#polabian language

[crescentaureola]

hey did you know that i had translated some bits of the Bible into Polabian language? (Polabian is a now extinct West Slavic language that was located around Elbe river in Germany).

maybe someday ill translate more, but recently i have no energy for anything, so... bluh!

beginning bits of the Genesis story:

beginning of the Tower of Babel story:

[crescentaureola]

erlik ricące, jaz ni wîdzą są kakio liûba wåsoba. jaz jis dûpasta din mam wile jînech wad. wilą bŷt sama, dach stalè tech wårdát liûbena

[crescentaureola]

First look at the adjectives in Polabian

I finally managed to get into the adjectives. I put in two examples for to better visualize how the words behave when they're declined.

Polabian has two types of adjectives which inherited from Proto-Slavic: soft and hard (with the addition of short and long, but this post will not talk about the short adjectives), and they have slightly different declinations and behave slightly different. If we look at the tables bellow the first one is a soft adjective: prene meaning "front; early; first", and the second one is a hard adjective: welkiy meaning "great, large". (I chose to write soft adjectives with -e and hard with -y to differentiate them in my proposed orthography, which would mirror like in the other Slavic -i and -y respectively).

In the "⟨ ⟩" we have the proper orthography for the language and bellow in the "/ /" we have the way linguists tried to transcribe the language. The exclamation point before signifies that the ending was attested, question mark means uncertain reconstruction.

Singular:

I'm not certain of the feminine genitive form. In Proto-Slavic the soft adjective had the ending: *-ьję̇ję̇; while the hard adjectives had: *-yję̇. Both of the final nasal vowel would became: -ą, but we do have attested words where this particular nasal vowel sometimes loses its nasality when at the end of the word, and becomes -ă. So both -ă and -ą are possible, in my opinion. (Though I would personally prefer and recommend the unreduced -ą).

Another aspect of the fem. gen. is the palatalization. It feels correct but I'm not 100% certain of it.

Dual:

For genitive and locative I still didn't decide how they supposed to look like, so for the time being I left them empty. And in addition, I might have made a mistake here while making this table, I believe the dative for wilkiy should be wilkîma instead. I if recall every *ky sequence becomes -kî- instead.

Plural:

Again, I'm slightly uncertain if in the hard adjective the palatalization would stay or not.

In addition, we can see the alternation between k : ť : c, (also g : ď : ʒ and x : x́ : s) played a huge part in Polabian declination and overall morphology system:

wilkiy liás - "great forest", masculine singular, but in plural it's wilce lesî - "great forests",

wilka wåda - "great (body of) water", feminine singular

wilkia swiųto - "great holiday", neuter singular

(originally I posted it on r/PolabianLanguage)

[crescentaureola]

erm,,, w-would you still love me if i were to translate the opening line of the Communist Manifesto into Polabian? 🥺👉👈,,,,,, ,,, ,,? ?,,,?