INTRODUCTION TO FTHINRAKATHI GRAMMAR
Rakashyu kha'FthinraKathi ShatJishi

The extinct language FthinraKathi dates from before the time of Surak and his original followers, and is a cousin of "Old Golic Vulcan". The FthinraKathir were slaughtered by the vLauDuKaurir in one of the ancient wars that killed so many Vulcans. The only surviving materials on that language have been preserved at the religious centers at Gol.

Grammar Fundamentals

FthinraKathi is a "compounding" language. Basic words and roots are put together to make new words, a lot like the Germanic languages of Earth. For example, the FthinraKathi for "mouth" is "ruuf" and for "water" or "fluid" is "mosh". If you combine the two smaller words, you get "ruuf-mosh", which means "saliva" (literally "mouth-water"). Most FthinraKathi compound words are directly combined without any punctuation. The only indication of those compounds is that the first letter of each root is capitalized. Only some borrowed words in FthinraKathi have the fairly standard " - " ("pakh", similar to a hyphen) separating their roots. Words can be combined with any number of roots, unlike many other Golic languages.

Just like German does on Earth, most nouns are capitalized in written FthinraKathi. Pronouns are not capitalized.

Like most of the other Golic languages, FthinraKathi is an affixing language. Prefixes and suffixes are added to words (simple or compound) to modify them. In FthinraKathi, nearly all words corresponding to prepositions are prefixes. These are usually separated from the word they modify by a Vulcan "half-stop" ("ulef-pekhaya") or " ' " (similar to an apostrophe). For example, "eshek" means "us" but "k'eshek" means "with us" and "s'eshek" means "from us". Suffixes are also important. They can be directly affixed, or separated by " ' " or " - ". For example, "yutan" (compassionate) and "yutanef" (compassion) or "ludu" (child) and "ludu'fut" (childless). When new to the language, it is easy to confuse a compound word with a suffixed word. Also, certain ancient words handed down or adopted from other languages, like "t'forti" (finally), may look like they are prefixed but they are not. Memorizing the historical exceptions will help to prevent confusion later on.

Finally, FthinraKathi is a "syntactic language", meaning sentence construction and word order can determine shades of meaning.

Prefixes & Suffixes

See the three charts on the Affixes Page at the link below for examples of various grammatical and modifying affixes.



Verb-Noun Word Pairs

Most FthinraKathi words come in what are called verb-noun word pairs. If you know the verb, you can often determine the related noun, or vice versa. Most of these verb-noun pairs follow one of several standard patterns. The table below shows the most common forms with sample words:

Type	Noun ending	Noun	Verb	Comments
1	(none)	sed (life)	seddor (live)	most common; bare root plus ~dor to make verb
2	(varied)	panuaf (trust)	panudor (trust)	ancient compound with root extracted plus ~dor
3	(varied)	talun (find)	taldor (find)	noun variant to prevent similar word confusion
4	(varied)	estuh (touch)	estul (touch)	ancient words, highly irregular with no pattern
5	an	psthan (search)	pstha (search)	ancient words, ~n added to verb to make noun
6	au	helau (invasion)	helav (invade)	v dropped from verb, u added to make noun
7	shyu	ldishyu (liking)	ldishu (like)	u dropped from verb, yu added to make noun

Sentence Order

As a syntactic language, sentence order is very important in FthinraKathi. The verb is almost always placed first in the sentence, although it may move for emphasis. Subjects are placed before objects in the sentence. The language tends to be "contextual" in that understood or previously mentioned things are seldom repeated, unless needed for emphasis. Non-Vulcans sometimes have a tough time understanding a conversation when pronouns, subjects and objects are dropped out. Vulcans usually find it wasteful to use more words than are truly necessary to get a point across. Normally full word usage is only done in teaching situations or formal literature.

Stress

The position of stress varied in FthinraKathi words, although purists often put the stress on the second part of a compound. Remember not to count prefixes and suffixes when determining stress. The root word, whether compound or not, is often what stress is based on.

Written FthinraKathi

The Vulcans who spoke FthinraKathi used two styles of writing the consonants and vowels of their language. Each of these styles had a specific place in their life and society. Although they are known by various names, the most widely accepted names are Ceremonial and Common. It is very easy to tell the different styles apart from each other.

The "Ceremonial Script" is the most ornate style, preserving a certain amount of the ancient pictographic nature of Vulcan languages. This script is used for most inscriptions, official legal and family documents, and all major literary works. This is the style that Surak and his contemporaries used throughout their writings.

The "Common Script" is that used in day-to-day life for writing notes, work, journals, correspondence, etc., and for any use that the "Ceremonial" is not appropriate. It is not as intricate as the "Ceremonial" and is much easier to write.

The Ceremonial Script is nearly always written top to bottom. The Common Script is written either top to bottom or left to right, depending on the writer and style.

