Hej everyone,

as promised last week, I'm going to delve a bit deeper into Freljordian today, and note some basic qualities that the language has. From these we can then delve deeper and start constructing our own sentences and even writing our own songs / stories!

Before we get into it, even though both songs are ur-freljordian, there are some differences in pronunciation, which would indicate a slightly different dialect. For example, Ornn’s people pronounce æ like [ɛi] while Voli’s people pronounce it like [ai]. However, they are mostly likely still the same phoneme. There will thus be some slight pronunciation differences, but the written language will be identical between the two dialects. So, let’s see what we can learn from the two songs about Freljordian.

NOUNS

For one, we can see that nouns can be singular and plural. One example from the songs that immediately stands out is grup ‘pits’. In this one, the plural and singular forms are identical. This can be seen in other languages such as Swedish, where the neuter gendered words are not marked either, so it is not entirely suprising.

We have found some other plural endings such as: -s, -er, and -ir. Depending on how many grammatical genders Freljordian has, these will be divided among those. There are two possible options (the names are preliminary, they’re up for change):

​

The choice of ending within a gender is based on either the ending or the word, or origin of the word. For example, words ending in i may receive -ir, while words ending in a consonant may get -s. This would require some more material to be decided though, as there may be more endings that we haven't seen yet.

Furthermore, words can be definite, indefinite or unspecified. Definite words in English are made by adding the while indefinite words are made by adding a or an. Interestingly, there are multiple methods for creating this distinction. Compare the next two examples:

frá   det   bérgen    hall
from  DEF   mountain  half 
‘from the half mountain’
-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-
Regn-ón    stremn-or
Rain-DEF   flow-PRS
‘the rain flows’

You can see that the article (the the word) can either be in front of the noun as in the first one, or attached to it on the second one. A possible hypothesis is that if the noun has an adjective or other description, the definite article is moved to the front (which partly resembles the process in some Nordic languages), while if there is no adjective, the article is suffixed to the end of the word, as in regnón.

The indefinite article (a or an in English) is always just placed in front, as with en and æn. If Freljordian has three genders, we’d expect something like this (the * in front of ett means that it’s a hypothised form, that we haven’t seen in the material).

ADJECTIVES

Adjectives are commonly placed behind the noun, though some examples have them in front as well. One interesting bit about them can be seen in Voli’s theme.

vír stark
'we're strong'

Notice how there isn’t a verb in that sentence? My first instinct was that perhaps the vír is a combination of ví erum (we are), but this was quickly debunked since vír is used in Ornn’s theme too. Thus, a copula verb like to be is not mandatory in Freljordian.

Another thing to notice is that adjectives don’t seem to change depending on anything. In most Scandinavian languages, the adjectives change when the subject is plural or change with gender, but Freljordian doesn’t appear to have that. This will make it a lot easier to learn.

PRONOUNS

We don’t have many of those, though we may have as many as four cases, such as the nominative du ‘you’, dative mér ‘of me’, and genitive (possessive) din ‘yours’.

VERBS

Since most verbs from the songs are in present tense, we can’t say too much about this yet. We have roughly 7 different endings for a present tense though, so there are either a lot of irregular verbs, or many different patterns. I’ll save you all the individuals example, you can find them in the dictionary later. One thing that must be noted, however, is that Freljordian has the Scandinavian passive s.

To create a passive sentence (he buys the book (active) vs the book is bought (passive)) you only need to add an -s to the verb, such as in this example.

mörk    rók     urtand-s
dark    smoke   exhale-PASS
'Dark smoke is exhaled'

In conclusion, there is a lot more to be found in those songs, but I didn’t want to make this post too long (since it’s already quite dry) but with the information that we have now, we can now roughly analyse each sentence, as can be seen in the example below. The completely glossed songs will be placed over at r/Runeterran where each sentence is dissected, and the grammatical parts are highlighted.

frán    kall-ir  ásþisk     férn-er     mér
from    call-PL  ancient    find-PRS    me.DAT
'From ancient calls, they find me'

This post wasn't as informative as I would have liked, but we needed to get the basics across. If you have any questions, feel free to dm me or hop onto our Discord ^^

Cheers,

Nanna