LotM - Aug 14: Nithalos: view article

For the first ever LOTM, we have opted to go with the main language of the site's owner and founder, Nithalos!

Nithalos is the brain child of our admin hashi, a mixed language spoken Nithalosia (presumably an a priori land not located on Earth). Nithalos is a mildly inflected language (by comparison, Russian and Icelandic are heavily inflecting), with both nouns and verbs inflecting. Nithalos also has several particles acting as conjunctions, adverbs, and adpositions.

[top]Nominal Morphology

Nominal morphology is mainly agglutinating, with each case being a vowel added to the end of the word. The language avoids doubled vowels when possible when nouns are declined, so some endings dissimilate to avoid an declined noun ending in a doubled vowel. See [here] for an example of a declined noun.

A grammatical peculiarity of Nithalos is the stative case, described as:

subject

nominative

The stative case is a relic of yu, the archaic verb for 'to be'.

See more details on nominal morphology here: Niđalosa Švutavart - Nithalosian Nouns

[top]Verbal Morphology

Verbs conjugate for tense, mood, and polarity. Person is marked overly with the appropriate subject pronoun. Much like nouns, conjugation is an agglutinating process, see [here] for an example of a conjugated verb.

Nithalos has two moods that are not commonly found, the relative and the suggestive moods. The relative mood (if it has similar usage to Latvian) indicates "reported" speech, that is, knowledge gained from another source but not a direct quote. The suggestive is used, per the description of the mood, to indicate that one "might [verb]" or "could [verb]", as it would be an good (or bad) idea to do so.

[top]Particles

Particles run amok in Nithalos, so much so that I am too lazy to write about them all, so read about them here: Niđalosa Ušivart - Nithalosian Particles

[top]More

Want more? Check out the rest of Nithalos' information [here], including the phonology, articles I haven't covered, dialects, and its rather easy and intuitive orthography.

And of course, I need to include that Let It Go has been translated into Nithalos... sing along!

[top]A Note on LOTM

Got suggestions for how the next LOTM should be written? See something in Nithalos that wasn't covered and you wish it had been? Hate my guts and want to tell me? Feel free to shoot me (argylegasm) or Brandon a PM with your thoughts, suggestions, and hate mail. Also feel free to drop by the LOTM clan if you have other feedback, want to join in the voting process, or nominate a language!