Goedish - Verbs

From "Ej studans par Godisk! – A Comprehensive Guide to the Goedish Language, Chapter 1: Verbs"

Goedish is the language of a half-thousand people on the coast of Estonia and Latvia, taking from the settlement of Germanic tribes centuries ago. It survives in only a few numbered villages, and is a unique case of a Germanic language whose sister and brother branches have all died off, leaving it as the sole surviving member of a distant Germanic language branch. In its totality, it mostly draws from Proto-Germanic in vocabulary, morphology and syntax – less of it comes from Latin, mostly from modern times, yet preserves a Germanic morphology when adopting these words. It has morphed considerably from its usage by a hybridized Germano-Baltic people, who have kept the language ever since its introduction. Being the only member of its branch, it has unique features which set it apart, yet undeniably trace back to a direct Proto-Germanic origin. Non-Germanic features are thought to be due to either elements of Baltic or Finno-Ugric influence.

Verbs

Goedish verbs come in a uniform style; they all end in “an”, which with variations in accent can become –en or even –in, which is a cognate with the German infinitive ending –en and the Latin ending –um. Even so, this helps to organize Goedish verbs by their direct link to proto-Germanic – for example, the cognate for the verb “to do” comes in many forms in the various Germanic languages, and not all of them are immediately recognizeable. Goedish preserves the easiness of this task in simply pairing the sound with its customary verb ending, “an”, in order to produce “dan”. We therefore know that “dan” means to do, and from there on out a relatively simple system of recognizing Germanic roots takes effect.

What is different about Goedish verbs, however, from the rest of its fraternal and sororitarian counterparts is the fact that it, contrary to them, does not exhibit an explicit system of conjugation. That is, the “an” ending does not change to another ending depending on tense, person, et cetera. Person is not marked in verbs, and is denoted solely through the presence of the subject. This means that the ending “an” is universal for all subjects, regardless of person. There are other features, though, which help the reader and speaker to denote meanings such as tense, and they are all exceedingly strange.

The first is not so unfamiliar, being a cognate of the German verbal prefix “ge” and the old English “a”. However, unlike in German there is otherwise no other change in the verb when it is given the tense of a past event – the prefix “e” is simply added to the verb, bringing it into the past tense. Therefore “dan” becomes “edan”. However, in the course of the languages history the exact relationship of the “e” prefix became estranged, and sometimes manuscripts mark this prefix rather at the end of the subject, connected, instead of at the beginning of the verb, connected. Taking into account that the first-person pronoun is “ej”, and our previous mention of “dan”, the clause meaning “I do”, which would be “Ej dan”, would therefore appear not as “Ej edan” but as “Eje dan” whenever the verb is meant to be in the past tense. This would not be any truly different if the subject is always before the verb – therefore proving only to be a variation in spelling – but the fact that subjects and verbs in Germanic languages can take a whole other realm of placement and replacement throughout a clause mean that “e” has already been seen to be, on a whole, a suffix for the subject, rather than a prefix for the verb. Whenever the subject is placed before the verb, there has been a recent resurgence in spelling “e” in connection to the beginning to the verb, instead of the subject, but further developments are very sparse.

The second marker of tense, which is that of the present, also takes the form of the letter “e”. But this is a suffix for the verb, and, contrary to other Germanic languages, the “an” ending remains unchanged. Instead the “e” is affixed to the end, so that “I will do” would be rendered as “Ej dane”. No one knows where this practice originates from, but it was originally hypothesized that it was a remnant of a dative marker affixed to a verb, similar to the English word “to”, as in, “I am going to do” or “I am to do”.

There are further conjugations of the Goedish verb, however. The speculative “would have” takes the form of a double-inclusion, using the past-tense and future-tense markers simultaneously in a fashion that would render “I would have done” as “Eje dane”.

The last feature of the Goedish verb here is that of the gerund case, also called the Continuous mood for other languages. In German this is the shift of “en” to “end”; in English this is the affixation of “ing”. For Goedish, an “s” is affixed to the end of a verb, turning a verb like the archetypal “dan” into “dans”.  Therefore sentences like “I am doing” or “I was doing” would be rendered as “Ej dans” or “Eje dans”.

