Giant language

The giant language, or giantish, also called Jotun by those who speak it, was the ancient language of most giants. It was one of the oldest active languages. It was believed that the language shared some of its roots with Common and Thorass.

Script
Both ancient and modern Giant was written with Dethek runes. Ancient giants also had a set of logographic runes primarily used for runecasting, although they were also used symbolically in art to represent or refer to related giant subraces and gods. These runes did not make up a true alphabet or syllabary, but rather they were diagrams or models of the relationships between cosmic forces and the deeper truths of the universe.

Grammar
Jotun tended to follow a subject–verb–object order, but there were exceptions. The copula, er, was often left out of sentences.

Nouns
The plural forms of nouns varied depending on the declension. For example, the plural of jotun ("giant") was jotunen, while the plural of huslyd ("family") was huslyder.

Verbs
Scholars have determined that verb forms in Jotun were inflected, that is, they changed form depending on the subject of the sentence. For example, the verb fer, "to go", was known to have at least the following forms:

The participial form ferd derived from the verb and meant "going" or "journey".

The infinitive form, fer, was used in commands, e.g., Fer zu dun heim, "Go to your home."

Pronouns
The subjective forms, as known, are shown below:

The following were the known objective forms:

The known possessive forms were as follows:

The two demonstrative pronouns were i and det, "this" and "that", respectively. The interrogative pronouns included wo ("what"), wer ("who"), and wie ("where").

Numbers
The cardinal numbers in Jotun are listed below:

Numbers after ten were formed simply by following ten with the next digit, as in tier et, that is, there was no separate word for eleven. 20 and 30 were represented with to tier and tre tier. Similarly, 2,345 would be represented as to tusen tre hund fir tier fem.

The only ordinal number known to scholars was stot, "second".

History
Giant was derived from the Primordial language. Jotunstein had strong Auld Dwarven influences, and the Thorass language and by extent the Common language of Faerûn were thought to share lingual roots with Jotun, possibly having evolved from an even more ancient giant language.

Only about 1% of giants had any significant knowledge of the ancient giant runes in 1366 DR. By the late 14th century DR, a few giants were familiar with the rune commonly associated with their subrace and the runes were still used by giant runecasters. Most ancient dragons were also familiar with the large majority of these runes.

Derivatives
There are several languages and dialects based on Jotun that have evolved from it.


 * Jogishk : This is the patois spoken by ogres.
 * Jotunalder : Similar enough to Jotun to be reasonably understood, this language has not changed in thousands of years and is used formally in ceremonies.
 * Jotunhaug : Spoken by hill and mountain giants, and closely related to Jotunise.
 * Jotunild : Spoken by fire giants.
 * Jotunise : Spoken by frost giants and closely related to Jotunhaug.
 * Jotunskye : The language used by cloud and fog giants.
 * Jotunstein : Spoken by stone giants. The written form was called "Metamorpherie".
 * Jotunuvar : Spoken by storm giants.

Appearances

 * Adventures
 * Curse of the Azure Bonds &bull; Storm King's Thunder