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.
That is one possibility to explain how the form came about, however this form already does have some history. Observe below:
mo yu prai ó ari - this was the original form (using current lexicon - digging up my old notes, this was originally
mö yu braya öy arïx...). The
yu was a particle meaning that the subject was part of a stative sentence. The
ó was the old accusative marker, and
ari being the verb. In this example,
ari was often just dropped leaving:
mo yu prai ó - sentence without the verb. In my next revision of the language, what happened, was I dropped the
ó on the object in favour of a suffix, and merged the
yu with the subject making:
mou prai - this is pretty much the current form. However, the first time I started using this form, the stative suffix was
only -u, while the accusative could still sometimes be
-i (maybe good to note that
ó changed to
-u/-i in this reform). Gradually I started using both where I could and now both these are acceptable to mean "I am a boy":
moi praimou praiIn contrast, you
could use the now unproductive form of
mo praiu ari.
The thing I'm really having difficulty understanding is what name I am supposed to give the grammatical feature used to produce the sentences. It is effectively the accusative case (when you look at the morphemes used), but is not really an accusative case.