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 Nithland (Niδyaskema), a parallel-Earth Ukraine and Belarus.

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

Numbers

aina, twā, δriye, γeδure, vaiγe, 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.