Carpathian nouns

Most of the Proto-Indo-European declensional classes were retained, with the exception of the consonant-stems, which were gradually falling out of use, being replaced by other, more productive classes.

Carpathian nouns have three grammatical categories: gender (masculine, feminine, common and neuter), number (singular, dual and plural) and seven cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative and vocative with only three different case forms being distinguished in the dual number.

Accent classes

All Carpathian nouns belong to one of the three accent classes:

• AS (acute stative) – acute accent (tone-1) fixed on (usually) the initial syllable.
• CS (circumflex stative) – fixed circumflex accent (tone-2) or grave accent (tone-3) on any syllable. For neuter stems it is the final syllable, while for all other genders it is typically the first or the second syllable.
• M (mobile) – the pitch (tone-2 or tone-3) alternates between final and non-final (usually initial) position.

Classes

There are seven main stem classes in Carpathian, being defined by their specific case endings: a-stem, u-stem, i-stem ā-stem, ī-stem, ū-stem, and consonant-stem, the latter consisting of several subclasses. The following tables are examples of Carpathian noun-class paradigms. The example words belong to the M-paradigm, because the pitch pattern of the other two paradigms is predictable.