Riphean

Riphean/Music

Riphean (riviske ṛstine; Ăn Yidiș: ă Rifiș) is an Indo-European language in the Riphic branch, an Irtan satem branch. It's spoken in Irta's Poland, 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 Riphean-speaking communities exist in parts of Irta's Russia, Alaska and Tibet. More recently it has absorbed words and calques from various Mediterranean languages.

Riphean has many accents and there is even a creole of Riphean, 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 Riphic language which preserves the stop system of Middle Riphean, reinforced by Korean's stop system. Another notable creole is Riphlish, spoken by Riphean people in Anglophone parts of Verse:Irta, particularly in the Pacific Northwest. Its lexifier is Riphean and it's roughly based on English grammar but with some Korean grammatical influences.

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

In real life, Riphean is inspired by Germanic (particularly Gothic, Dutch and Icelandic) and Slavic.

Todo

Revamp phonology (use b/d/g and more complicated vowel diachronics)

Grammar

Riphean 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 Riphean than in other IE languages, due to the influence of Uralic languages.

As in Latin and Greek, Riphean 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 Riphean, 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 Riphean neuter noun haste. Most notably, Riphean 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 atvėziđe. "It is a good document".
• Ene atvėziđe 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 Riphean doesn't have definite articles, Riphean 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 -đa. The rules are as follows:

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

Verbs

Verbs in Riphean 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 Riphean: nonpast, direct past and inferential past, the latter deriving from an Old Riphean pluperfect tense.

Syntax

Syntax in Riphean is quite free.