Ekeðin

Overview
Ekethin (natively Ekeðin [ˈêːkeːðɪn], also Ekeðin maulinn) is an agglutinative language spoken natively by approximately 140,000 of the Ekeði people in the Ekeði Kingdom, an island nation far-west of the Barents sea. It is a solely suffixing agglutinative language which has a relatively simple syntax and free word order. The language bares many morphological features similar to the Finnic-Ugric languages, though due to Ekeði Kingdom's proximity to the Scandinavian countries, it features a similar phonology and a vast quantity of words related to Old Norse and the other Scandinavian languages, notably Norwegian and Icelandic.

All text in Ekeðin on this page will be written in the Standard Romanisation of Ekeðin, instead of the usual Norse Runes script for better accessibility.

History of the Ekeði Kingdom
The Ekeði Kingdom (Ekeðin Kongerikinn) is a far northern island in the Barents Sea, characterised by two large mountain ranges, the Thornvari and Vreirvari ranges, and rolling green hills. By the south-west coast, lies the ancient and historically important capital of "Þæivell" where an archipelago of 17 islands spans out into the Barent and Norwegian Seas. The country has a long history of trading with Nordic tradesmen who formed the now culturally-important port town of Ansitti (in the south of the country) where Viking migrants and tradesmen eventually settled. The Ekeði Kingdom is perhaps best known for the battle of Helnakk, a medieval town with a stronghold on the outskirts of Þæivell, one of the earliest recorded Viking battles against the ethnic Ekeði people. There were big losses on both sides, but by a slim margin, the Vikings took over the island and forged the modern-day capital Þæivell. The Ekeði people learnt how to live alongside the Vikings and thus, a language was needed to communicate between the Ekeði people and the Vikings. These sequences of events altered the people and the culture of the Ekeði Kingdom giving rise to the modern Ekeði language and people today.

A citizen of the Ekeði Kingdom is called an "ekeðinmen", the language is called "ekeðin (maulinn)", the relative adjective is "ekeðinsk" and the name of the Ekeði Kingdom is often informally shortened to Ekeðia [ˈêːkeːði.ɑ].

Consonants
Notes:
 * 1) /l/ is a velarized laminal [ɫ] after back vowels /ɔ, oː/, /ɑ, ɑː/, /ʊ, uː/.
 * /n, t, d/ are laminal [n̻, t̻].
 * 1) /s/ is a dentalized laminal alveolar [s̪]
 * 2) /ɾ/ is a voiced apical alveolar flap [ɾ̺]. It is a trill [r] in clusters ⟨rr⟩ and in emphatic speech.
 * /p, t, k/ are unaspirated fully voiceless [p˭, t˭, k˭], whereas /pʰ, tʰ, kʰ/ are aspirated, and fully voiceless [pʰ, tʰ, kʰ]. After /s/ within the same syllable, only unaspirated voiceless stops occur.
 * /ŋ, k, ɡ/ are velar, whereas /j/ is palatal and /ɕ/ is alveolo-palatal.
 * 1) /h/ is usually a voiceless fricative. The friction is normally glottal [h], but sometimes it is dorsal: palatal [ç] when near front vowels and velar [x] near back vowels.
 * 2) /ʋ/ may be a voiced bilabial fricative /v/ in some dialects.
 * /ɳ, ʈ, ʂ/ are retroflex mutations of the sequence of /ɾ/ + /n, t, s/ and only occur word-medially.
 * 1) /θː/ and /rː/ are always geminated.

Vowel Harmony
Ekeðin, like many other agglutinative languages, has the phenomenon called vowel harmony, which restricts the cooccurrence in a word of vowels belonging to different articulatory subgroups. Vowels within a word "harmonize" to be either all front or all back. In particular, no native noncompound word can contain vowels from the group {a, o, u} together with vowels from the group {æ, ø, y}. Vowel harmony affects inflectional suffixes and derivational suffixes, which have two forms, one for use with back vowels, and the other with front vowels. Compare, for example, the following pair of abstract nouns: hallitus 'government' (from hallita, 'to reign') versus helvys 'health' (from helvisk, healthy).

There are exceptions to the constraint of vowel harmony. For one, there are two front vowels that lack back counterparts: /i/ and /e/. Therefore, words like kello 'clock' (with a front vowel in a non-final syllable) and tuli 'wind' (with a front vowel in the final syllable), which contain /i/ or /e/ together with a back vowel, count as back vowel words; /i/ and /e/ are effectively neutral in regard to vowel harmony in such words. Kello and tuli yield the inflectional forms kellonna 'in a clock' and tuulenna 'in a wind'. In words containing only neutral vowels, front vowel harmony is used, e.g. vei – veillæ ('road' – 'on the road').

