Niemish
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| Niemish | |
|---|---|
| Nimsk | |
| Pronunciation | [/nʲimsk/] |
| Created by | User:Tardigrade |
| Date | 2015 |
| Official status | |
Official language in | Niemgard |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | qnm |
| BRCL | grey |
Niemish (Nimsk) is an East Germanic language descended from Gothic, the oldest Germanic language with a sizeable text corpus. The name originated from Proto-Slavic *němĭcĭ, an exonym given by speakers of Slavic languages to Germanic speakers. Niemish has undergone extensive influence by Slavic languages and is a member of the Balkan sprachbund, having such features as suffixed definite articles and deriving the future tense from present subjunctive. There is also considerable influence from languages such as Turkish, Hungarian, Greek, Latin and Romance languages.
Scripts
Alphabet
The Niemish alphabet consists of 33 letters.
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The acute and grave accent can respectively mark stressed long vowels (or diphthongs) and stressed short vowels. These are generally not used except in dictionaries for clarity.
In addition, Niemish orthography uses six digraphs: ⟨Ch, Cz, Ph, Sz, Th, Tz⟩ and two trigraphs:⟨Dsz, Zsz⟩ These function as sequences of two or three letters for collation purposes.
Outside digraphs, the letters ⟨C, Q, V⟩ only appear in loanwords, as do the digraphs ⟨Ph, Th⟩ and the trigraph ⟨Dsz⟩.
Phonology
Orthography
Cyrillic script
Historical changes
Wulfilan Gothic to Post-Gothic
Vowels
Wulfilan Gothic had three (in some analyses five) short vowels and seven long vowels. The short vowels were maintained in Post-Gothic and the long vowels reduced to five; Wulfilan Gothic already showed signs of merging close-mid vowels with close ones:
- Got. ē /eː/ → Post-Got. ei /iː/
- Got. ō /oː/ → Post-Got. ū /uː/
This is attested in variant spellings such as leikeis for lēkeis. In Post-Gothic this merger was complete.
The most important sound change with respect to short vowels was loss of syllable-final h /h/ with compensatory lengthening:
- Got. ah /ah/ → Post-Got. ā /aː/
- Got. aíh /ɛh/ → Post-Got. ái /ɛː/
- Got. aúh /ɔh/ → Post-Got. áu /ɔː/
This raised ā /aː/ from a marginal phoneme to a common one.
Consonants
The proposed Thurneysen's law became fully operational in Post-Gothic, although it was modified:
- Spirants gained or lost voice in dissimilation with the consonant beginning the previous syllable. This occurred in all syllables, not only unstressed ones.
- The condition for the law depended only on the voicing of the consonant beginning the previous syllable, and the effect of consonant clusters beginning that previous syllable did not differ from simple consonants.
Development of Niemish proper
Development of nasal vowels
Wherever a nasal consonant occurred word-finally or before a spirant in Post-Gothic, it disappeared in favour of nasalisation of the previous vowel. The length of the vowel was not affected.
- Post-Got. dagam → dagą
Nasals that formed the end of a root, as in háim-s and aljan- were either not lost or more likely restored by analogy with forms with inflectional endings; the Niemish descendants of these words are ham and älin.
S-retraction
Much like Slavic and Indo-Iranian languages (and to an extent High German), Niemish retracted s /s/ to sz /ʃ/ before and after /r, w, uː, j, iː/:
This sound change took place before the backing of /iː/ to /ɨː/, as indicated by the fact that mēs became mysz.
Emergence of /ɨː/
Long /iː/ (from Gothic ei and ē) became y /ɨː/ when preceded by a labial or labialised consonant (/p, b, m, f, w, kʷ, gʷ/) and not followed by a front vowel in the next syllable. Labialised velars were subsequently delabialised:
Open syllable lengthening
Although open syllable lengthening occurred in all dialects of Niemish, the result was not the same in all dialects.
Open-syllable lengthening was simplest in the Panian dialect, where it affected all stressed open syllables. Consequently vowel length is not phonemic in Panian, other than those of the lowland fringe which have regained it by ceasing to distinguish geminate consonants.
In the Great Plains dialect (and by extension the Standard), open syllable lengthening was blocked before voiceless plosives.
The Westlandic dialect underwent the law of open syllables: where possible, consonants in the syllable coda were resyllabified into the onset of the following syllable. Consequently, more syllables became analysed as open in Westlandic than in other dialects, and open syllable lengthening affected a greater number of words. It also has lost geminate consonants, although vowels before historic geminate consonants remain short.
The Capitoline dialect is a special case. It developed as a koiné from numerous dialects in the capital. It is thus broadly similar to the standard, other than shortening historically long vowels before voiceless plosives (this is due to spelling pronunciation and hypercorrection) and loss of geminate consonants.