|
|
| Line 222: |
Line 222: |
| --> | | --> |
| ===Nouns=== | | ===Nouns=== |
| Nouns inflect for gender, number and case. The gender system contains eight classes, descended from an earlier system that distinguished animacy through noun classifiers. In time these classifiers became bound morphemes, accounting for the disparate patterns found across the present noun class system. Animacy is still correlated with noun classes, with animacy tending to decrease from left to right across the noun classes. However, the animacy distinctions have blurred, with some of the nouns in the protolanguage being reassigned to another class due to syncretism. | | Nouns inflect for gender, number and case. The original Proto-Duaric gender system consisted of at least eight noun classes descended from an earlier system that distinguished animacy through noun classifiers. Of these eight noun classes, Nidâri preserved four of them. |
|
| |
|
| The Class I and Class II nouns are unmarked in the nominative, but take accusative suffixes. Nouns from Class III to Class VI all exhibit suffix marking on the nominative, with null marking on the accusative. These nouns are referred to as the ''unmarked accusative'' nouns, or ''marked nominative'' nouns. Based on this type of case marking, linguists have classified Ín Duári's morphosyntactic alighnment as [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative%E2%80%93absolutive_language nominative-absolutive ], a subtype of the more familiar nominative-accusative morphosyntactic alighment. Nominative-absolutive languages occur rarely throughout the world. However, Ín Duári exhibits nominative-absolutive alignment only in Class III-Class VIII. Class I and Class II exhibit the prototypical nominative-accusative pattern though, so Ín Duári is highly unusual as it appears to exhibit a split alignment system between the nominative-accusative and the nominative-absolutive morphosyntactic alignment classifications.
| | Animacy still has some correlation amongst the surviving noun classes, with animacy tending to decrease from left to right across the noun classes. However, the animacy distinctions have blurred, with some of the nouns in the protolanguage being reassigned to another class due to syncretism, as can be seen in the Class IV nouns, where the singular nominative and genitive are wildly irregular, whereas the plural nominative and genitive are, with a few exceptions, quite regular. |
|
| |
|
| Class VII and Class VIII nouns have merged the nominative and accusative cases into a single, direct case. The plural forms originally reduplicated the initial syllable with the CV- pattern followed by and infixed ''-θ-'', but through phonological erosion initial consonants were lost, leaving behind the vowel of the original reduplicated syllable. Through time the vowels were leveled to an ''e-'' prefix in all noun classes, save for the plural in the form VIII direct case, which changed to initial ''i-'' prefix.
| |
|
| |
|
| {| class="bluetable lightbluebg" | | {| class="bluetable lightbluebg" |