Some Nowsith Englisc grammar

Orthography

For the most part, Nowsith Englisc's orthography bears a strong
resemblance to Modern English's, with a couple exceptions.  Without the
French influence, the letter thorn remained in the alphabet.  Edh,
however, dropped out, although it still sometimes shows up in "archaic"
places.  Here I use the digraph [th] for thorn, because I'm using Pine and
it's difficult to throw in extra characters.  [Ch] is used the same way,
but [sc] is used in the place of [sh].  Accent is almost always on the
first root syllable, except in borrowings, in which case it's
unpredictable.

Verbs

Verbs come in two classes, strong and weak.  Strong verbs form their
preterite with a vowel change, and their past participle with the
suffixed -en:

speak --> spoke --> spoken

Weak verbs form the preterite with the dental suffix, usually written -ed
but pronounced as /d/ in a voiced environment, and /t/ in an unvoiced
environment.  Past participle is made by adding the prefix i- to the
preterite form.

walk --> walked --> iwalked

Verbal conjugation in the present tense is as follows:

I walk
thou walks
he, sce, it walks

we walken
you walken
they walken

The subjunctive is formed by adding -en to the stem, and is not otherwise
conjugated.  "if I walken . . . "

Nouns:

The definite article is "se" in the nominative singular, "the" in all
other cases.
                singular                plural
Nom/Acc/Dat     word                    worden
Gen             words                   wordna

Certain stem changing nouns are irregular in the plural:

Nom/Acc/Dat     mon                     men
Gen             mons                    menna

Adjectives:

Adjectives used with definite articles, plural nouns, or proper names
sometimes add a silent -e.

a red barn
se redde barn
som redde barnen
the redde barnen

Adverbs:

Adverbs are formed by the addition of -ly or, rarely, -liche

he foht ful modliche fortha the law te thurgo.
He fought very bravely for the law to pass.

My boorn sings fairly.
My child sings beautifully.

Oops, it's time for me to go home and grab something to eat.  So if
there's any interest I'll finish this later.


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