A Reference Grammar of the Novegradian Language

Foreword Предѣсловия Novegradian is an artificially constructed language, an experiment in language development and evolution set against an alternative historical timeline. In working on it, I sought to create something realistic, a language that could conceivably be seen as a modern-day sibling to the other Slavic languages of Eastern Europe. The contents of this grammar were not simply created out of thin air; it involved a great deal of research into the other Slavic languages, their development, and the historical linguistic background of the broader Slavic language family, as well as the Uralic languages that were traditionally spoken in the same territory as the real Old Novgorodian and my own Modern Novegradian. Most of the inherited vocabulary was hand-derived from reconstructed Common Slavic, believed to be the ancestor of all the modern-day Slavic languages. A great deal of thought and effort was put into literally every single word of this language. It has been a project of four years at the time of writing, and I hope that time is reflected in the quality of the product. Although the Novegradian language is artificial, it does have some roots in reality. The idea for it originated when I first came across an article on the “Old Novgorodian Dialect” on Wikipedia, a real and attested dialect spoken in northwest Russia around the city of Veliky Novgorod and throughout its vast territory from roughly the 10th through 15th centuries. This discovery sparked a long-lasting interest in me regarding both the medieval state of Novgorod and its language, both of which were highly unusual given their place and time on the periphery of Slavic-speaking territory. The Old Novgorodian dialect had a number of very unique features, such as its apparent lack of the Second Palatalization seen in all of the other Slavic languages, its unusual Ŏ-stem nominative singular ending -e, the origin of which is still a matter of great controversy, and unique phonological phenomena…