Slettala

Slettala, Sl: Slettále, is a North Germanic language belonging to the Scandinavian branch of languages, along with Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, Faroese and Danish. Of the five Scandinavian languages, Slettala has the closest relations to Icelandic, though unlike Icelandic, Slettala did not go under linguistic purism, therefore Slettala shares words with most North Germanic languages (and some western ones such as English and German). Would Slettala have lost its inflectional system (for it inflects nouns, pronouns and adjectives for grammatical case, number and gender), Slettala might have been mutually intelligible with Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, and perhaps even English, to an extent.

Features of Slettala
 * Slettala is an inflecting language.
 * Slettala inflects its nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and numbers up to four according to number, gender, and case.
 * Slettala has four grammatical cases: the Nominative, the Accusative, the Genitive and the Dative.
 * While Slettala inflects to two numbers, there is atleast one instance where the numbers collapse, leaving many nouns to inflect to only 1 number.
 * Slettala inflects to two grammatical genders: Common and Neuter, Common consisting on what used to be Masculine and Feminine, while the Neuter contains Neuter nouns.
 * Slettala is the only Germanic language with a voiceless bilabial fricative (ɸ).
 * Slettalian nouns, while going through relatively simple declensions, go through a number of umlauts (there's atleast one umlaut in every declension paradigm).
 * All Slettalian verbs are strong, though their ablauts are much more consistent than Icelandic verbs, or even English verbs.
 * Slettala pre-aspirated geminated stops (pp, tt, kk), much like Icelandic does.
 * Slettala devoices final consonants except for g (ɣ), or when the preceding consonant is voiced.
 * The word "Slettala" comes from the two Icelandic words "slet", meaning "smooth", and "tala", meaning "to speak".
 * Slettala, like other Germanic languages, experiences a high frequency of word compounding.
 * Slettala generally follows an SVO word order, though, like most Germanic languages, it follows a strict V2 rule.

Consonants
Like in Icelandic, geminated stops (P, T, K) are preaspirated, therefore, ‹pp›, ‹tt›, and ‹kk› is pronounced ‹hp›, ‹ht›, and ‹hk›, respectively. After unvoiced consonants, m, n, r, and l devoice. However, the difference between voiced and voiceless consonants in m, n, r, and l is not phonemic and thus won't change a word.

Alphabet
The Slettalian Alphabet is based on the Icelandic alphabet, noted for its use of the thorn (þ), and the eth (ð), along with the addition of the character œ. It is also typical to replace ú+vowel with a wynn in general handwriting, i.e Fúa (ipa: fuɑ) would be written Fƿa. This, however, is limited only to handwriting, as many fonts do not support the wynn (ƿ).

Umlauts
One of Slettala's main features is the abundant usage of umlauts, or vowel changes due to certain triggers. It must be noted that umlauts in Slettala do not work like vowel harmony in other languages, where vowels are restricted to being back vowels or front vowels in one word.

Umlauts are quite simple to trigger. The affected vowel is always the vowel before the new vowel of the word; for example, in the word máðúr, the affix -um is added in the dative plural. The vowel u triggers an umlaut in certain vowels, ú being one of them, therefore, ú changes when put next to u. The umlaut then occurs, leaving máðúr to be máðirum in the dative plural, not máðúrum. Note, this only happens during inflections. Words with u and ú adjacent do exist, if only rarely.

Every vowel in Slettala has a vowel trigger, some more than others.

Note: the symbol Ø represents the vowel becomes null; in other words, the affected vowel disappears (ex: hœndur in the dative adds -u and -um, which trigger an umlaut, therefore hœndur in the dative is hœndru and hœndrum because u + u = Ø).

Vowel Shifts
Vowels go through shifts when conjugating for tense. However, vowels that have gone through shifts are still subjected to umlauts. It must be noted that not all vowels are equally distributed in vowel shifts.

Nouns
Nouns in Slettala decline to four cases: the nominative, accusative, genitive, and dative. They have two main classes, common and neuter gender, along with several subclasses under them, the most notable being the common gender and its system of classing by number of syllables in the nominative. Masculine and Feminine genders, along with Neuter genders, are barely seen in traces anymore, even with pronouns (hett, the common third person pronoun, can mean he or she, though the distinction is ususally made with special gender declensions, traces of gender, which are unique to personal pronouns). Among declension by gender and number (which, noticably, merges to create one number in many declensions), nouns are also declined for definiteness. Rather than using articles separately, Slettala suffixes them on, like many Scandivian languages (Icelandic, Norwegian, Sweden, Danish, etc.).

Article Declensions
Technically, articles don't exist in Slettala, for their function is provided by suffixes to a noun. There are three kinds of articles that are affixed to a noun: Definite (the), Partitive (some), and Negative (no, none, not any). A declension for the Indefinite article does not exist in Slettala. Articles do not change with grammatical case.

