Swamp Gothic

Classification and Dialects
Swamp Gothic is, together with the closely related Crimean Gothic, one of the few remaining remnants of the Ostrogothic language. It is spoken in a few villages in the marshy areas of Volhynia around the Pripyat and Bug rivers, in territory in contemporary Belarus and Ukraine.

Historical phonology

 * 1) Graphic ai, au > e, o. I am assuming that Ulfila, who assembled his own alphabet and was free to draw distinctions, spelled them all the same way because they sounded alike to him.  air&thorn;a > *erto > jereto
 * a/o, ā/ō > o/a
 * θ, ð > t, d
 * 1) q > k; hw > v hwaila > vjelo
 * 2) Open syllable rule: Closed syllables are reduced, in the following stages:
 * 3) Nasals: *N indicating either *n or *m not immediately followed by a vowel: aN, eN, iN, oN, uN → õ, ẽ, ẽ, õ, ỹ
 * 4) In a cluster of stops or fricatives + another consonant, the obstruent is deleted unless the cluster can occur word-initially.
 * 5) Liquids: eR, oR > eRe, oRo (see below)
 * 6) Consonants are palatalized by an immediately following *j:
 * 7) * sj, zj > ʃ, ʒ
 * 8) * nj, lj, rj > ň, ľ, ř
 * 9) * tj, dj > ʧ, ʤ
 * 10) * bj, pj, mj, wj > bl, pl, ml, wl
 * 11) Vowel fronting: After *j or some other palatal sound, back vowels are fronted (a, ā, u, ū, ai, au → e, ē, i, ī, ei, eu). This leads to regular alternations in the morphology.
 * 12) Prothesis: Before a word-initial vowel, j or w is usually inserted, depending on the vowel: je, ji wo, wu, but either ja or wa.
 * 13) Palatalization. k, g, x > ts, *dz, *ʃ before or occasionally after e, i. This leads to regular alterations in the morphology.
 * 14) Vowel quality shifts: All pairs of long/short vowels become differentiated as well by vowel quality:
 * a, ā > o, a
 * e, ē > je (with palatizations)
 * i, u > ɪ, ʊ
 * 1) * *ī, *ū, *ȳ > i, u, y
 * 2) Breakup of liquid-final syllables: or, ol, er, el > oro, olo, ere, ele
 * ur, ul, ir, il > syllabic r, l, ř, ľ
 * 1) Word final stops are devoiced.
 * 2) g > h

qiþa auk izwis þatei nibai managizo wairþiþ izwaraizos garaihteins þau þize bokarje jah Fareisaie, ni þau qimiþ in þiudangardjai himine. (Matt. 5:20)


 * čito ok jizviš doče njibe monohiza verečič jizvorrezas horechtšẽ da dižje bakorri ja Farišie, ni do čimit in čudõhorodše himinje.

Phonology
While umlaut is not a feature of the inflectional system of Swamp Gothic, palatization does figure prominently and tends to be strongly regular. The following table indicates the palatized forms of the stops and sibilants. These are the palatizations that are marked specifically by diacriticals in the orthography. Other consonants are subject to palatization besides these; for these, a following j in the orthography indicates the consonant quality.

First declension, type A: non-palatal stems
The first declension contains masculine and neuter consonant stems. Historically, these are a-stems, and o-stems in Indo-European. For stems whose final consonant is subject to palatization changes, several pattens emerge. For roots with non-palatal stems subject to palatization, the genitive singular and plural will be subject to change. For stems whose final consonant is already in the palatized series, it is the dative singular and plural that change. The consonant to which the root changes back is lexical.

As in most Indo-European languages, for neuters the nominatives and accusatives are identical. Masculine nouns of this declension have -s in the nominative.

volofs, "wolf" (m)

Also declined like volofs: vuls "bird", himils "heaven", lebs "bread", ljubs "leaf", vlabs "grease" and many more.

Note also that in this declension, a distinction is drawn that does not entirely map onto gender in Swamp Gothic. Animate nouns that name people or familiar animals, such as volofs and vuls, have -a in the accusative plural, but -as in the nominative and vocative plurals. Inanimate masculine nouns have -as in both. Neuter nouns will have -a in all forms.

