Moderators:Ashucky, Dormouse559
An | ešo al | sumviđ |
i.nom | chair .loc | sit |
An | ešo al | ari |
i.nom | chair .loc | be |
Anu | ešo al |
i.acc* | chair .loc |
A quick search on Wikipedia tells me that Hebrew goes with the natural pairs method; it also says that Slovene uses the dual any time there are two of something except when the objects in question are a natural pair, when it uses the regular plural. It seems to me you have a lot of leeway when it comes to naturalistic assignment of the dual, so I'd tell you to choose whichever way you like better (which seems to be the natural pairs method).Narbleh wrote:I'm trying to decide if the dual will be for everything that there is two of or just for things that occur in pairs There's a dual version of every case so it is a bit cumbersome.
ąąme (eye) -> ąąnut (two eyes) -> ąąnunten (with my own two eyes)
peja (arm) -> pejat (two arms) -> pejatse (in my arms)
So then do we talk about "indu" (two books) and "siolu" (two people) or maybe it means "a pair of"?
I'm not sure what seems most useful or realistic.
Can the direct object of ari(đ) take the accusative case, and does this change when you delete the verb?hashi wrote:So I guess the summation of what my question is, if not some type of ergative-absolutive alignment, what would you call the use of the "accusative" markings on the subject of stative sentences?
Dormouse559 wrote:Can the direct object of ari(đ) take the accusative case, and does this change when you delete the verb?hashi wrote:So I guess the summation of what my question is, if not some type of ergative-absolutive alignment, what would you call the use of the "accusative" markings on the subject of stative sentences?
Dormouse559 wrote:If I'm interpreting this correctly, the nominative case is zero marked, so you could say that a popular device in the historical language was to invert the arguments of a stative verb and delete the verb, but that over time the technique was reanalyzed as a neutral, un-inverted stative phrase and even became the preferred form.
Dormouse559 wrote::hmm: Maybe its present form could be explained as some sort of variation on the language's nominative case, because it performs the same function as a typical nominative case (marking the subject of an intransitive verb and the agent of a transitive verb), but it's only used in verbless stative phrases. Something similar could be said of the direct object, that it's taking an unmarked variation of the accusative case.
If you want to differentiate the case the subject takes, you could maybe call it an oblique case, only used in stative phrases. The fact that English translates this marked word as the subject might not preclude this possibility, because I seem to remember that other languages are much looser about what is the subject and what is the object in stative expressions.
True. Eh, we'll just throw ideas at the wall and see what sticks.hashi wrote:I'm not really sure I understand how the oblique case differs from the accusative to safely evaluate whether that would be a more appropriate label. Wikipedia, doesn't help much either lol.
You could perhaps call it the secondary nominative or the stative nominative (or secondary/stative accusative), to differentiate the two.hashi wrote:A variation of the nominative case sounds like the most intuitive suggestion I think. I was almost thinking in my next revision of the language diverging this feature away from the common accusative and giving it a more distinguishable suffix. My issue at the moment with it really is that both the accusative, and that form can occur in one sentence. Like this:
Sou tišau taprilana kit. - That is the man who ate (all) the cheese.
that.? cheese.acc eat.aor.rel person.
Dormouse559 wrote:Or you could be bold and invent your own case! The Stative Case: the case used to mark the subjects of stative expressions.
Those changes to the seem fine to me. It certainly wouldn't be the first time a language altered, or even deleted, a grammatical feature for the sake of pronunciation.hashi wrote:I'm planning the following changes:
(Examples use šemo (island) and praran (library))
Basic location: šemo al / praran al -> šemol / prananal
Other locative postpositions: šemo ula / praran ula -> šemoa ula / prarana ula
The second change comes about as the southern dialect of the language uses the genitive case with most locative postpositions. I thought about affixing -al, but praranal ula is bit of a mouthful, so I will drop the -l (that way it could be viewed either way).
I like that idea. It adds a bit of "regular irregularity" to the language.hashi wrote:I'm also cutting the dative back from the postposition eg, to be just a suffix of -(e)y/-g, so: šemo eg -> šemog and praran eg -> praraney. In the latter example, the -g will now lenite to -y when after the -e-.
Dormouse559 wrote:Those changes to the seem fine to me. It certainly wouldn't be the first time a language altered, or even deleted, a grammatical feature for the sake of pronunciation.hashi wrote:I'm planning the following changes:
(Examples use šemo (island) and praran (library))
Basic location: šemo al / praran al -> šemol / prananal
Other locative postpositions: šemo ula / praran ula -> šemoa ula / prarana ula
The second change comes about as the southern dialect of the language uses the genitive case with most locative postpositions. I thought about affixing -al, but praranal ula is bit of a mouthful, so I will drop the -l (that way it could be viewed either way).
Dormouse559 wrote:For the difficulty of pronunciation, you could have allophonic diphthongization at word boundaries, like Italian does. I'm not totally sure of the particulars, but you could possibly limit it to closely linked words.
Oh, what's that? I don't think I've heard of it before.hashi wrote:At the moment I solve this by using intervocalic palatalisation, but this is not always that aesthetically pleasing as I thought it would be.
Dormouse559 wrote:Oh, what's that? I don't think I've heard of it before.hashi wrote:At the moment I solve this by using intervocalic palatalisation, but this is not always that aesthetically pleasing as I thought it would be.
To clarify, I'm assuming that you mean this sound change applies to word boundaries like those in šemoa ula and prarana ula.
Plusquamperfekt wrote:However, I wonder if such locative adverbs that all share the same ending wouldn't automatically lead to the reconstruction of a locative case, if my conlang were a natural spoken language. Weird problem
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