Classical Arithide adjectives

Adjectives in Classical Arithide, in accordance with the language's left-branching nature, are generally placed before the noun they modify (as with adverbs), 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 in the Equora, was an innovation adopted from the dialects of western Calagia and Demedria.

As such, 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.

The prestige tongue of the Equora dynasty, the most widely written and recognised variant, and the common modern benchmark for "standard" Classical Arithide, had two types of word that could be considered as "adjectives":

1. Verbal adjectives, also called adjectival verbs, depending on the academic source, which were technically stative verbs, and constitute the vast majority of Classical Artihide adjectives. These were and are quoted in dictionaries in the infinitive verb-form.
2. Nominal adjectives, or adjectival nouns, again depending on academic source, which behaved grammatically as nouns, like Latin adjectives. These were and are quoted in dictionaries in the nominative singular of the first declension.

It is worth noting that while nominal adjectives understandably decline for case, even verbal adjectives, when used attributively, take case-endings as well.

Verbal adjectives

Most words that could conceivably be used with an adjectival function were technically stative verbs, e.g. egnēn, "black", or literally, "to be black", having the ability to conjugate for tense, mood and aspect while modifying a noun, whether predicatively or attributively. These adjectives behaved much like the "i-adjectives" of Japanese. 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.

Conjugation

Verbal adjectives typically belong to the consonant-stem conjugation (see Classical Arithide conjugation).

An example of a verbal adjective would be nistēn "fast", or literally "to be fast". Predicatively ("the car is fast"), it would be conjugated nista to mean "it is fast", or niste to express that it used to be fast. When the adjective is used attributively ("the fast car"), the aspectual participles are used instead, and while past states still retain the use of the perfective aspect (nistēm), the imperfective aspect is employed for current states (nistī).

• Viringa nista. The car is fast.
• Nistī viringa dagemenum dakte. The fast car stopped in front of the house. (lit. "is-fast 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)

Attributive usage & case-marking

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

• Viringa nistī fyre. The fast car left.
• Viringetis nistītis fyre. (I/We/You/He/She/It/They) left in the fast car. (lit. "by the fast car")

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.

Nominal adjectives

The nominal adjectives, which behave as nouns like their Latin counterparts, do not, due to their nature, conjugate for time-distinctions unlike the verbals. In addition, as they are technically nouns, their semantic scope does not include a copula, and in predicative usage such an equating verb is frequently needed to express what would, with verbal adjectives, be encoded in the conjugation; innovation, however, gradually reduced such need by reanalysing the nominal adjectives as nouns per se, and thence deriving verbal adjectives through the suffixation of -nēn (see #Deriving adjectives from nouns below).

Adjectives in the nominal class tend to be concerned with appearance, e.g. oluros "ugly, out-of-shape", vobulos "pitch-dark", nassos "deepest, ulterior, core". Exceptions include all the adjectives of colour, which are morphologically derived from the names of the individual colours by affixing -nēn, and are hence verbal in nature. Also in this group are some of the most commonly used adjectives, including pan "all".

Declension

Nominal adjectives can be further divided into two groups based on their declension behaviour. While all nominal adjectives are quoted in the first declension nominative singular in dictionaries, most exhibit variable declensions, i.e. like verbal adjectives, their declension class varies with the noun they are modifying. E.g. in the nominative, vobulos aumos "dark cave" (declension I) but vobula hael "dubious personality" (V) and vobuli taite "dark night" (VII). (See Classical Arithide declension for more information on declension.)

There exist some adjectives with invariable declension classes, however. One of them is pan "all", for which regardless of the target noun's lexical class the declension group remains the first. Hence for it, as for other same:

• pan baletēs "all possibilities (VIII)"
• panen sivianēs "of all towns (II)"
• panae foritēnēs "to all miners (VI)"

Pan is unique, in that as a mass adjective it does not have a plural form. With other similar adjectives, the plural would be used in the above examples.

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

Deriving adjectives

The derivation of adjectives mostly involved nouns as roots, except with the participle forms of verbs. Most derivations involve the affixation of adjectivalising suffixes to noun stems, i.e. the form without any grammatical ending (didek- < didekos),

Applicative adjectivaliser -nēn

The adding of the adjectivalising suffix -nēn to a noun turns the noun into an adjective (more broadly speaking, a modifier) of applicative denotation: root nouns are not all related to their derivative adjectives in the same way. 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.

Phonetic assimilation takes place in cases where appending the suffix gives rise to certain consonant clusters:

• -kn > -gn: didekos, didek- "strength" > didegnēn "strong"
• -fn > -vn: leif, leif- > leivnēn
• -bn > -mn: leber, leb- "tail" > lemnēn "tailed"
• -tn, -dn > -nn: dīmotos, dīmot- "law" > dīmonnēn "lawful, legal"; ridos > rinnēn

When the noun stem ends in an -s, an -r, a geminate consonant or a consonant cluster, an epenthetic -e- is inserted before the suffix; with s-stem nouns the sibilant is voiced:

• -sn > -zen: thalasos, thalas- > thalazenēn
• -rn > -ren: klara, klar- "horn" > klarenēn "horned"
• geminates: lassos > lassenēn
• clusters: midra "minister" > midrenēn "ministerial"

All other unlisted consonant clusters are permissible. Note also that in all instances -gn is pronounced [ŋn] as elsewhere.

Adjectives of approximation

Adjectives of approximation, of which examples in English include "salty", "boyish" and "songlike", indicate the similarity of the noun described to the referent that forms the root of the adjective. Adjectivalisers of similarity in Classical Arithide include:

• -(i)ēlēn, verbal; "resembling, looking like" (derives from the noun hael "characteristic")
  alar "bird" > alarēlēn "birdlike"
• -ītos, nominal; "having the character of"
  dhīs "fest, celebration" > dhidītos "festive"; nēs "boy" > neītos "boyish"
• ōrēn-, verbal; "having or full of"
  ves "breeze" > vetōrēn "breezy"

Adjectives of relevance

Familiar adjectivalisers of relevance in English are mostly Hellenic in origin: -ic, as in poetic "in the manner of a poem/poet" or Tantric "regarding the Tantras"; -ous, as in famous "having a lot of fame". Classical Arithide has the following:

• -(i)kios, nominal; "in the manner of" (derives from the verb ikēn "to pass")
  paryos "poem" > parykios "poetic"
• (i)vēn-, verbal; "having a tendency to"
  
• -(i)ōs, -(i)od-, nominal; "consisting of"
  
• -essēn, verbal; "believing in" (derives from hessēn "to believe")
  elamos "freedom" > elamessēn "libertarian"

Adjectives of belonging

Under this category fall adjectives that describe the "belonging" of a person, an object etc. to another, like the English suffixes -(i)an ("Egyptian", "Republican"). There are in Classical Arithide the ones below:

• -ēthos¹

, nominal; indicates nationality or origin
Lybein "Lybia" > Lybēthos "Lybian"; Isphea > Isphēthos "Isphean"

• -udēn¹

, verbal; "to be of a nationality or origin"
Areth > Arudēn "to be an Areth"; Isphēthos > Isphudēn "to be an Isphean"

• -(i)meos or -(e)mios, nominal; indicating a certain style
  ante "water" > antimeos/antemios "fluid like water, fluent like water"

¹ These two suffixes are used complementarily.

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