Common Gender
Nouns in the common gender are the most abundant, as nouns that were in the masculine and feminine genders collapsed into a single common gender. Common genders, by coincidence, have the easiest set of noun classification, with only a few criteria: final syllables, and number of syllables. Essentially, however, declensions recycle eachother out, therefore nouns with three syllables share the same declensions with nouns that have six syllables. There is no exact way of determining nouns in the common gender, though most tend to not have a specific ending, as opposed to neuter nouns, which all end in either -a, -e, -ur, -œl, and -ærr. Note: there are exceptions to the endings.

First class
The first class of nouns are nouns that contain an odd number of syllables in the nominative form. Because of typical vowel changing, most nouns will go through umlaught whilst going through declension. Atleast once in every declension, the plural will have merged with the singular, and the context will need to be used to figure out the number.

Second class
These nouns, however, have an even number of syllables in the nominative form.

Third class
The third class of nouns are not as common as the above nouns, but still exist. These nouns are compound words. Therefore, while hœndur and hjúkrúrnær, which mean dog and nurse, respectively, would both be in the first declension, however, dog nurse, or hœndurhjúkrúnær, would fall under the third class. Note, umlaut does not occur when words compound together, only in declensions do they occure.

Neuter Gender
The neuter gender stayed exactly the same in Slettala, save for a few assimilations between genders. All neuter genders end in -a, -e, -an, -ng, -ur, and -ærr, along with a voiced -ð. Note, however, that due to assimilations in gender, many nouns break these rules. These nouns are ususally given as irregular.

The neuter gender only has three declension paradigms; nouns ending in -a, nouns ending in -e, and nouns ending with a consonant.

First Class
The first class describes nouns that end in consonants. Nouns in the first class lose their endings(-an, -ng, ur, -ærr, and the voiced -ð) in the genitive singular and the singular and plural dative. In cases where the ending to a noun is a vowel, and the ending of the nouns without its ending is a vowel, a -t is inserted, ususally, unless the word already carries a -t, in which the letter becomes -d.

Second Class
The second class deals with nouns ending in -e.

Third Class
The third class deals with nouns ending in -a.

Verbs
Verbs in Slettala inflect for a number of criteria, such as tense, mood, voice, and person. Slettala also only inflects for the indicative and imperative mood, while the other two moods, the conditional and the subjunctive, are created out of analytical costructions by use of helping and auxiliary verbs.

As in most inflecting languages, verbs in Slettala govern case, just like prepositions do. Slettala has a variety of irregular verbs, though even irregular verbs follow a consisten conjugation. All verbs are technically strong verbs. Verbs in Slettala conjugate by the use of vowel shifting and the occasional affixing.

All Slettalian verbs have -e as the infinitive, save for a few irregular verbs such as sersí, to customize, etc. However, verbs with irregular infinitives still follow the regular conjugation.

Person
Slettala conjugates its verbs for person: first person, second person, and third person. However, there are only two genders for the third person pronoun; hett/gitt for the common gender, and þí/þé for the neuter gender. References to masculine or feminine genders are not required and are usually assumed by context, though distinction can be made by specifying the subject; i.e. He learns Slettala would be Hett lírret um Slettálo can be seen as a boy learning Slettala or a girl learning Slettala. However, a distinction can be made, ususally for emphasis, so to say that the learner of Slettala was explicitly a boy, one would say Hette strákur lærret um Slettálo, which says "Him/her the boy learns Slettala." Slettala is not a pro-drop language. Conjugations for the second and third person singular are the same, as they are for the plural of the third person and the singular of the first person. It must also be noted that verbs, too, go through umlaut, which explains why "æ" becomes "í" for the second and third person singular conjugation.

However, irregular verbs follow different sets of rules. As one can see, the verb "to be" is highly irregular. Note, a contraction is common in the third person singular neuter gender, merging þí + írs into a single þírs.

Tenses
There are only two simple tenses in Slettala: the simple past, and the simple present. However, that is not to say there are much more tenses that are helped by the use of aspectual verbs and other auxilliary verbs (compare ég er, I am, ég úr, I was, and ég gór vóren, I will be). Verbs make heavy use of vowel shifting and participles when dealling with compound tenses.

The past tense is formed in most verbs by the use of a vowel shift. In this sense, verbs tend to look a lot like their participles. However, after the vowel shift is applied to the conjugated verb, past tense ending, -ír, are applied, which may cause umlaut to happen (such as in the second person plural; for example: horfe, to watch, in the second person plural is þá horfúm, then with the vowel change becomes þá hærfam, which then causes umlaut with the affix, as a + í = Ø, therfore, you (all) watched would be þá hærfmír.)

Phrases
Hœndiren drúngní fattírell fræ síngeren.
 * The dog drank water from the lake.

Hette loket érisinn œntúg áð ítárim. Fjung flækkegní nálæ sínaérsinn mænne stórim. Gamílinn mjað sém énnet að lese gangegní á mé.
 * She closes the window before eating dinner.
 * A bird flew by my store's display window.
 * The old man that enjoys reading walked up to me.

Hette vílet ekke jœrstoll. Hjúmænpúrranekk ert fæðúrett ján frjúgno.
 * She doesn't want any meat.
 * No human being is born without freedom.