Old Beltonian

Old Beltonian (Βάμιν Σιδωαδε, Bæmin Sidwade, Modern Standard Beltonian:Bémesiawri Cewl) was the earliest stage of the Beltonian language. It existed in the period from approximately 400 to 900, beginning with the divergence of Wistarian and ending with the divergence of Classical Beltonian from the vernacular dialects.

Old Beltonian was a continuation of the Proto-Beltonic language that was spread across Beltonia by the Beltonic Migration. It largely abandoned the nonconcatenative morphology of its predecessor, though elements of it survived in irregular noun and verb inflections. It remained a highly inflective language with a large number of cases and moods. It also pivoted towards a nominative-accusative alignment, merged two of the genders and introduced verb inflections by person, while mostly eliminating verb inflections by gender. In phonology and it introduced consonant clusters, reduced the number of guttural consonants while adding voiced stops as separate phonemes and expanding the palate of vowels. The language introduced loanwords from other languages, especially Greek, and to a lesser extent Latin, Arabic and pre-Beltonic languages.

The language had multiple dialects which diverged from each other but for the most part were mutually intelligible. In the Wistarian Marches there was a continuum of hybrid dialects between Beltonian and Wistarian. The Omchoke dialect dominated literature and was the basis of Classical Beltonian, while the southern dialects would ultimately have a greater influence on Middle High Beltonian and therefore the modern language.

The earliest writings of Old Beltonian are Beltonian Runes. From the 6th century onwards, the language was most often written in the Greek alphabet, and more rarely in the Latin and Arabic alphabets.

Consonants
Old Beltonian had approximately 23 consonant phonemes. Compared to Proto-Beltonic, the stops had become divided into contrasting voiceless/voiced pairs, while there was a net reduction in the number of consonants, mainly due to a loss of guttural ones.

Vowels
The number of monophthongs increased from 3 to 6. /e/ and /o/ originally entered the language as allophones of /i/ and /u/, before merging with /ai/ and /au/ as well as also arriving in loanwords. Despite the merger of the original diphthongs, similar ones were formed through assimilation with the palatal consonants and /w/ as well as arriving in loanwords. Ansteh concludes that /ei/ and /ou/ also came into existence through the same assimilation process but quickly became monopthongized to /e/ and /o/.

The vowel system was not fixed. In particular, the Omchoke region showed a series of vowel shifts such as /u/ > /ʉ/ that would mark the transition towards Classical Beltonian.

Nouns
Nouns were divided into two genders: common and neuter. The genders influenced agreement from adjectives, a few verb tenses and, initially, which pronouns would replace them. From the 7th century onwards, inanimate common nouns shifted towards taking the neuter pronouns. The common gender was formed the merger of the Proto-Beltonic masculine and feminine genders.

The conceptual plural disappeared during the 6th century. Some strong nouns underwent regularization.

Strong nouns
Strong nouns preserved two vowel inflections from Proto-Beltonic. With the accusative being the base form, the plural was formed through i-mutation and the nominative was formed through cross-mutation. In the former, the first core vowel had a /j/ inserted in front of it, with a few exceptions: /wæ/ and /wɑ/ became /wi/, while /æ/ and /ɑ/ became /je/. If the first core vowel was /i/ or was /j/ before it, the mutation instead moved to the second or (for bilateral roots only) resulted in /e/ being added on the end.

Cross-mutation usually resulted in the swapping of /u/ and /i/ and of /e/ and /o/ among the core vowels. /æ/ and /ɑ/ were unaffected, but if both core vowels were those vowels, then the second core vowel was deleted.

Starting in the 7th century, strong nouns began to switch their copulative form to resembling the nominative form, while retaining the -(o)s suffix.

Verbs
Like the modern Beltonic languages, Old Beltonian had multiple moods:
 * Indicative: Conveying that an action is happening or has happened.
 * Energetic: Conveying the same as the indicative but with emphasis.
 * Jussive: Conveying that an action is desirable.
 * Imperative: Conveying commands in the second person, and in other persons conveying an exhortation that someone should do or be allowed to do an action.
 * Conditional: Conveying that an action would only happen under a certain condition. Unlike the conditional forms of many modern languages, it could not be used to present the 'future in the past'.
 * Negative: Conveying an action did not happen, in conjunction with the adverb gu. This came from the Proto-Beltonic potential mood.
 * Habitual: Conveying a recurring habit instead of a one-off or ongoing action. This is normally described in most languages as an aspect rather than a mood, but has the grammatical characteristics of a Beltonic mood.

Verbs also inflected for person and number, and in the third person inflected for gender also (3 singular and 2 plural). Each mood also had an infintive form, present participle and past participle. This meant there were 12 inflections for each mood, except the indicative mood which had additional inflections for the preterite (past indicative). However, not all the inflections were unique.

Verbs were classified into strong, semi-strong and weak verbs. Weak verbs followed a regular pattern, and aspects of this pattern were introduced to the strong verbs through regularization. Strong verbs retained the vowel mutations of the proto-language, although most did not retain it completely. The conditional mood in particular was prone to being regularized. Regularization tended to occur if a strong verb pattern had become unrecognizable through sound change. Semi-strong verbs had almost completely abandoned the vowel mutations except for the past tense, as well as using strong verb endings in other moods like the jussive.