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Common (na Xafen): Difference between revisions
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A note on number: Common tends not to use mass nouns. If there is an idiomatic way to use the plural, Common tends to choose it. So a word like "mury," "hair," is treated like a singular hair, and to refer to a head of hair one would use the plural, "naz mury," much like French. Mass nouns tend to be things that are not naturally distinguishable as being composed of individual parts, like fluids. If it is necessary to count portions of a mass noun, like drops of water, a word for the portion is counted in the paucal or referred to in the plural, and then the substance is referred to periphrastically using the null preposition. | A note on number: Common tends not to use mass nouns. If there is an idiomatic way to use the plural, Common tends to choose it. So a word like "mury," "hair," is treated like a singular hair, and to refer to a head of hair one would use the plural, "naz mury," much like French. Mass nouns tend to be things that are not naturally distinguishable as being composed of individual parts, like fluids. If it is necessary to count portions of a mass noun, like drops of water, a word for the portion is counted in the paucal or referred to in the plural, and then the substance is referred to periphrastically using the null preposition. | ||
In the following sections, each of the noun determiners/articles/pronouns will be detailed with their declensions and usage. The lemma, or dictionary entry, for each article is its absolutive singular form. | In the following sections, each of the noun determiners/articles/pronouns will be detailed with their declensions and usage. The lemma, or dictionary entry, for each article is its absolutive singular form. Note: it is not an omission that possessive forms of the pronouns are not given. Common genuinely lacks explicitly possessive forms, although one way to indicate possession is using the null preposition, which takes an object in the nominative case, allowing the nominative to sometimes act like a genitive case. | ||
===First Person - Ates Palisyn (we)=== | |||
The first person pronoun/article is 'we'. It works like any other non-relative determiner in Common in that it is used in a phrase structure with a head term, even though it is very commonly used on its own like the equivalent English words 'I' or 'we'. The most common head terms used with it are a personal name, title or honorific. In this case, it would be the idiomatic way to say what English would set aside with commas, for example, 'I, Tony, see the child' would be 'We Toni nox triju ija pocuk'. | |||
''Declension of '''we''' (First Person)'' | |||
{| border="1" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="1" class="bluetable lightbluebg" style="width: 400px; text-align:center;" | |||
! scope="col" | Case/Number | |||
! scope="col" | Singular | |||
! scope="col" | Paucal (Exclusive) | |||
! scope="col" | Plural (Inclusive) | |||
|- | |||
! | Absolutive | |||
| we /we/ | |||
| wer /wer/ | |||
| wez /weθ/ | |||
|- | |||
! | Ergative | |||
| je /je/ | |||
| jer /jer/ | |||
| jez /jeθ/ | |||
|- | |||
! | Dative | |||
| ije /'i.je/ | |||
| ijer /'i.jer/ | |||
| ijez /'i.jeθ/ | |||
|- | |||
! | Nominative | |||
| we /wen/ | |||
| wenar /wenar/ | |||
| wenaz /wenaθ/ | |||
|} | |||
One special feature of number in the first person, is that the paucal number is used for exclusive (not including the addressee) and the plural is used for the inclusive (including the addressee). These forms are equivalent to the English 'we' and 'us', but the sense of whether the person addressed is included is generally always carried and contrasts with English. However, the normal sense of the paucal (a few of something, or something that can be precisely counted) versus the plural (many of something, or something that is too numerous to conveniently count) is still operative and can create ambiguity as to which sense is meant when a number is used.. Such ambiguity has to be worked out via context or extra phrasing to clarify if needed. | |||
===Modifiers=== | ===Modifiers=== | ||