Riphean: Difference between revisions

'''Oselish''' (''oseliske ṛstine'') is an Indo-European language in the Nithic branch, a satem branch in a clade with [[Azalic]]. It's spoken in Irta's Ukraine, Belarus, and Korea, and is influenced by Uralic languages. It's also spoken in the island of Nōje Ceme (Isle of Man in our timeline), and substantial Oselish-speaking communities exist in parts of Irta's Russia, Alaska and Tibet. More recently it has absorbed words and calques from various Mediterranean languages.

Oselish has many accents and there is even a creole of Oselish, Korean and a little Nivkh, ''Bamaej-eo'' (literally "mixed language"), with some Korean words and mostly Korean syntax. Bamaej-eo, spoken in Irta Sakhalin, is notable for being the only modern Nithic language which preserves the stop system of Middle Oselish, reinforced by Korean's stop system. Another notable creole is Nithlish, spoken by Oselish people in Anglophone parts of [[Verse:Irta]]. It has Oselish syntax but generally less free word order, influenced by English, and a general reduction in morphology (there is no grammatical case in Nithlish, as in Bulgarian). Nithlish has some peculiar grammatical quirks found in neither Oselish nor English, such as the total avoidance of infinitive forms (believed to be borrowed from Arabic), and a total syncretism of the dative and the genitive, using the apostrophe -'s for both. Some features borrowed from English are besides the more rigid word order, the presence of analytic tenses and a perfect tense construction with the verb ''emi'' "to have" (''aiđi'' in standard Oselish; personal forms use the root ''em-'').

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