Passive Mood

The Passive mood is the other side of the Goedish verb. These are simpler. For Goedish, the “an” ending actually does make a change – but it is a simple omission of the “n”. Therefore a verb like “dan” becomes “da”, and “I am done” or “I have been done” would be rendered as “Ej da” or “Eje da”. Note well that “I am done” does not have the same meaning of a statement of completing something as it does in English – it means simply that one has been “done” by something, with further meaning left to the enrichment of the context.

There is a gerund or continous form of the Goedish verb, and this is the ending “ni”. Therefore “I am being done” would be rendered as “Ej dani”, and “I was being done” would be rendered as “Eje dani”. Sufficing to say, there is no future tense available for verbs in the Passive mood.

Conditional, “If”

The last mood of the Goedish verb is a very rare one – the Conditional mood. It runs along the lines of what the English phrase “If one were to”, rendered in Goedish. It is achieved by replacing the suffix “an” with “as”, and has no Continuous version. Therefore, “If I were to do” would be rendered as “Ej das”. It has one other form, for the Past tense, rendering “If I had done” as “Eje das”.

Ej studan - I study
Ej studans - I am studying
Eje studans - I was studying
Eje studan par Godisk - I have studied for Goedish or I studied Goedish
Eje studans par Godisk - I was studying Goedish or I've been studying for Goedish

Goedish verbs themselves come mostly directly from proto-Germanic, and as such their forms retain a pure linguistic relationship. It is the style of Goedish to omit the cognate vowels present in so many Germanic verb forms. For example, in the English word “bear” we have preserved the middle vowels between the “b” and “r”. However, in Goedish the word is more likely to have its midle vowel omitted, its two consonants joined together, and the declensional suffix, such as “ad”, be given presidence. Therefore, a word like “bear” would go from the previous form “beran” to just “bran”.

Negation

Lastly, before we take a break, one must know how to negate the Goedish verb. The Imperative mood comes strictly through mentioning the verb in its normal state – “dan!” for the verb “dan” and so forth – but negation occures through the affixation of the suffix “it”, after whatever temporal tense has been applied. For example, “I do not do” would be rendered as “Ej danit”, “I did not do” would be “Eje danit”, and “I will not do” would be rendered as “Ej daneit”. The last three vowels of “daneit” are pronounced as the “ay” in the English word “day”, therefore as one sound.

Below is a table to help practice. What does each of these mean?

Ej dan

Eje dan

Ej dane

Eje dane

Ej dans

Eje dans

Ej da

Eje da

Ej dani

Eje dani

Elementary verbs: dan – to do, bran – to have, studan – to study (yes, this is a loanword from Latin!)

These are only the basics of Goedish verbs. Starting with these roots, it is possible to construct an even more extensive vocabulary, primarily with the two prefixes “be” and “ge”, and then by the affixation of secondary words to alter the main verb’s meaning. The most common form of this practice is the adjoining of a secondary verb to the beginning of the verb “dan”, which means “to do”. For the purposes of explaining this instance in particular, we will introduce another verb: “dran”. This verb, like most Goedish verbs, has a rich etymological history and carries with it an extensive set of meanings. An elementary gloss would render it in English as “to hold”, but in the sense of an object holding under pressure, or a sign-post holding up over time. Its English cognates are “drag”, “draw”, and “durate”, the latter of which sheds greater light on its meaning. What typifies the action of this verb is to “hold fast”, in a sense to “support”, either itself or whatever it is supporting; it implies that the subject drags itself through time, and in the sense of its German cognate “ertragen”, also to take, as in to take abuse, a situation, or a test of endurance. From this we derive all of its further implications – it is used when speaking of oneself doing service or being employed, in something or another.  

The practice of affixing a secondary verb to the verb “dan” is shown in this classic example. When we affix to it the verb “dran”, which now takes its “connective” form, the result is “draidan”. The Connective form, as we will discuss in the second chapter, is the form with which a word can be affixed to another, in order to form a compound word.

