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Nidâri: Difference between revisions
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Nouns inflect for gender, number and case. The original Proto-Duaric gender system consisted of at least eight noun classes, perhaps even up to eleven< | Nouns inflect for gender, number and case. The original Proto-Duaric gender system consisted of at least eight noun classes, perhaps even up to eleven<ref>The putative eleven cases are based on the Nidâri suffixes ''-šni'', ''-jan'', and ''-qan'', which have no cognate forms in Ín Duári.</ref>, descended from an earlier system that distinguished animacy through noun classifiers. Of this complex noun class system, Nidâri preserved four of them. | ||
Animacy 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 III and IV nouns, where both the singular and plural nominative and genitive forms are wildly irregular. Across all noun classes, including the irregular paradigms, there is always an infixed ''-h-'' in the plural, reflecting an earlier ''-θ-'' in the Proto-language that is still preserved in Ín Duári. | Animacy 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 III and IV nouns, where both the singular and plural nominative and genitive forms are wildly irregular. Across all noun classes, including the irregular paradigms, there is always an infixed ''-h-'' in the plural, reflecting an earlier ''-θ-'' in the Proto-language that is still preserved in Ín Duári. | ||