Old Catulerīae

Consonants
Old Tritan's phonology changed greatly compared with Proto-~, with all internal fricatives merging with plosives and all word-initial fricatives merging into f or h. Only one labiovelar, qu, was maintained, with xw merging with f, gw merging with v and ɣw merging with v.

Vowels
Old Tritan had an increased vocalic inventory compared to its ancestor, having five short vowels and five long vowels. There was a shift of i and u from high-mid to high positions vocalically, and a loss of central vowels, with i becoming a fronted vowel.

Pronouns
As Old Tritan was a pro-drop language, distinguishing between all persons and all numbers in verbs, pronouns were typically used only for emphasis in the nominative, but normally for other cases. Old Tritan developed third person pronouns, from unstressed forms of Proto-~ demonstratives.

Participles
Proto-~ maintained the system of participle formation found in Proto-??, though, due to various sound changes, much of these systems became difficult to discern. The ablaut paradigm was most affected, due to the addition of new vowels to Proto-~ phonology.

Verbal
Proto-~ verbs belonged to one of two declensions, marked by their infinitives, -iβo and -ezo. These different endings denoted tense, mood, grammatical person and number. Every verb declined for seven tenses (present, aorist, imperfect, future, perfect, pluperfect and future perfect tenses), three moods (indicative, imperative and subjunctive), three persons and three numbers (singular, dual and plural).

The only major difference between Proto-~ and Proto-?? verbal morphology was the merger of the subjunctive case with the optative case, a merger which arose in the majority of Proto-?? descendants. The subjunctive was used to express counterfactuals, hypotheticals and desries, and was formed through the addition of the subjunctive marker -er(i) to the verb stem, alongside non-obligatory ablaut. There was also a tendency among speakers to use the perfect tense in place of the aorist tense. The person endings were broadly the same throughout the indicative, subjunctive and optative paradigms, with -ti (except in the subjunctive, when it was simply a vowel), -di and -si representing the first, second and third persons respectively. The addition of an n before the consonant (forming the clusters -nt, -nd and -ns respectively) was used as a form of pluralisation. Verbs were atypical in that ablaut was used, not in order to form the plural (though it was used to form the dual), but in order to form different tenses.

Nounal
Proto-~ nouns lost the active root formation process of Proto-??, though some suffixes to form complex nouns were maintained. Some suffixes used to form nouns from roots were em, en, er, el, tem, ter, Vd, Vt and Vk.

Proto-~ nouns declined for seven cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, locative, lative and ablative), with the loss of Proto-??'s instrumental case. The instrumental case was replaced in most of its functions by the ablative case. There was also a tendency among speakers to use the ablative case with adpositions, instead of locative and lative cases. The gender system of Proto-~ was generally preserved, though some nouns shifted between genders. There were two separate noun declensions, marked by their different nominative endings, -o/-a/-e and -ajo/-ejo.

Examples
The priest exclaimed: "Oh, Iuzero! Teach me!" - Iuzento wenizizi: "Ajo, Iuzero! Njaz sōrereksi!"