Riphean
Nithish (niđiske ṛstine, from the word niđja "one's own") is an Indo-European language in the Nithic branch, a satem branch in a clade with Azalic. It's spoken in a parallel-Earth 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 Nithish-speaking communities exist in parts of parallel-earth Russia, Alaska and Tibet. More recently it has absorbed words and calques from various Mediterranean languages.
Nithish has many accents and there is even a creole of Nithish, Korean and a little Nivkh, Bamaej-eo (literally "mixed language"), with some Korean words and mostly Korean syntax. Bamaej-eo, spoken in parallel Earth Sakhalin, is notable for being the only modern Nithic language which preserves the stop system of Middle Nithish, reinforced by Korean's stop system. Another notable creole is Nithlish, spoken by Nithish people in Anglophone parts of Verse:Apple PIE. It has Nithish 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 Nithish 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 Nithish; personal forms use the root em-).
Modern Nithish is notable for mostly preserving PIE's syllabic approximants, ḷ and ṛ. However, Nithish consonants display various innovations including Grimm's law taken a step further (as in Dutch in our timeline).
Todo
Kīwaiđaza kala in utnė vlōje - The living fish swims in water.
lauzme - world, from *lewk-mn; stem lauzmen-
vrirasti - nature
zaurasti - nurture
-wite - science
- vamēzwite, xīmye - chemistry
- vamēzwitina panta - chemical bond
- sternawite - astronomy
- wistōrje - history (later coinage)
nepalaste - anesthesia
- nepalastwite - anesthesiology
trōkzaiđaste - synesthesia
zaiđna - sensory
trōkna - concomitant, trōken - together
yēre, lėđe, azanye, cīme - seasons
azaniđi - to harvest, to earn (semantics influenced by the English cognate)
lėđe - (poetic) year
weđa - year
ōster - morning
uđrni - noon
sletuđrni - afternoon
wespra - evening
naiđ - night
skīye - shadow
skēwiđi - to walk
wart - plant
cweri - animal
sēne - fungus
vratānik - prokaryote
zōtānik - eukaryote
Bamaej-eo
Kioneun kala unneo-in blon-ada. - The living fish swims in water (-neun, -ada and syntax from Korean, the rest is Nithic)
Three numeral systems - Nithic, Korean and Sinitic
Tons of deictics as in Nivkh
Numbers
aina, twā, δriye, xeδure, vaixe, 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. There is also a distinction between attributive and predicative adjectives, with predicative adjectives never taking suffixes:
- En sive atvėziδe. "It is a good document".
- Ene atvėziδe 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 Nithish doesn't have definite articles, Nithish 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 -δa. The rules are as follows:
- -za after animate singular nominative nouns
- -ze after collective singular nominative and accusative nouns
- -δa elsewhere
Verbs
Verbs in Nithish 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 Nithish: nonpast, direct past and inferential past, the latter deriving from an Old Nithish pluperfect tense.
Syntax
Syntax in Nithish is quite free.