[Notes] Goedish - Parts of Speech

The following is an incomplete transcript of the third chapter of the Goedish grammar, going over parts of speech, as well as an appendix section covering native demonyms. A post will be made later encompassing the entire lexicon of Goedish words as it stands thus far. 

Chapter 3: Parts of Speech

This section deals with describing things in greater detail, as well as introducing the vital concepts of prepositions, personal pronouns, and the adjectival forms of words. This consumes a great deal less of space because the concepts are not many, but they are very important.

Prepositions

Just as in English, prepositions proceed the noun and have the same kinds of functions. Goedish does not offer as extensive an amount of prepositions as English does, however, and again the reader and composer must use context to the greatest advantage. That does not mean that Goedish prepositions are totally inept. The few that must be remembered, with their descriptions, are as follows:

i – “in”, as an obvious cognate, and most translated as either in, inside, or within. It is not used to equate the phrase “at”, or the locative case, and purely means “in”. It can only mean this if the word that follows it is in the appropriate case, which is the Accusative case, in which case it then does take a dynamic meaning equating to “at” or “to”, but never as the static “at” as in English.

av – cognate with the English word “of” and “over”, this word is used to denote being “at” someplace, such as being “over at a friend’s house”. Note how English uses the word “over”, and that Goedish uses “av” to mean the same thing, and applies to all such cases, whereas English sometimes uses “at”. It best expresses the locative condition.

par – “for”, it not only denotes a dative condition but also a kind of locative, if not a dynamic one – one readily thinks of the Swedish “på” in analogy. The two are thought to be cognates. It can be rendered in English as “to”, as well as “on”, because of this. For example, “par dreo” means “on the door”, and “i par dreo” means “onto the door”.

Personal Pronouns

As mentioned before, the First Person Singular pronoun is “ej”. Its similarity to the Scandinavian “jeg” are quite obvious, and it almost approaches the sound of the English pronoun “I”. Yet you are far from discovering all of these pronouns.

Adjectives

These words are made from nouns. The form is achieved simply by adding a “j” before the middle vowel of the word, for instance shifting “drad” into “drjad”, and is pronounced in the same way as the letter “j” in German or Scandinavian languages. The resulting adjective means, respectively, “strong”. Its declension functions in the same way as in the standard, four-fold forms of “ad” as described in the previous table. However, when the thing that they are describing is included in the statement, the behavior of the adjective takes a radical change. It is placed behind the noun that it is describing and adopts a simple binary relationship – when the described object is singular, the adjective takes the Accusative Plural ending “aidi”. When the described object is plural, the adjective reverts to its simple ending of “ad”, while the described object – if ending in “ad” – must take the ending of “aidi” instead. This creates an inverse relationship. It is suspected that this was a fairly recent development, i.e. developed in the past thousand years, and does not follow the conventional Germanic adjectival practices.

If we take “stav” to mean “stem”, the following description of “a strong stalk” and “strong stalks” would look as follows:

Singular	Plural
stav drjaidi	staivi drjad
strong stem	strong stems

Chapter 4: Composition

Now we are ready to put our knowledge to the test. The forms of Goedish bring the mind into a heightened sense of the past; of a poetic condition of the thoughts of these ancient verb-forms. Now it is time to see how they are created, when prose is given form, and to utilize these elements. 

[Missing]

Appendix: Demonyms

Demonyms

Demonyms were introduced to the Goedish language relatively late, since they lived in far proximity from any of their geographical neighbors, but when they were, they were taken from a rich tradition of historical names and terms for the world’s peoples, some of which are described below.

God, the demonym to describe the Goedish people and language, does not actually mean a deity – it is the ancient rendering of the word “Goth” by the Goedish people, from whom they branched off, and who they therefore called themselves. Geographically the area of the Goedish people is not far from Gotland in Sweden. It is cognate with the English term “Geat”. The rendition of this name in modern Goedish is “Got”, but this is the term they use to describe “German”.

Another easily shown example is the term Gal, which one should try to guess without much effort. It comes from the term “Gaul”, used by the Romans, and distantly related to the word “Celt” or “Keltoi”. It is used to describe the inhabitants of the region once lived in by the Gauls and their language, which today is the French. Gal is therefore used to describe the people and language of modern-day France.

The neighbor of the Goedish, the Russians, are given the wider-spanning demonym of Lav, which is a backformation of Slav, with a deletion of the letter “s”. This term can be used to refer to any Slavic peoples or their language, most often times however referring to Russians, while the more specific Ruslav can be used to mean the same.

To denote a member of the people, their language, or anything described by them, the ending “isk” is used. Another ending, “is”, specifically denotes an individual, as it does in the case of the various disciplines in the lexicon translated from Greek.

To denote the country from which a people come, the endings “jar” and “jum” are used. “Jar” is a cognate with the English words “yard” and “garden”, and functions the same was as the last element in the word “Asgard” and “Midgard”. This happens to be its etymology as well. The first is therefore used to denote the physical land or space from which they come, which can be defined with borders and as a specific area.

“Jum”, on the other hand, can mean much more than this, and is a cognate with the English ending “dom” as in the words “freedom” and “kingdom”. This ending denotes the collective state of an entire people, transcendent of physical space, similar to the words “Englishdom”, “Slavdom”, “Germandom”, et cetera.

The following list provides the known Goedish demonyms and their translations:

Angl                 English (from the Angles)

Est                   Estonian

Dan                  Dane

Gal                   French (from the Gauls or Gaels)

God                  Goedish (from the ancient rendering of “Goth”)

Got                  German (from the modern rendering of “Goth”)

Gralan             Greenlandic

Han                  Chinese (from the Han)

Hel                   Greek (from the Hellenes)

Islan                 Icelandic

Lat                   Italian (from the Latins)

Lav                   Russian (from the Slavs)

Nor                  Norwegian (from the Nords)

Nippon             Japanese

Suom               Finnish

Sum                 Sumerian

Sven                 Swede