Table of Contents

Archaic Style

Initially Nûrlâm was intended to have 3 styles of speech: Archaic, Standard and Modern (Colloquial), with distinct grammatical features. One of the features of Archaic Nûrlâm should be an ergative morphosyntactic alignment found in ancient Hurrian language, which share some similarities with Black Speech. But as no evidence for ergativity was found in Tolkien's known material, this idea was rejected. The remaining features of archaic style were insufficient to speak about separate language.

Nevertheless the language should have some features for translating archaic texts (like Bible or some poetry) to keep their style. The following grammatical and syntactical features are suggested to add archaic flavour to the texts (relatively to Standard Nûrlâm):

  • Convert all prepositions into postpositions. Additionally make them clitic, thus transforming into locative case markers.
  • Singular form of all pronouns and pro-forms is used as plural. wrong, fix the mistake & clarify
  • Place modifiers after the word they describe. Demonstrative pronouns may be used as clitics. Exceptions are cardinal numbers and compound words (as Nazgûl, Dushgoi, bub-hosh, etc.)
  • Explicit use of Accusative case suffix -ish for nouns.
  • Explicit use of verb “kul-” (to be) in present tense.
  • Optionally change word order to Subject–Object–Verb (SOV)1) instead of Subject–Verb–Object (SVO) typical for English and Standard Nûrlâm. Another option is Verb–Subject–Object word order used in Biblical Hebrew and Celtic languages. Other more exotic word order types are not recommended for regular use.

Examples

Make more examples

Standard Nûrlâm English translation Archaic Nûrlâm
Za sigûrz glamb naruglû ash urukfor These long claws do not scare a brave orc Glambza sigûrz ash urukforish naruglû

See also

1)
actually SOV word order is more widespread, if we count all languages of Earth
archaic_style.txt · Last modified: 2023/09/07 19:38 by 127.0.0.1