Haġlsk

Haġlsk is a constructed language.

=Grammar= Haġlsk is an inflected language with four cases: nominative, accusative, dative and genitive. Haġlsk nouns can have one of three grammatical genders, masculine, feminine or neuter. Nouns, adjectives and pronouns are declined in four cases and two numbers, singular and plural.

Morphology
Nouns are declined for case, number and gender; adjectives for case, number, gender and comparison; and there are two declensions for adjectives, weak and strong. Verbs are conjugated for tense, mood, person, number and voice. There are two voices: active and passive. There are only two simple tenses, past and present, but to make up for that there are a number of auxiliary constructions.

Nouns
Haġlsk nouns decline in four cases (nominative, accusative, dative and genitive) and vary in gender (masculine, feminine or neuter) and number (singular and plural). Following are three examples of declension.
 * Masculine nouns often end in -ur or -un.
 * Feminine nouns often end in -a or -ing.
 * Neuter nouns usually have no ending.

Articles
Haġlsk does not have an indefinite article (a/an in English), and the definite article (the) is usually joined onto the end of word. The table below shows the different suffix forms for the three genders:

The example below shows three nouns, one for each respective gender, declined in the nominative:
 * masculine: hválur—“(a) whale” becomes hválurin—“the whale”
 * feminine: kluka—“(a) clock” becomes klukin—“the clock”
 * neuter: heimfangstfak—“(an) address” becomes heimfangstfakið—“the address”

Personal
The personal pronouns in Haġlsk are as follows: Haġlsk has separate masculine, feminine and neuter words for they; when talking about a group of mixed gender people or items, the neuter form is used.

Like English, the pronoun usually comes before the verb, as in the example below:
 * æg heita þurg hem—I have the same name like him

But the order of the sentence may be inverted. In this case the pronoun moves to the end of the sentence:
 * Þurg hem heita æg—Like him have the same name I

Reflexive
Haġlsk possesses a reflexive pronoun, functioning in much the same way as German sich. That is sig.
 * Hen vaskað sig.

In addition, -self could by add, to stress the action.
 * Hen vaskað sigself.

Possessive
The Haġlsk possessive pronouns for the respective grammatical persons are as follows, where the three columns for each person represent masculine, feminine and neuter genders respectively.

Demonstrative
The Haġlsk demonstrative pronouns are as follows, where the three columns for each person represent masculine, feminine and neuter genders respectively.

Indefinite
There are around fifteen to twenty of these, depending on who is counting. engin (nobody) is given below. It is inflected thus:

Numerals
The words for one to four are declined for the respective cases and genders:

Other numbers are as follows and not declined:

Adjectives
Adjectives themselves must agree with the gender and number of the nouns that they describe. For example, the word gamalt (old) agrees as follows:

In strong declension, for example:
 * Æg bya it gamaldu hús —I live in an old house 

Both gamaldu and hús are dative singular. In this case it is the preposition it which governs the case. (it can also take the accusative, but the distinction belongs to the syntax.) This is an example of strong declension of adjectives. If an adjective is modified by the article, or most pronouns, weak declension is used, for gamal it would be:

An example of weak declension:
 * Æg sjándi veikdu kvénin —I saw the sick woman 

Veikdu is the weak declension of veikt (sick) in the accusative singular. Kvéna is also accusative singular, but with the definite article attached (-in), and the article forces the adjective to be weak. Here the verb governs the case.

Of course adjectives also have comparison. Here are some examples.
 * Positive Degree (fágt, beautiful)
 * Comparative Degree:
 * Of superiority (fágart þæn, more beautiful than)
 * Of equality (us fágt hví, as beautiful as)
 * Of inferiority (unfágart þæn, less beautiful than)
 * Superlative Degree:
 * Relative Superlative
 * Of superiority (fágstt, the most beautiful)
 * Of inferiority (unfágstt, the least beautiful)
 * Absolute Superlative (fágurt, very beautiful)

Verbs
As with most inflected languages, the verbs in Haġlsk determine (or govern) the case of the subsequent nouns, pronouns and adjectives of a sentence. For example:


 * Safna ('to collect' or 'to save') governs the dative case.


 * Æg ema að safna pæningum til geta til budja jólgöfta handa móðira.
 * I am saving money to be able to buy a Christmas gift for mother. (Pæningum is the dative plural form of pæningur (coin))


 * Sakna ('to miss') governs the genitive case


 * Æg sakna þín
 * I miss you

In the infinitive, most Haġlsk verbs end in -a. Some exceptions are munu and skulu, these two auxiliaries are important, since they turn up in various places to make up for the poverty of simple tenses. Following is the present tense of a regular verb, tala (to talk): And compare with the verb væra (‘to be’), an irregular verb, but useful for comparison:

And finally vælja (‘to choose’), which is an -ja verb:

Some Haġlsk infinitives end with the -ja suffix. The suffix is lost in the first person singular. When conjugating -ja verbs, the single ‘j’ must also be removed, so singja (‘to sing’) would become æg sing (‘I sing’) in the first person singular and not æg singj. Note, however, that the j in itself is not a reliable indicator. Examples could be tratja (‘to demolish’), which belongs to one class (singular, first person, æg tratja, past tense æg tratjaði) versus tælja (‘count’), belonging to another class, (æg tæl, past tense æg tældi).