The result of this affixation involves a meaning which has gone through several layers of alteration. The first meaning, glossed as “to hold” or “to hold fast”, means just precisely that. However, the meaning of “draidan” is, literally, “to do as an object typifying the action ‘dan’ would do”. This is a little confusing at first. After all, would not an object that performs “draidan” do exactly what an object that performs “dan” does? No. This is because, truth be told, what is being affixed to “dan” is not the actual verb “dran”, but its noun counterpart, “drad”. “Drad” is what typifies the action of “dran”, which in Goedish is a tree. The meaning of “draidan” picks up specifically how a tree would perform the action “dran”, which brings further specificity in meaning. The way in which a tree “endures” is very specific compared to other meanings what we can ascribe to “dran”, which gives “draidan” its specific meaning. “Draidan” therefore means to “endure”, “withstand”, “take”, “last”, “durate”, and lastly to “be strong” or “be hard”. One may “dran”, but one may not always “draidan”. They hold different implications. The true wonder of Goedish verbs is that they are often defined by context and the way in which they are used, which this extensive guide will no doubt clarify.

We have mentioned one other way of constructing new verbs, and this is through the affixation of “ge” and “be”. The first of the two, “ge”, has a cognate in German as the prefix “ge”, as well as the English word “again” and “against”. We have once before explained one of the cognates of “ge” as the Past tense marker in Goedish; but is serves another role, and this affixation helps to produce a whole new word altogether. It gives the meaning equivalent to both “again”, a collective suffix denoting either many times or a sum of a great number of instances, and “against”, which has both meanings of “to return” or “repeat” as well as “against” physically or mentally.  For example, the resulting form “gedan” means, in English, “to react”. This comes from the implication of doing something in return for another action having been done, or enacting a contrasting action, either in opposition to the other action or as a simple result, typified by its status as an action which “repeats” as being the second or reacting action, or “goes against” by being produced secondarily, in contrast. By extension, this particulary word also means “to function”, as in to function within a system, which is typified by how it acts in accordance with the things around it.

Our second prefix, “be”, it’s a merged cognate of both prefixes “be” and “for” in English. Etymologically it comes from the Goedish word “par”, meaning “for”. This prefix denotes the subject’s action of setting the object into a particular path of action, which is to enact the original verb, or to simply denote that the subject is making that verb be done, regardless of whether the subject is actually performing the verb or not. To use our previous example, the resulting word “bedan” means “to cause”, literally meaning “to make something do” or “to make something be done”. It also means “to affect”, especially when another verb is lacking in the clause. The meanings are often simultaneous.

Lastly, we will note some of the specific usages of verbs that are achieved through the Passive mood. For example, the elusive word “bran” does not only mean “to bear”, but also all of the other implications that Germanic languages give to their cognates of “to bear” – to be born, to conceive, to give birth to. This word is used to denote the subject having given birth to someone. In the Passive mood, it means to have been born. Therefore, “I was born” would be rendered in Goedish as “Eje bra”. Unlike in English, Goedish does not use the verb “to be” to facilitate the Passive mood.

This goes to great lengths in writing. Other words whose usages are notable are “gran” and “stan”, meaning in English “to grow” and “to stand”. The Passive mood of “gran” means something similar, but it is strictly intransitive, meaning either “for the subject itself to grow” or “for the subject to be grown by someone or something”, unlike “gran”, which means either “for the subject itself to grow” or “for the subject to grow something”. The Passive mood only makes that certain sense of the word, for the subject itself to grow, to be more clearly expressed.

For a word like “stan”, there are many other implications. The word itself is very rich with connotations, most of which are alotted separate words in other languages. English as “sit”, “stand”, “set”, “stay”, and “stall” as cognates, whereas Goedish has only “stan”. Further differentiation depends on its context. The Passive form of the word, which is “sta”, can mean either for the subject itself to sit, as is also denoted in “stan”, but can also mean to be seated or placed somewhere. It thus denotes less of a volitional or purposeful movement.

In order to review what we have learnt before the chapter-end, we will list here all Goedish words that have been introduced thus far:

dan – to do

Ej – I (singular first-person pronoun)

studan – to study (a borrowing from Latin)

bran – to have

dran – to hold

draidan – to endure

drad – tree

gedan – to react

bedan – to affect

gran – to grow

stan – to stand

As you may know, in addition to the further meanings that some of these words have, their Passive mood versions also supply several other words, for example, that of “stan” can mean to be placed or seated somewhere, which is not included nor is it directly inferrable from this list, as a “Passive” version of “to stand”.

The next section is over nouns. This includes their declension and their very special relationships with verbs.