Old Dwarven language

The Old Dwarven language was the earliest attested variant of the Dwarven language, and it is the second most attested ancient language of Artograch that was spoken before the Proto-Elven invasion of Artograch. It is still used as for religious purpose in the Dwarven religion, although with modernized pronunciation - this form is known as Temple Dwarven.

Evolution from Proto-Norlokian
Old Dwarven - or rather, its written form - was rather conservative seems to have not diverged much from its ancestor, though some differences still existed:
 * The affricates deaffricated, which crowded out the original sibilant fricatives  to the postalveolar region.
 * While the precise articulation of the seven monophthongs and four diphthongs in Proto-Norlokian was not known, and it was unknown whether they were coloured by neighbouring slender and broad consonants. In contrast, in Old Dwarven, it was well-documented that the palatalization of slender consonants and velarization of broad consonants mainly manifested itself in the colouration of neighbouring vowels, rather than actual audible palatal or velar offglides following the consonant.

Phonotactics
In Old Dwarven - just like in its ancestors Proto-Norlokian -, the acceptable syllable structures were and. Vowel clusters were forbidden, all syllables have to begin with a consonant. Word-initial and word-final consonant clusters were forbidden. because of the accepted syllable structure, each consonant cluster could only consist of two consonants. When a syllable begins with a consonant that is identical to the one the previous syllable ends with, the result is gemination by assimilation. This even applies when one of the consonants is slender and the other is broad.

Consonants
In Old Dwarven, each individual consonant came with two variants: Slender (palatalized) and Broad (velarized/pharyngealized).


 * The broad coronal stops had retroflex allophones  in clusters with the corresponding postalveolar fricatives,  respectively being pronounced as
 * The consonant clusters respectively allophonically coalesce into affricates, just like in the successor languages.

Vowels
Old Dwarven had seven monophthongs - - and four diphthongs. Unlike in the predecessor language, Proto-Norlokian, these vowels were heavily coloured by the surrounding consonants.

Grammar
Old Dwarven mixed concatenative and nonconcatenative morphology (roots and templates) - words were largerly made out of two components: a consonantal root (usually triconsonantal), and a (mostly) vocalic template (though templates could also contain consonants), but conjugations were often added to before or after the words (the conjugations could be also interpreted as parts of the templates). When combining a root and a template together, we'd get a whole word. One such example is combining the root (iron) with the templates  (person) and  (people), which results in   (dwarf) and   (dwarves). Most roots in Old Dwarven were triconsonantal, but some more primitive concepts were expressed through biconsonantal roots, while some more abstract concepts required quadliteral roots.

Just like Proto-Elven and the various early Elven languages, word order was flexible, because of the conjugations the language relied on to mark the proper place of nouns, verbs and adjectives in sentences - nevertheless, the preferred word order was SVO.

Nouns
In Old Dwarven, each noun had only three cases: nominative (makes the noun the subject of the sentence) and accusative (makes the noun the object of the sentence) and genitive (makes the noun the owner of a preceding noun). For most words, the nominative case is unmarked, and the accusative and genitive cases is indicated by a postposition (which could be also interpreted as part of the template). Most nouns also have plural forms.

Since Old Dwarven words were made out of combining roots and templates, it is not possible to simply state how plurals and cases were marked, because each noun-forming template had its own six variants (nominative singular, accusative singular, genitive singular, nominative plural, accusative plural, genitive plural).

One would think that this system inevitably results in heavy irregularity and difficulty with learning Old Dwarven nouns, in truth, it is far more benign: for the majority of noun templates, if the accusative singular form's template has a schwa in the last syllable, it is replaced by a long, otherwise the template is concatenated with a - if the template ends with a vowel, the template is concatenated with  instead, creating a diphthong. Of course, there are exceptions.

For the majority of nouns, the accusative and genitive cases consist in taking the accusative case, and concatenating it with  or  for accusative,  or  for the genitive.

In their default state, all nouns are assumated to have an indefinite article - the definite article is marked by adding an or  before the noun, depending on the initial consonantal sound.

Verbs
Old Dwarven verbs had past and non-past forms, with the present and future not being distinct as far as the grammar system was concerned - if one had to unambigiously specify the future, they could do so by adding a phrase like "in the future" or specifying time after the verb; similarly, unambigiously present could be specified by adding "now" after the verb. Alternatively, unambigious future can also be specified with an auxiliary verb.

In addition to the past versus non-past distinction, verbs also had these forms:
 * Form I: To do (to commit the action specified in the verb)
 * Form II: Causative, to make someone do (to make someone commit the action specified in the verb)
 * Form III: Imperative / prohibitive (direct request or prohibition to make someone commit the action specified in the verb)
 * Unlike all the other forms, Form III only works in non-past. Every other form has a past and non-past variant.
 * Form IV: To turn, to become. This is limited to colours, physical defects and some other states.

Not all verbs have all four forms. Several verbs - especially the auxiliary verbs - only have Form I. As an alternative to using imperatives, a more polite way to order someone to do something was to use indicative future: which is to statate "you will do X".

Adjectives and adverbs
Old Dwarven did not treat adjectives truly separately from nouns - all adjectives could be also treated like nouns (meaning that the word for "big" could also be interpreted as "(the) big one", the word for "handsome" could also be interpreted as "(the) handsome one"), and otherwise, adjectives had to conform to the nouns they were attached to - each adjective (when used purely as an adjective, not as a noun) had a plural and a singular form, which were identical to the nominative forms used when the adjective is interpreted as a noun. Typically, adjectives came after the nouns they were attached to.

Adverbs were formed from adjectives, by concatenating them with or, depending on whether the adjective ends with a consonant or a vowel. They could be put after or before a verb, though after was preferred.