South Carpathian grammar
This article discusses the grammar of the South Carpathian language.
Morphophonology
South Carpathian has two main morphophonological processes: the vowel harmony and the consonant gradation.
Vowel harmony is a redundancy feature, meaning that it is uniform within a word, so either only front or only back vowels can be present in a single word. This usually does not apply to new compound words and loanwords.
Unlike in other Carpathian languages, the consonant gradation became non-productive and unpredictable in South Carpathian. Originally a consonant in the strong grade "weakened" when a syllable became closed. However, in the modern laguage those grades were altered significantly, especially after the merging of geminated consonants with plain ones.
Nouns
South Carpathian has the least amount of cases among the Carpathian languages: four grammatical, three directional, and two locative cases (nine in total). The commitative case is obsolete, but it is used dialects of some villages and (seldom) in literature, thus it is listed below. Endings with back and front vowels are used with words having a respecting vowel harmony, so koi "house" uses back vowel endings, while pienkä "wind" uses front vowel endings.
| Case | Ending | Example | Translation | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| sg | pl | sg | pl | ||
| Grammatical | |||||
| nominative | – | -k | koi | koik | (a) house |
| accusative | -g/-da/-dä | -ba/-bä | kojug | koibă | house (as an object) |
| genitive | -gă/-gĕ | -ădă/-ĕdĕ | koigă | kojudă | of (a) house |
| essive | -p/-ĭp/-ip | -ub/-üb | koip | kojub | as (a) house |
| Locative | |||||
| inessive | -t | -tui/-töi | kojut | kojutui | in (a) house |
| adessive | -go/-gö | -ko/-kö | koigo | kojuko | on (a) house |
| Directional | |||||
| elative | -hĭ/-hi | -kĭ/-ki | koihĭ | koikĭ | out of (a) house |
| lative | -jăb/-jĕb/-ib | -kăb/-kĕb | koijăb | koikăb | to (a) house |
| ablative | -ci | -i | koici | kojui | from (a) house |
| Obsolete | |||||
| commitative | -ĭn/-in | -käin/-koan | kojĭn | koikoan | with (a) house |