An Introduction to Teutonic (Part 2): Nouns
Part 1
Introduction
Teutonic is a highly inflected language, meaning that words have multiple forms depending on their place in a sentence and context. This makes Teutonic similar to modern Germanic languages like Icelandic, Faroese, and German rather than English. For those unfamiliar, I will do my best to explain these concepts.
Gender Nouns in Teutonic change their form depending on: gender (masculine, feminine, neutral), number (singular and plural), and case (nominative-accusative, genitive, plural). It is important to remember that the (grammatical) gender of a noun does not refer to the natural gender of a noun. For example, the Teutonic word vif "wife" is neutral, even if it refers to something considered feminine. You can consider grammatical gender just a form of noun classification - other languages like Hittite divided nouns between inanimate (non-living) and animate (living), or even lack grammatical gender altogether (modern English, Farsi).
Identifying a noun's gender is harder than languages like Spanish, but not as hard as Icelandic. In general, most nouns ending in a consonant are masculine or neutral (but sometimes feminine), while nouns that end in -a are feminine. Nouns ending in -i/u can be either feminine or masculine, while there is a special class of "weak" nouns that end in -a regardless of gender.
Most nouns in Teutonic can be singular or plural, but there are a few types of nouns that only have singular forms. These are typically abstract nouns (mirched "darkness), or non-countable nouns like fech "cattle."
Cases
The most notable feature of Teutonic grammar is its case system - in English, the relation between nouns is reflected via word order. In the sentence "I gave the hat of a cat to a rat," we know that hat is the direct object because it goes after the verb, and that it's owned by a cat because of the preposition of, and the rat is the indirect object because of the preposition to. This sentence would look different in Teutonic:
ic gaf than hatt cattis ratte
i.PRO give.1SG.PAST the.ACC hat.NOM-ACC.SG cat.GEN.SG rat.DAT.SG
To approximate, the Teutonic sentence would be something closer to "I gave the hat cat-of rat-to." Because of Teutonic's case system, it is far less reliant on prepositions to indicate the relations between words (but they are still used frequently).
The nominative-accusative case refers to the subject of a sentence, and the direct object of a (transitive) verb's action. Merging the two cases together only happens for nouns. The genitive case indicates possession or absence of a noun, equivalent to the -'s suffix in English. Finally, there is the dative or indirect case, used for indirect objects and indicating where the subject is located.
Using the above sentence as an example, ic is in the nominative-accusative case because it indicates the subject. While hatt is also in the same case as ic, the form than (nom. sa) is in the accusative. This is because articles and pronouns decline differently for nominative and accusative forms. cattis (nom. catt) indicates that the hat is owned by the cat, and because the rat is being given an object, it is in the dative (nom. ratt)
Declensions
Most nouns belong to the a-stem pattern, typically ending in a consonant with plural forms ending in -as or -a. This category comprises of masculine and neutral nouns.
Before talking about the next stem, it's important to talk about Germanic umlaut. In Proto-Germanic (the reconstructed ancestor of all modern Germanic tongues), the presence of /j i/ after a back vowel later altered the preceding vowel sound.
The word cheese in modern English was descended from Proto-Germanic *kāsijaz. Because ā follows /ij/, it becomes ċēse in Old English and eventually, cheese.
For ja-stem nouns, they decline similarly to a-stem nouns but with etymological i-umlaut. The leftover /j/ typically is left as a final -i.
The wa-stem lacks umlaut, but has an intervocalic -v- in the genitive/dative cases and plural forms.
There is a historical declension pattern called the u-stem; in Proto-Germanic these were nouns ending in -uz, but this ending is omitted in Teutonic.
Most feminine nouns belong to the o-stem patterns, as well as the jo/wo-stems. It should be noted that these terms do not actually reflect the endings of words in Teutonic, but rather their original Proto-Germanic endings. For example, Proto-Germanic *aspō becomes aspa "aspen" in Teutonic; compare Icelandic ösp and Dutch esp. jo/wo-stems are similar to their masculine ja/wa-stem counterparts.
i-stem nouns possess both final -i in the singular as well as in their plural forms.
Root nouns change their internal vowel rather than adding a special suffix/ending. When internal vowel mutation doesn't occur, the -as suffix is inserted in the plural forms.
The second-to-last class of nouns are r-stem nouns, which compromise a very small class of vocabulary pertaining to family. These words are modar, fadar, svestar, brodar, and dochtar, corresponding to "mother, father, sister, brother" and "daughter" respectively.
Finally, there are the weak (n-stem) nouns which share the same endings in the plural and genitive/dative cases. Remnants exist in English, such as oxen.