Tenses
Strictly speaking, there are only two simple tenses in Haġlsk, simple present and simple past. All other tenses are formed using auxiliary constructions.


 * personal pronoun + væra + að + infinitive verb
 * æg ema að læra
 * I am learning

An overview of the complete conjugation follows:
 * Very few verbs take -að where normally -ið is used.

Adverbs
Compared to other lexical categories, Haġlsk adverbs are relatively simple, and are not declined, except in some cases for comparison, and can be constructed easily from adjectives, nouns and verbs. These derived adverbs often end in -leg:
 * nyt—new ⇒ nytlega—lately (lit. newly)

Note: The adverbs ending in -lega can be declined for comparison:
 * hæta—danger ⇒ hætulega→hætulegar→hætulegst, i.e. dangerously→more dangerously→most dangerously.

This is a regular way to form adverbs. Another way is to take the neutral nominative singular of an adjective and turn it into an adverb:
 * blít—gentle ⇒ blít—gently, cf. hun sløpið blítt—she sleeps gently

Another way is takingan adjective and add an a:
 * ilt—bad ⇒ ilta—badly, cf. hun hágið sig ilta—she behaves badly (ilt never takes the -leg surfix).

Many adverbs of time don't take any suffix:
 * bráðum—soon
 * nú—now
 * oft—often
 * straks—right away

The basic adverbs of direction include, among others:
 * østa—east
 * norða—north
 * suða—south
 * væsta—west
 * i—in
 * inan—from within
 * út—out
 * útan—from outside

Prepositions
In Haġlsk, prepositions determine the case of the following noun. Some examples are given below:
 * i and á are inflected.

Syntax
Haġlsk word order is SVO (subject-verb-object), generally speaking, with the subject and verb inverted in questions and when a sentence begins with an adverb. However, the inflectional system allows for considerable freedom in word order.

Despite this, there are certain rules of syntax which are relatively inflexible. For example, the main verb must always be the second lexical unit of the sentence (this is a feature known as V2 word order, as is common to many Germanic languages). Take the example below (subject in yellow, verb in blue, object in red):
 *  Manfjøð var 1.500 —The population was 1,500

Here the element var (the past tense third person singular form of the verb væra, ‘to be’, i.e. ‘was’) is the second lexical unit of the sentence. If we change the sentence, however:
 *  Árið 2000 var manfjøð 1.500 —In 2000, the population was 1,500 (lit. The year 2000 was the population 1,500)

Here, var is still the second lexical unit of the sentence, despite the fact that it is not the second word in the sentence. The prepositional phrase árið 2000 (highlighted in green) counts as one lexical unit, and so in order for the verb to be the second lexical unit it must come after 2000 and not after árið. The subject and object of the verb then follow. An exception to this rule arises when forming questions by inversion:
 * Hen ærð svangt—He is hungry

and when turned into a question:
 * Ærð hen svangt?—Is he hungry?

Here the subject and verb have been inverted to form a question, meaning the verb is the first lexical unit in the sentence as opposed to the second. This method of forming questions is used in many languages, including English.

Questions
As we have seen, questions can be easily formed by rearranging the order of the sentence from subject-verb-object to verb-subject-object. For example:
 * Þú talist haġlsk.—You speak Haġlsk.

can be made into a question as follows:
 * Talist þú haġlsk?—Do you speak Haġlsk? (lit. Speak you Haġlsk?)

The inversion rule still applies when interrogatives are involved, which are simply added to the front of the sentence. The interrogatives in Haġlsk are:
 * hvað?—what/how?
 * Hvað ærð þú að gøra?—What are you doing? (lit. What are you to do?)
 * hvaða?—what?
 * Hvaða hundur?—What dog?
 * hvær?—who?
 * Hvær ærð þú?—Who are you?
 * hvernig?—how?
 * Hvernig hefast þú þæt?—How are you? (lit. How have you it?)
 * hvar/hvært/hvaðan?—where/whence?
 * Hvar ærð þú?—Where are you?
 * Hvært ærð þú að fara—Where are you going? (lit. Where are you to go?)
 * Hvaðan kømist þú?—Where do you come from? (lit. Whence come you?)
 * hvenær?—when?
 * Hvenær kømist þú?—When do you come? (lit. When come you?)
 * hvers væġna/hví?—why?
 * Hvers væġna hen?—Why him?
 * Hví æki?—Why not?
 * hvorð?—whether/which?
 * Hvorð hen kømið, veitja æg æki.—I don’t know whether he’s coming or not. (lit. Whether he comes, know I not.)
 * Hvorð vilt þú?—Which do you want? (lit. Which want you?, implying a choice between two alternatives.)

Ablaut
Ablaut are very often used to create plurals for nouns. The following ablauts occur:
 * a ⇒ æ
 * á ⇒ e
 * e ⇒ ö
 * é ⇒ i
 * i ⇒ ö
 * í ⇒ ø
 * o ⇒ ö
 * ó ⇒ ø
 * u ⇒ y
 * ú ⇒ ý
 * y ⇒ å
 * ý ⇒ å

=Phonology= The Haġlsk language has both monophthongs and diphthongs, and many consonants can be voiced or unvoiced. Additionally, length is contrastive for consonants, but not vowels. In Haġlsk, the main stress is always on the first syllable.