Introduction

Þrjótrunn is a North Romance language, i.e., it belongs to the Romance family of the Indo-European language group. It is spoken in Þrjótur.^[1] (Ef þú ert Íslendingur álítur þú vissulega að 'Þrjótur' sé íslenska. En það er ekki íslenska, það er þrjóska (þrjótrunn).) The language derives from Vulgar Latin (VL) of the 1st century CE.^[2]

This section gives an overview of the features that make Þrjótrunn or the North Romance language different in the family of Romance languages.

• Nominative forms are usually retained.^[3]
• A four cases system is retained.^[4] (The five/six case system of Classical Latin was probably not preserved because acc. and abl. had merged too early in VL.)
• There is a complex system of umlauts and sandhi.^[5]
• The verbal system looses many synthetic tenses.
• The article is suffixed to the noun.^[6]
• The early vowel system does not collapse to seven vowels.^[7]
• 'de' is never used for possessives: genitive case is used instead.
• Retention of synthetical comparative and superlative.^[8]
• Retension of 4th declension for many words.
• 'hví' (what?) and 'hvæll' (what kind of?) clearly distinguished in adjectival interrogative usage.
• Lexical differences from South Romance:
  • '(The) same' is not from '*metipsimus', but from 'aequalis'.
  • 'Equus', not 'caballus', is the standard word for 'horse'.
  • 'Iste' is almost completely lost.
  • The article derives from 'ipse', not from 'ille' (shared with a few South Romance languages).^[9]
  • The distal demonstrative derives from 'ipse'.