Classical Arithide adjectives

In Classical Arithide, adjectives were a rather nebulous class of words, and their indeterminate, halfway-house status contributed to their amorphism, or rather polymorphism, over the years, and indeed, a cursory glance at the adjectives in a certain text and the way they are inflected is one of the surest ways to discern the period from which it came.

In accordance with the language's left-branching nature, adjectives in Classical Arithide are generally placed before the noun they modify (as with adverbs and the relevant word they modify), but may technically be placed anywhere in a sentence due to the extensive case-marking system. This latter point is definitely true only for the standard dialect of the Equora dynasty; adjectival case-marking was rare before and gradually fell out of favour after the time, and even during the Equora, was adopted from an innovation of the dialects of western Calagia and Demedria.

The Classical Arithide of the Equora dynasty, the most widely recognised variant and the common modern benchmark for "standard" Classical Arithide, had no adjectives per se: all words that could conceivably be used with an adjectival function were technically stative verbs, e.g. egnēn, "black", or literally, "to be black". While predicative use of verbs as adjectives was expected, the attributive property grew out of a grammatical device, now largely disused, of making verbs into modifiers by displacing them to the front of nouns rather than behind them, as is the usual SOV order.

Inflection

Tense

To reuse the example above, the verb egnēn, which comes from ek "the colour black" (see #Deriving adjectives from nouns below), means "to be black". It would then be conjugated egna to mean "it is black", or egne to express that it used to be black; this applied when the adjective was predicative ("the car is black"). When the adjective is used attributively ("the black car"), the aspectual participles are used instead, and while past states still retain the use of the perfective aspect (egnēm), the imperfective aspect is employed for current states (egnī).

• Viringa egna. The sedan is black.
• Egnī viringa dagemenum dakte. The black sedan stopped in front of the house. (lit. "is-black sedan house-front-at stopped")

The existence of this present- and past-state distinction enables some handy locutions as well:

• Ielanēm konkanditis egnī assula levē agare The sky that was once blue but now black with rage howled ferociously (Osces, Poetry)

Case

Case endings are, logically, not required with predicative uses of adjectives, not only because the adjective can only, by definition, be in the nominative, but also because the adjective is grammatically a verb, thus inflecting only for time and not case. With attributive use, however, cases are marked, though in the nominative, generally no endings are appended. When the adjective modifies a noun in a case other than the nominative, however, case endings become necessary for purposes of disambiguation:

• Viringa egnī vage. The black sedan went.
• Viringetis egnītis vage. (I/We/You/He/She/It/They) went in the black sedan. (lit. "by the black sedan")

The adjective takes on the case endings of the appropriate lexical class, i.e. the one to which the noun being modified belongs. Exceptions are that nouns of the sixth declension (agentive nouns) take adjectives declined in the fifth declension, and that declension VIII nouns (derivatives) take adjectives declined as per declensions I, II, III or IV according on their nominative ending.

Note: towards the end of the dynasty the innovation of a final -m, borrowed from the perfective participle, with the imperfective participle (leading to egnīm etc.) spread to adjectives as well, and subsequently gave rise to the -im adjectival ending of Modern Arithide.

Derivatives from verbs

The participle forms of verbs could also be used as adjectives, without further modification. These derivative adjectives fall under the nominal class, and are not availed the subtle distinctions of present and past states as are the adjectives of the verbal class. Conjugation follows as per the declension class of the noun modified.

• Īde tath zurōnēs enēn mēsēs labi, futisi lārīē segē nollos.
  alas again cruel.PL return.INFIN Fate.PL call.IMPF, hide.IMPF-and.CLIT swimming.PL.ACC eye.PL.ACC sleep.NOM
  "Alas again the cruel Fates are calling me back, and sleep is obscuring my swimming eyes." (Lēspēs, Laments)

Similarly, these derived adjectives were affected by the rise of the use of final -m late in the Equora.

Deriving adjectives from nouns

To make an adjective of a noun in Classical Artihide requires only a very regular process: the adding of the verbifying suffix -nēn to the noun. The suffix is made up of two parts, the first (-n-) being the marker for modifiers, and the second (-ēn) being the infinitive ending for consonant-stem verbs.

The suffix is appended to the stem of the noun, i.e. the form without any grammatical ending (didek- < didekos); in cases where this results in certain consonant clusters, some phonetic processes are triggered:

• -kn > -gn: didekos > didegnēn
• -fn > -vn: lafos > lavnēn
• -bn > -mn: laber > lamnēn
• -tn, -dn > -nn: dīmotos > dīmonnēn, ridos > rinnēn
• -sn > -zn: thalasa > thalaznēn
• -rn > -ren: klaros > klarenēn

All other unlisted consonant clusters are permissible. Note also that -gn is pronounced [ŋn].

See also

• Classical Arithide
• Classical Arithide grammar
• Classical Arithide declension
• Classical Arithide conjugation
• Classical Arithide adverbs
• Classical Arithide determiners
• Classical Arithide adpositions
• Classical Arithide pro-forms