[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

Goedish - Nouns

From "Ej studans par Gotisk! - A Comprehensive Guide to the Goedish Language, First Edition, Chapter 2: Nouns"

Goedish nouns are an entirely different matter. Over ninety percent of them are derived from counterpart verbs, or verbs that end up sharing the same root. An example is the archetypal word “drad”, derived from “dran”. Understanding the chapter on Verbs will help prepare one for the concepts that make up the derivations of them – a suitably large amount of the lexicon. With only so many roots to take from, as the list of original Germanic verbs is relatively small, there are various styles of deriving nouns from a single root that imply different aspects, and create a new word altogether. There are four standard types of verb-derived nouns, and unlike the suffix of the Goedish verb, the suffix of the noun is changed in accordance with plurality and subject-object orientation.

As is detailed in the first chapter, verbs make the backbone of the Goedish language. This applies both literally and etymologically. This first group of nouns and indeed the entire initial lexicon of nouns in Goedish are in fact verbs that have been given forms as nouns. This means that for each verb, there is a corresponding noun – and then three additional ones that give a noun-form in a different sense. Each of these four endings makes the verb a noun in a different aspect, but the endings usually denote the same treatment for each verb. For example, the implications of the second ending, “eo”, are the same for all verbs that it is applied to.

The First Declension : “Ad”

“Ad” is a cognate with the Latin ending “us” and the proto-Germanic ending “az”. Therefore it follows similar rules, yet it changes only with respect to number and role as a subject or object. It is curious to note that while Greek, Latin, and the Slavic languages have preserved this practice, the rest of the Germanic languages have nearly lost it altogether, instead opting to preserve the practice of verb conjugation which Goedish lacks from the source.

With these two binary values, a total of four possible endings results from the first declension “ad”. These are Nominative Singular, Nominative Plural, Accusative Singular, and Accusative Plural. The Dative and Genetive cases, nor any others, are not marked by a declensional suffix. They are rather marked by certain practices: for the Dative, it is dependent on the inclusion of prepositions the likes of which will be gone over later. For the Genetive case, the possessing word is rendered in the Accusative Plural case and follows the noun that it is possessing. This being said, the plurality of the possessor cannot be expressed while the Genetive case is in effect.

The following is a chart for the declension of “drad”, which will be used as an example:

Tree – “drad”	Singular	Plural
Nominative	drad	draid
Accusative	dradi	draidi

This chart shows the way in which this kind of noun declines, as well as introduces the first discrepancy between typography and phonetics. It is an important note for pronouncing Goedish, that whenever the letter “d” at the end of a noun becomes bordered on either side by an “i”, it slips from its “d” sound to that of the sound “th”, as in the English word “the”. This is one of the few Germanic languages to retain the fricative “th” sound.

As the chart shows, the word “drad” starts at its simplest form with the form “drad” and ends at its most complex form, “draidi”. In between are two possibilities. The first, of the Nominative Plural case, functions as a simple Ablaut and alteration of the noun’s inner vowel sound, so that the middle “a” suddenly becomes “ai”. This feature is familiar for speakers of Germanic languages. The second, the simple fixation of an “i” to the end of the noun, is also familiar in the same way, being a simple alteration of the ending in the accusative. A combination, changing “ad” to “aidi”, graces the Accusative Plural case.

We have already seen the word “drad”. As will be quoted in our section on Noun Transitivity, “Words ending in ‘ad’ are often those things which are either acted upon in the event of the verb or enact the verb [upon] themselves…” They describe whatever object most often experiences that verb. For the Goedish sense of thinking this was “tree”, for the concept “to hold”. In this way the class of words ending in “ad” is the closest to those of the verb-counterparts. 

Two other forms exist, however, for the nouns ending in “ad”. These have nothing to do with accusativity or plurality, and nor do they mark them. The first is relatively simple, and it is the shift of “ad” to “ai”. It is the Connective form, as seen in the first chapter’s discussion of compound nouns, and it performs exactly what is implied. Any word that takes the Connective form can thus be attached to the beginning of another noun to make a compound word, but it may only take this form if it is attached in such a way. “Drai” as a stand-alone word does not make sense. As the last note about this form, it is important to reflect on the fact that the fixation of a word to another does not have the same implications as when compounds ending in a verb are made. For example, “draibrad” would not be the exact noun-counterpart of “draibran”. For two nouns joined together, the way that the noun at the front alters the one at the back is in relation to what its original verb means – “dran” – and not “drad”, even though it uses the connective form of “drad”.

The second additional form is the curiosity called the “Nominal Case”, but not because of anything nominative or subject-marking. It is unique among languages, comparable only to the vocative case, which it nevertheless differs from dramatically. This form creates a name out of the noun, a proper name such as can be used to name a figure, being, or a simple archetypal actor. The result is best thought of as a title. It can only be done with the class of words ending in “ad”, and is carried out by first bringing the word into its Accusative Plural form, ending in “aidi”. Then, as will be discussed in the section over adjectives, a sound is inserted in the form of a letter before the middle vowel of the noun. It is an “i”. The resulting name will describe a being that performs the action in question, deriving from the original verb rather than its concrete noun-counterpart ending in “ad”. It therefore makes another return to its root and manifests again as an actor or agent. Therefore, “drad” would become “Driaidi”, meaning “one who endures”. The practice of making or using these names is very limited.

