Ancient Shieldian

Nouns

Ancient Shieldian is an extremely declined language with at least nine different major cases and four declension. Most native Shieldian words fall into one of the first three declensions (masculine, feminine, and neuter, or first, second, and third), with the fourth being used for words of foreign or modern origin. Often these declensions involve something as minor as a location change for an accent or a new long mark, which is one reason Ancient Shieldian is now a dead language.

The gender of nouns is not as important as in modern languages because no articles are ever used, like in Latin, and adjectives follow declension. However, no native adjectives go into the fourth declension, meaning that knowing the gender of fourth declension words is quite important.

Case is indicated with a suffix. All nouns stems, except some fourth declension ones, end with a consonant.

The Cases:

1) Nominative: the subject or predicate 2) Prepositional: used for nearly all prepositions 3) Essive: used for a temporary state of being 4) Compositional: used for inalienable possession 5) Possessive: used to show alienable possession 6) Ergative: the subject of a transitive verb 7) Absolutave: the subject of an intransitive verb 8) Terminative: used instead of the phrase “as far as...” 9) Dative: used for the indirect object.

Plurals are made by adding ‘r’ to the end of a noun. If the declension used ends in a consonant, ‘ur’ is used.

1 = the first vowel is accented. If the first vowel is already accented, nothing changes.

The most common nouns now seen in Ancient Shieldian are Dûn Ádien, the King’s castle.

‘’’Dûn’’’, which means ‘fortress’ or ‘castle’ and occasionally ‘palace,’ is actually an exception to the rule. At one time, it was properly ‘Dûna’ but common use dropped the last letter in the nominative case. All other cases decline with the first declension. ‘’’Adie’’’ is a proper noun which was the name of the wife of a fisherman. He named the island upon which stood his hut after she died in childbirth. That island later came to hold the great fortress of the House of Callahan. ‘’’Ádien’’’ is the singular possessive of Adie; hence, ‘Dûn Ádien’ means ‘the Fortress of Adie’ or ‘Adie’s Fortress.’

For example, if we wished to say “the Adie of the Fortress,” Adie would be put in the nominative and Fortress in the possessive. This example would be “Dûnàoy Adie” (doon-AWE ah-DEE-eh).

If we wanted to say “I am going as far as Adie’s Fortress,” we would leave Adie in the possessive and put Dûn into the terminative. This example would be: “goytâg Dûnây Ádien” (gwe-TAG doon-EH AH-dee-ehn).