Nasal stem
ščẽs, "stone" (m)

Also declined like ščens: čudõs "people, folk, nation".

'''Neuter nasal stems
korõ (n) "grain".

Also declined like korõ: ogorõ (n) "fruit", jezorõ (n) "iron", and many more.

First declension, type B: palatizing stems
vorod "word" (n)

Many Swamp Gothic nouns are declined like vorod, including jets "oath" (m), fisks "fish" (m), vẽds "wind" (m), vosts "twig" (m). The masculines all lose the -s prefix in the vocative and accusative cases. Masculines also have -as in the nominative and accusative plural.

H-stem
Historically, these nouns have -g as the final vowel of the stem, which regularly changes to -h in Swamp Gothic. This becomes -ž before the palatizing genitive endings.

dohs, "day" (m)

Also declined like dohs: vehs "road" and vihs "soldier".

First declension, type C: pre-palatized stems
herežis, "shepherd" (m)

Other nouns declined like herežis include onis "end", vičis "wheat" (dative stem vit-), ličis "doctor, physician" (dative stem lik-)

bođi, "bed" (n)

Other nouns declined like bođi include neči "net", veđi "vow", čẽđi "family".

Second declension, type A: invariant stems
The second declension is historically the 'o' declension, corresponding to the Indo-European h2 declension. Most nouns of this declension are feminine in gender.

hibo, "gift" (f)

Also declined like hibo: ovo "river", koro "care", njelo "needle", gorovo "ditch", vjelo "time", runo "secret", and many more.

Second declension, type B: palatizing stems
The only place the palatizing stems of this declension alter the root is in the dative singular.

jereto, "earth" (f)

Many nouns are declined like jereto, including bludo "question", böko "book", heredo "herd", soroho "pain", and many more.

Second declension, type C: pre-palatized stems
These technically belong to this declension despite the divergent appearance of their nominatives. Being palatized already, the root does not change.

bõđi, "band" (f)

Many other nouns are declined like bõđi, including heči "field", movi "virgin", vošči "clothes", horođi "city", and many more.

Third declension, type A: invariant stems
The third declension continues the Proto-Germanic i-stems. These are masculine or feminine nouns.

oroms, "arm" (m)

Many other nouns are declined like oroms, includibg boroms "breast" (f), čẽs (oblique stem čen-) "woman" (f), vẽs (oblique stem ven-) "friend" (c), homuns (f) "memory", and muns "thought" (m).

Third declension, type B: palatizing stems
The palatization here is simple. All plural forms get palatized.

oroblets, "work" (f)

Many other nouns are declined like oroblets, including bolohs "belly" (m), mots "meat" (m), stods "place" (m), fljuhs (m) "fly", õst "favor" (f), đeds "act, deed", haborots "birth" (f), huds "thought" (f), vorots "root" (f).

Note that there are no pre-palatizing nouns in the third declension, because ancestrally all of these nouns were i-stems.

Fourth declension: N-stems
These are nouns that take a suffix n with a theme vowel in the oblique cases. Since nouns in n are almost always invariant, these nouns do not exhibit palatalization variations. These nouns can be masculine, feminine, or neuter.

Masculine
hono, "chicken" (m)

Many nouns are declined like hono, including očo "father", bljumo "flower", mjeno "month", snoho "shirt, tunic", and many others.

Feminine
čunga, "tongue, language" (f)

monohje, "crowd" (f)

Neuter
hereta, "heart" (n)

Verbs
The Swamp Gothic verb is much less well preserved than the noun. The conjugated past tenses have been replaced by a form that does not inflect for person, but rather for the gender and number of the subject; in origin it is a participle. The present tense serves as a future tense, and can be made explicitly future by adding an adverbial particle. Because of this, the distinction between strong and weak verbs is much less salient, if not entirely gone, in Swamp Gothic.

On the other hand, the past tenses inflect for perfective versus imperfective states via a number of unpredictable variants.