Lastly, there is an ending for this class of word that denotes a range of degrees or the quality of the word in question. “Ad” becomes “aiad”.

The Second Declension: “Eo”

“Eo” is thought to be a cognate of the Latin feminine ending “a” and the German feminine ending “a”. However, its meaning – as is thought to be in the proto-Indo-European language as well – does not signify anything pertaining to biological sex. What it denotes, from its originating verb, is a thing that is involved in the process of carrying out the action, but is not necessarily the affector or the affected. It is simply a catalyst, or an object somehow removed from its verb-counterpart by a few degrees of meaning and is meant to denote something that relates to it. For example, the word ending in “eo” for the verb “tran”, which means “to turn”, is “treo”, meaning “track”. This word specifically implies a closed track, or a path that is circular, because that is what results from the typically continuous action of “tran” (the nature of “tran” will be extrapolated upon later, shedding much light on its continuous nature).

The nature of this ending may seem idiosyncratic at times, but they can all be traced back to their parent verb in some fashion or other. To illustrate, the “eo” form of the verb “dran”, “dreo”, has the meaning of “door”. At first there seems little resemblance between a tree, “drad”, and a door, “dreo”, other than that they both might be made of wood. However, being noun-forms of the same verb, they do share a feature. “Dreo” is what occurs, or what exists, when “dran” is continually performed – but it is not the actor nor the acted upon. It is simply an object which typifies a usage of “dran”, to hold fast, and the Goedish people most readily assessed this as a door. A door is a thing which lets things in and does not permit others, and in this function as a dynamic barrier, guarding whatever is at the other side, its function is very prevalent for something that is “holding fast” or “supporting”. A gate supports or holds fast in the face of what is going against it, yet it lets in that which can help it or which should enter. It is therefore a very important tool for whatever is holding fast. Further etymology for “dreo” can be traced back to a supposed relationship of trees acting as doorways, either as in the hollow of a tree or in the space between two trees in the pagan practices of the ancient Goedish, but this cannot be clearly documented.

To sum this up, “eo” is what results when the action is undertaken, but most often as a function, and whatever object provides that function, rather than what the physical product of the verb is.

The ending “eo” also changes in accordance to plurality and accusativity. These binary values create a total of four endings, which are illustrated in the table below, the declension of the word “dreo”:

Door  – “dreo”	Singular	Plural
Nominative	drea	dreia
Accusative	dreo	drei

As the chart shows, the Nominative Singular form is not “dreo”, but “drea”. The reason that words ending in “eo” are listed as such, instead of being listed as words ending in “ea”, is because this class of noun most often tends to not be in the Nominative case, due to its nature, and is mostly seen as an accusative object either with a direct or indirect relationship. They are often not the actors. One can readily see that the declension of “eo” makes changes much more radically than that of “ad”.

As before, the Dative case is marked by the inclusion of a preposition, without any additional changes to the actual word. The Genitive however is always marked with the Nominative Plural case, and also does not allow the expression of plurality while it is in effect. As with “ad”, it follows the possessed thing whenever in the Genitive case.

The Connective form of words ending in “eo” is actually no different than “eo” – these words can simply be added how they are to another, albeit carrying a specific spectrum of meaning. These words can also connect to others with the ending “ea”, and this is only if the described base-word of the compound is being described as affected by the connected word, which is most often not the case. When it is connected with the ending “eo”, it usually means, in the case of verbs, “to perform said verb in the way that would be done to the connecting word”, rather than the other way around, when “ea” is used. “Dreodan” means literally “to do as one would to a door”, and thus means either “to open the door”, “to close the door” or “to open or close” something in the general sense. “Dreadan”, on the other hand, would mean “to do as a door does”, which could mean a range of things, most of which happen to be expressed already by other words.

The Third Declension: “i”

This rarely seen ending is etymologically similar to the ending “a”, but it denotes an instance of an uncountable thing. That mostly means something for which a plural form is irrelevant, such as snow and rain, and therefore the word denotes a continuous amount. “Vi”, for example, means water. “Sti” means grain. It has little to no declension at all, existing only in a Connective form. When it is fixed to a word, its ending changes from “i” to “y”, which is the Greek Y or Upsilon which is pronounced as the umlaut-ed “u” in the German word for bureau. Even with this being said, there are a few singular words that fall under this category that deserve attention.

This is because those words do not follow the standard – and very simple – rules for the ending “i”, and that is because they retain the remnants of the former style of declension that has since disappeared. The two words particularly in question are “liht”, “miht”, and “naht”, which mean “light”, “power” and “night”.  These follow an old system of declension and relate to “i” only in the fact that their Connective forms also end with “y”.