Alphabet

The alphabetic system used in FthinraKathi Vulcan was made up of 30 symbols in all. The Traditional order of their letters was:

S T P K R L A I N Z M D O E V U H G Ch Y J F W B Sh Th Kh Zh Ts X

Pronunciation
See Language Lesson 1 for information on pronunciation of TGV and MGV, which is essentially the same as for FthinraKathi. Just remember "J" is pronounced as "Dzh" and "X" is pronounced as "Ks".

Articles

There is no definite article in FthinraKathi. For example, the word "ludu" can mean "child" or "the child". Although this is confusing to many non-Vulcans, the Vulcans have no trouble because context dictates the intent. The use of indefinite articles (a, an) in FthinraKathi is normally used only for emphasis.

Plurals

Plurals are often understood through context or by the use of pluralizing words, such as a number. In those cases, the word does not change its form. Two forms of a pluralizing direct suffix, (~'ir) after vowels and (~ir) after consonants, exist in FthinraKathi Vulcan, similar to the "~s" of FSE.

When a construction like "a flock of birds" or "a pod of whales" is used in FSE, the type of animal is pluralized. In GV, equivalent constructions are not pluralized, since the collective word automatically indicates there is more than one animal. For example, "treit t'kushel" (literally, "flock of bird") or "kuht t'sehlat" (literally, "herd of sehlat").

Interrogatives

Although many Federation languages have interrogative symbols, FthinraKathi Vulcan does not -- there is no question mark. "Yes or No" questions are formed by using the word >aa< at the very end of the sentence. Other questions are formed by using a questioning word like >will< (where) at the end of the sentence. To aid offworlders with the language, though, a question mark is often used in transliterated Vulcan (but never with true written Vulcan).

Modes of Speech

In FthinraKathi there was only one mode of speech, although there were three modes of speech in Old FthinraKathi: Superior, Normal and Inferior. Since this is an introductory grammar and not a comprehensive guide, we will not go into this subject any further at this time.

Verbs

In the FthinraKathi language, the verb took only one form for all three persons, singular or plural, in a tense. There were three types of verbs in this language: Weak, Irregular Strong and Regular Strong.

Weak Verbs were formed from a word root and the direct suffix "~dor". This form stayed the same for all persons. In the simple past tense, the weak verb was preceded by fet (past). For example, fet seddor meant "lived" (but literally past-live). Weak verbs were very common in FthinraKathi.

Irregular Strong Verbs could take any form, such as kadah (to invade) or mabak (to hunt), and were usually older words still in use or borrowings from other languages. Like the weak verbs, they kept the same form in all persons. In the simple past tense, the irregular strong verb was preceded by fet (past). For example, fet mabak meant "hunted" (but literally past-hunt).

Regular Strong Verbs ended with either "~av" or "~shu". They kept the infinitive form in all present and future tenses. In the simple past tense, the ending changed to "~af" for the first variant and "~she" for the second variant. For example, osav (steal) and osaf (stole); and aishu (breathe) and aishe (breathed).

All three types of verbs were treated the same way in perfect past tense and the future tense. In the perfect past tense, the verb was prefixed with " ke' ". For example, ldishu meant "to like" while ke'ldishu meant "has liked". In the future tense, all verbs either went by context or were preceded by helper words. In High Mode this was fnak (future). For example, fnak seddor means "will live" or "shall live" (literally "future to live"). In Low Mode, this was "dvunu" (shall, will). For example, dvunu seddor ("will live" or "shall live"). "Dvunu" was not affixed to verbs.

Punctuation

In FthinraKathi, there are five main marks used in punctuation:

" - " pakh (stroke) - used in affixing or compounding words, and as a comma or semi-colon is used in FSE
" -- " dah-pakh (double-stroke) - used as a colon or long dash is used in FSE
" ' " ulef-pekhaya (half-stop) - used to separate affixes from base words
" . " ek'pehkaya (full-stop) - used as a period is used in FSE
" .. " dah-pehkaya (double-stop) - used for emphasis, similar to an exclamation mark in FSE

Many Vulcans use what is called ek'pakh (full-stroke), a line about the length of three pakh marks, instead of dah-pakh. This is the older form and is preferred in literature or religious texts. The dah-pakh will be used here for typographic reasons.

There is no question mark in FthinraKathi Vulcan. There are additional specialized symbols used in typography and science, but we will not discuss them in this particular material. A future page may focus on typographic and scientific symbols.

Golic Family Linguistic Map



Linguistic family tree of "Northern Hemisphere" languages on Vulcan,
concentrating on Golic and its relatives. Languages in italics are the
surviving languages still in use on Vulcan. Historical dates are not
available for most of the languages, due to loss of records caused by
warfare and natural disasters over the millennia. Several other
languages are known to have existed but information no longer
exists on them.


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