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Declension classes
All nouns we learnt in one of the previous lessons were ending with consonant, so adding definite article “-um” wasn't a problem. But what if there were some words ending with a vowel? Then, definite article is changed to just “-m”, e.g. “slave” is “snaga”, and “the slave” is “snagam”. Groups of words that are changed similarly during inflection are called “declension classes”. Nûrlâm has only two: words ending with consonants (declension class I) and words ending with vowels (declension class II). Declension class is very important, as not only the articles, but some other grammatical suffixes differ depending on declension class too.
New words
There are very few words ending with vowel to learn (probably more than half of them are listed here):
- fau (snow)
- gai (chain)
- gau (fruit)
- ghru (stick)
- glu (piss)
- goi (city)
- hlu (clothes)
- hrau (flesh, meat)
- khlau (ear)
- lau (year)
- mau (warrior)1)
- noi (bee)
- poi (berry)
- sau (skill, ability, craft)
- shra (person, character)
- slai (life)
- snaga (slave, servant, thrall)
- sru (seed, grain)
- tau (forest)
- zrî (joy, fun)
You may notice, that most of them actually end with a diphthong, so technically a semi-vowel, but nonetheless they all belong to declension class II.
All adjectives also have two declension classes depending on if the word ends with a consonant or vowel.
Declension classes in longer chains
Every addition of suffix or clitic should be done according to declension class of the previous part. For example the word “slave” (⇒ “snaga”) belongs to declension class II, adding adjective “dirty” (“dug”) to say “filthy snaga” changes the resulting word “snagadug” to class I. Thus “the slave” becomes “snagam”, but “the filthy slave” becomes “snagadugum”. On the contrary, “orc” (= “uruk”, declension class I) becomes “urukum” with article “the”, but adding adjective ending with vowel like “sta” (= “short”) converts it to declension class II: “urukstam”. Some suffixes are the same for both declension classes, like word “za” (this): “this slave” = “snagaza”, “this orc” = “urukza”.
See also