Pitch accent
Ekeðin is a stress-accent language, but has elements of pitch accent, with two distinct pitch patterns. They are used to differentiate polysyllabic words with otherwise identical pronunciation (such as anðinn/anðinn). Generally, monosyllabic words use tone 1, while polysyllabic words use tone 2. In Ekeðin orthography, doubled consonants are pronounced long and the vowel directly preceding it is always short (e.g. long a, malin; short a, mallin). In a compound word, the pitch accent is lost on one of the elements of the compound (the one with weaker or secondary stress), but the former tonic syllable retains the full length (long vowel or geminate consonant) of a stressed syllable. This is usually the last or first syllable, i.e. the last syllable doesn't have to end in a doubled consonant for the preceding vowel to be short if the stress falls in a different place. For instance, in most Ekeðin dialects, the word anðinn ('the duck') is pronounced using tone 1 (/ˈɑ̀nðɪnː/), while anðinn ('the spirit') uses tone 2 (/ˈɑ̂nðɪnː/).

Pulmonic ingressive
The words ja ('yes') and æi ('no') are sometimes pronounced with inhaled breath (pulmonic ingressive) in Ekeðin. The same phenomenon occurs across the Scandinavian languages, and can also be found in German, French and Finnish, to name a few.

Writing System
Ekeðin Futhark Alphabet (ᛇᚴᛇᚠᛁᛦᛋᚴ ᚹᚢᚦᛆᚱᚴᛁᛦᛇᛦ ᛆᛚᚴᚮᛋᛋᛇᛁ Ekeðinsk Vuþarkinen Alkossei)

Native Letters Native Digraphs Non-Native Letters

Grammar
Ekeðin is an inflected language with 13 cases. It does not have grammatical gender. Nouns, adjectives and pronouns are declined in thirteen cases and two numbers, singular and plural.

Morphology
Ekeðin morphology is typical of rich agglutinative systems found in the Finno-Ugric and Turkic languages since nouns and verbs can become very long and rather complicated. Nouns and adjectives are declined for case, number, and definiteness. Ekeðin possesses a definite article, but not an indefinite one. The definite article is a suffix added to the noun -inn. Verbs are conjugated for tense, mood, person, number and voice. There are four voices: active, passive, causative and adjutative. There are three simple tenses, present, preterite and imperfect along with a periphrastic future and perfect tenses. There are three moods, conditional, presumptive and potential. There also exists a present continuous tense analogous to English "to be doing" as well as a variety of participles and an interrogative verb suffix, which is not in itself considered a stand-alone interrogative mood.

Nouns
The Ekeðin language does not distinguish gender in nouns or even in personal pronouns: hæn is 'he', 'she' or 'they' (singular, indeterminate) depending on the referent. There is only one article, the definite article, which is a suffix -inn appended to nouns only.

Cases
Ekeðin has thirteen noun cases: six grammatical cases (seven in some Eastern dialects), three lative cases, two essive cases, and two additional cases. In some Eastern dialects, the partitive* is the seventh grammatical case. It is nowadays obsolete in Modern Ekeðin and is almost exclusively found in a few fossilised forms and is therefore not usually considered a living noun case. The suffix is -a / -æ. Its meaning is partiality, some common examples being:


 * With nouns of indefinite number or substance nouns (the partitive object):
 * "havatko kirjo|j|a?" = "do you have any books?"
 * "villun vett|æ" = "I want some water"

* NB: the vocative and partitive case suffixes are vowels so when in the plural, a /j/ glide must replace the /i/ of the diphthongs ei, æi, øi, oi, ai and then followed by the -i ending of the vocative and the -a/æ ending of the partitive.

Pronouns
Personal pronouns are used to refer to human beings and inanimate objects. The personal pronouns in Ekeðin in the nominative case are listed in the following table:

Personal pronouns
Because verbs are inflected for person and number, in the Ekeðin standard language subject pronouns are not required, and the first and second-person pronouns are usually omitted except when used for emphasis.

Verbs
Verbs in Ekeðin are conjugated for tense, mood, person, number and voice. Ekeðin conjugates verbs for three persons in the singular and plural. In addition to the three persons, Ekeðin also has an impersonal form, which is distinct from the passive form (cf. French on vs passive constructions) and can conveniently be translated with "one" or "someone" as the subject, conveying generality. There are four voices: active, passive, causative and adjutative. There are three simple tenses, present, preterite (also called past) and imperfect along with a periphrastic future and multiple perfect tenses. There are four moods, imperative, conditional, presumptive and potential. There also exists a present continuous tense analogous to English "to be doing" as well as a variety of participles and an interrogative suffix, which is not in itself considered a stand-alone interrogative mood. There are three main auxillary verbs used to construct periphrastic tenses, the non-stative verb olla (to be), the stative verb ukka (to be) and the verb vaða (to become; will) which is used to construct the future tense. These auxillary verbs have separate special negative forms for periphrastic tenses.