The following table gives the declension for the word “naht”:

                        Singular                       Plural

Nominative     nyt                   nahti

Accusative      naht                 nahti

The sequence “aht” is also seen as “iht”.

The Fourth Declension: “av” and other miscellaneous letters

Words that end in “av” are denoted as a kind of vessel for whatever is taking place, or the physical part of the subject that most readily performs what the subject is said to tend to perform. For example, what is said to tend to perform “stan” the most is a “stad”, which is a word meaning “point” and “city” and possibly several other things that stand anchored in one place. The part of a single object that tends to perform it, however, which itself does this performing is “stav”, meaning “staff”, “stem” or “pole” depending on its application. It can also mean the trunk of a tree. This is because it is the trunk that performs most of the standing, while the tree performs this act mostly by its possession of the trunk. It is therefore a lesser version of the ending “ad” and denotes a lesser, more instrumental and actual application of the action, which may or may not belong to the “ad” form itself.

In terms of declension, this ending follows the exact same rules as the ending “ad”, except that the “d” has been replaced with “v”. This is only true, however, for those words that end in “av” that are derived from parent verbs like the rest of the previously described noun-types – and there are some that do not. These also end in the vowel “a” and then a consonant, but it is not “v”. This special sub-class of nouns fall under this section but do not behave in the way that the “ad” and “av” endings do. Instead they only take two forms, what would be approximated to the Nominative Singular and Accusative Plural seen in the table of the declension of “drad”. Without the option of distinguishing between Nominative and Accusative cases, these special words are actually remnants from the older proto-Germanic lexicon that never received proper sound-shifts to accommodate for the Goedish style of language. Or, more likely, they simply never changed. They therefore became declined under these two modes, which are very simple.

The ancient word “ak” means “oak” in Goedish, and is one of these miscellaneous-letter words. Below is a table with the declension of “ak”:

Oak – “ak”	Singular	Plural
Nominative  or Accusative	ak	aiki

Formerly there was a practice of rendering the Nominative Plural as “aik”, as well as with other words of this class, but such a practice has not persisted into the current century. It survives in only older writings.

The Connective form of the word ending in “av” remains “av” through and through. For other words under this category, they also remain the same.

Having gone over the four familiar endings derived from verbs, it would do good to review what vocabulary has been introduced. With their English translations, they are:

tran – to turn

treo – track

dreo – door

dreodan – to open the door

vi – water

sti – grain

liht – light

miht – might

naht – night

stad – city

stav – staff

ak – oak

As you may have already become aware of, the glosses of these words represent only a specific application of the word. You will no doubt learn of the various glosses that can be achieved via context, such as “point” instead of “city” from the word “stad”, as you find more examples.

Words without Standard Etymological Shifts

These words mostly persist with their old forms, like “ak”, and have not adapted at all to the system of declension. They therefore remain without declension, and can only be pluralized by adding an “i” to the end. These include such familiar words as “mother”, “father”, “sister”, and “brother, which are “moer”, “foer”, “soer”, and “broer”.

Further words without declension

A smaller amount of Goedish nouns, as well as verbs, come not from proto-Germanic linguistic roots but from onomatopoeia instead. This practice developed within the past thousand years to account for several words missing in the Goedish language – perhaps deleted as a result of a forced assimilation of the local Baltic people, or perhaps for more ineffable reasons. Chief among the examples is the word “kakan”, which means “to cook”, and is thought to come from the onomatopoeia of sizzling, “crackling” food when it is being cooked rather than the standard Germanic cognate for “cook”. There is a theory that perhaps these words were deleted and then rediscovered when making contact with other Germanic languages, and were appropriated under the guise and explanation of a solidarity-preserving onomatopoeic base. There are several words like this. Some hold much precidence, such as “kikan” which means “to peek”, or “to take a look at”, familiar in the German cognates “kieken” and “gucken”, but which is explained as coming from the clucking of a chicken or bird as it peeks at something from around the corner. Many of these words come from animal noises. “Moan” means to moan, and it comes from the sound of a cow mooing – this is one of the more plausible onomatopoeic relationships. The fact that the spelling deviates by not containing the single vowel “a”, or by the fact that the letter preceding the apparent base do not follow a Connective form, betray them as onomatopoeic sounds. The Goedish people never really had much of a chance to advance their form of nationalism, since the smothering of the Russians, Germans and even Latvians during the world wars and the past two centuries, but they have still maintained that these terms come from within their language alone, and that they were not stolen from their sister languages.

The last group of words is borrowed directly from Latin or Greek. “Avto” is car, “Disadparum” is disappearance, and it would not be rare to see a familiar Latin word or two in a text. Some of these words follow a simple system of declension while others do not follow any at all.

The next chapter will deal with parts of speech, including further descriptive classes such as pronouns, prepositions, and adjectives. 

Previous Chapters:

Chapter 1: Verbs

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.