattern for a weak verb. Note that the symbol "D" refers to the dental consonant used.

	Singular	Plural
Present
1st	-i	(u)-em
2nd	-ar	-ið
3rd		-e
Past
1st	-De	(u)-Dem
2nd	-Dar	(u)-Deð
3rd	-Di	(u)-De

Strong Verbs

Strong verbs show tense via a change in the stem vowel. There are seven classes of strong verbs in Vinnish, each characterized by a different alternation pattern.