New Saxon language

New Saxon ᚹᛖᛥᚷᛖᚱᛗᚫᚾᚦ
Regulated by	Rutland West Germanic Academy (RWL)
Spoken in	Saxon Empire, New Israel
Total speakers	1 (up to 15 with limited knowledge)
Family	Indo-European Germanic West Germanic Anglo-Frisian Old English New Saxon
Writing system(s)	Runic (West Germanic alphabet)

Not to be confused with the West Germanic langauge family.

New Saxon (ᚹᛖᛥᚷᛖᚱᛗᚫᚾᚦ Westgermänš [wɛstɡəˈmɛːntʃ]) is a West Germanic language derived from Old English, and closely related to German and Dutch. It is a recognized language of the Holy Empire of New Israel official and the official language of the Saxon Empire. The language is one of the most developed constructed languages to be used in a nation, with thousands of words in its lexicon and growing daily, with a translation of the Holy Bible in progress.

New Saxon is heavily influenced lexically by High German, which is used as a basis for compounds, and by Icelandic, which is favoured over Latin in an attempt to maintain Germanic purism. New Saxon retains a grammatical case system with noun as well as adjective declension, three genders (one being a neutral) and a V2 (verb-second) word order.

History

New Saxon is a break-off of the Late West Saxon dialect of Old English, based on the de facto standard of the writings of Ælfric of Eynsham. It also carries vestiges of the Northumbrian dialect in the pronominal system, e.g. 'þec' for the accusative 'thee' and 'user' (instead of 'ure') for 'our'. This is also due to influence through assimilation with other West Germanic languages, primarily High German. The High German influence is especially notable in the definite article, where the Old English 'se' (masculine nominative) and 'seo' (feminine nominative) have been replaced by 'der' (from 'þære', the feminine dative) and 'de' (from 'þa', the feminine accusative, cf German 'die'). 'Seo' has replaced the feminine third-person nominative pronoun 'heo' (cf German 'sie'). Characteristically Anglo-Frisian, having undergone palatalisation and the nasal spirant law from Old English, New Saxon has also lost the dental fricatives, which have become stops as in other West Germanic languages. It has additionally undergone the post-Old English vowel shifts, which similarly affected German, English and Dutch, with long vowels becoming diphthongs.

More than 97% of the lexicon is derived from Old English, but subject to semantic drift. For example, where Old English used 'writan' and 'rædan' ('write' and 'read'), these have been replaced by 'šraiven' and 'lezen' (from the less frequent 'scrifan' and 'lesan') as part of the levelling process with German ('schreiben' and 'lesen'). The remainder of the lexicon is mostly borrowed from other Germanic languages, including Icelandic, whence words are borrowed instead of using Graeco-Latin stems (e.g. 'Hymyndakann', where German and Dutch have 'ideologie'). A very small percentage of words are borrowed from non-Germanic languages, including Celtic and Latin.

Although Old English was written with the Latin alphabet, modern New Saxon has returned to the use of the ancestral futhorc runic alphabet in line with its puristic language planning policy.

Grammar

New Saxon is an inflected language with a grammar akin to that of Old English and standard German.

Noun inflection

New Saxon nouns inflect into:

• four cases: nominative, accusative, dative and genitive.
• three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter
• strong and weak declensions
• two numbers: singular and plural

The degree of inflection is on a par with Old English, albeit with vowel endings reduced to schwas except in the case of the plural genitive. It is greater than in other modern Germanic languages except Icelandic: for example, it retains the dative -e suffix on nouns and a much greater number of weak nouns, both are which are infrequently seen in modern German usage. Inflection on masculine nouns only is required by the accusative case, whereas the dative and genitive cases require inflection on nouns of all genders.

In the orthography, where a serif runic font is used, nouns and words with the syntactical function of nouns are capitalised. West Germanic forms left-branching noun compounds with no spacing or hyphenation.