Tense-aspect
There are three simple tenses: present, preterite and imperfect along with a range of periphrastic tenses, which are formed using the auxiliary verbs in the table below. They are formed as follows:
 * Perfect, uses the present tense of olla, plus the active past participle -nut/nyt appended to the verb
 * Past Perfect, uses the past tense of olla, plus the active past participle -nut/nyt appended to the verb.


 * Progressive, uses the present tense of the stative verb okka, plus the gerund -nðu/nðy appended to the verb.
 * Past Progressive, uses the past tense of the stative verb okka, plus the gerund -nðu/nðy appended to the verb.


 * Future, uses the infinitive of the verb, plus the present tense of vaða.
 * Past Future, uses the infinitive of the verb, plus the past tense of vaða.

Conjugation tables
Tables of conjugation are given here for the regular verb, of type I pusua (to speak), in the indicative as used in Ekeðin. The vast majority of verbs are regular, however, some are irregular such as the three auxiliary verbs shown above where the verb stems assume different suffixes and undergo different changes when inflected. The present, imperfect, perfect, and pluperfect correspond reasonably well to English: 'speaks', 'spoke', 'has spoken', and 'had spoken', respectively or in the passive voice, 'it is spoken', 'it was spoken', 'it has been spoken', and 'it had been spoken'. The auxiliary verb ei used for negation, usually with the naked stem of the main verb but with the past participle in the negative imperfect. Finnish lacks a true future tense, so normally the present tense is used for future time as well.

Mood
There are four moods: conditional, imperative, potential and presumptive, which are conjugated as follows:

Conditional and potential mood
The conditional mood corresponds mostly to 'would' or 'should' or to the past subjunctive in English. (Ekeðin lacks a subjunctive mood.) The potential mood corresponds to 'can' or 'could' in English. The perfect forms of these moods are easily understood as 'would have', 'should have', 'could have', etc.

Imperative and presumptive mood
The first and third person imperative forms here correspond to English 'let us speak', 'let him not speak' etc. Unlike other moods such as the indicative and conditional, there are no impersonal or passive voice forms for the imperative mood.

Voice
A verb-stem can be lengthened with certain extensions. The passive is one voice, but it doesn't use a suffix on the verb-stem, rather it has its own unique conjugation.

Infinitives and participles
In Ekeðin, there are two infinitive forms, with past and present participles for active, passive and adjutative voices.

Infinitive I
The first infinitive is the dictionary form of the verb: pusu-a = 'to speak' (stem pusu), and it corresponds in meaning and function to the English infinitive introduced by the particle 'to'. The suffix of the first infinitive depends on the type of the verb stem. With so-called "vowel" stems, the first infinitive suffix is -a/-æ, whereas with "consonantal" stems, the suffix is most often -ta /-tæ. The first infinitive generally takes on no inflected forms. It appears as the dictionary form of the verb. For example, muista "to remember", thænkæ "to think", syøta "to eat", thakka "to thank".

Infinitive II
The second infinitive is used for transitive verbs, whose original infinitive is not already transitive (thus intransitive). It cannot occur where an object is present as in intransitive verbs. It may be formed from the first infinitive by appending -tta / -ttæ. It's meaning mostly corresponds to particle and phrasal verbs in the Scandinavian languages (cf. Swedish ta emot). For example, intransitive herræ vs transitive herrættæ. Naturally transitive verbs do not employ any suffix as these are semantically marked.

Present active participle
This participle, also called a gerund, is formed simply by removing the infinitive ending and adding -nðu / nðy, and must be converted to -nðisk when it acts as an adjective describing what the object or subject of the sentence is doing, for example:

Past active participle
Basically, this is formed by removing the infinitive ending and adding -nut / nyt (depending on vowel harmony). There are however some irregular endings, such as verbs whose stems end in -n and -m which become -nnut / nnyt and -mmut / mmyt respectively. This always affects the bilabial and alveolar plosives and nasals (m, p and n, t). For instance: Irregular forms

Present passive participle
The present passive participle can be constructed from the 3rd person singular form of the present tense plus the ending -rut / ryt, which can be inflected in the same way as the present active participle. For example: It is possible to translate this participle in several related ways e.g. sannorut 'which must be/is to be said', 'which can be said', 'which will be said' or 'which is said'. Here are some sentences and phrases further illustrating the formation and use of the present passive participle:

Past passive participle
This participle is also formed from the 3rd person singular form of the present tense plus the ending -vu / vy.