Analytical constructions of Nûrlâm

The language is called analytic when grammar and relation between words is primarily expressed by word order rather then inflection. This term is a part of morphological typology. And as other types of language there are no pure examples for this concept, but rather a certain degree of this. This article focuses on analytical style of Nûrlâm instead of studying various analytical constructions used in all variants of language (like expressing modality or voice).

Orcish curse is the perfect example of existing a speech style different to “official” ring inscription. While the latter shows agglutination and word inflection, grammar of orcish curse is closer to English with it's analyticness. Svartiska dialect combined these styles, through mixing of it's subdialects though. Nûrlâm was also split into three branches or styles:

  • archaic, “high” speech, close to Ring Inscription, highly agglutinative with a lot of suffixes for grammatical forms;
  • standard language brings some analytic and fusion properties;
  • colloquial, similar to Orcish curse, highly analytical, easier for English-speaking users.

Differences from Standard Nûrlâm

Colloquial analytic speech differs from standard Nûrlâm in following ways:

  • suffixes of verb's 3rd person and number may be skipped;
  • no clitic words, all postpositions, adverbs, pronouns, short adjectives are written stand-alone and not joined to other words;
  • postpositions became prepositions;
  • suffixes of verb's tense are sometimes written separately before verb;
  • infinitives and gerundives are combined into one grammatical form with suffix -at but called infinitive
  • modal meanings of gerundive are not used, replaced with modal-like verbs (must, want, intend) or relative clauses after conjunction “that” and Subjunctive mood (depending on modality).

Colloquial language however introduced a feature of synthetic language by adding suffixes for the category of number for nouns, pronouns, adjectives, participles:

  • plural suffixes are added to nouns (see Grammatical number article);
  • adjectives and adjectival participles should agree with noun in number;
  • some personal pronouns have different forms (see Pronouns article);
  • all type of pronouns may be pluralized the same way as nouns (except pro-adverbs);
  • few postpositions may still be used sometimes for cases (genitive-possessive, dative, instrumental), mostly for pronouns (with addition of Objective/Accusative);

As analytical Nûrlâm represents variety of orcish dialects, these features may occur in different combinations and be somewhere in between the Standard and Colloquial language.

Examples

Standard Nûrlâm English translation Modern Nûrlâm
Za sigûrz glamb naruglubû urukforum These long claws will not scare the brave orc Zaz sigûrzû glambû ub nar ugl(û) za for uruk
Mûr gifauth dâdishi? Why do you1) hide in the shadows? Mûr latû fauth ishi dâd?
Gunduzg kulâ shadat Gondor must be destroyed Gunduzg maug kulat shadag
1)
plural
syntax_analytic.txt · Last modified: 2023/09/07 19:38 by 127.0.0.1