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Kirtumur: Difference between revisions
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===Stress=== | ===Stress=== | ||
Like other Eastern varieties, Kirtumur does not possess a strong stress and thus it generally does not cause any vowel reduction of unstressed syllables (a feature, shared with Kērsalur, but not with some westernmost dialects, like Ilusal). A stress is generally fixed on the root vowel of a word, but some suffixes can cause the stress shift to the right, like the inanimate locative marker ''-enei'' which receives stress on its first vowel ([ˈlum] "surface" - [lu.ˈmɛ.nɛɪ] "on the surface" ) or the negative active present conjugation, which shifts the stress to the person suffix ([ˈkʰɑ.tʰɑ] "to stop" - [kʰɑ.ˈtʰeɪ.ŋi] "I'm not stopping him/her". In composite words the stress always falls on the second root vowel or a suffix - [nɑm.sɑ.ˈlir] "speech, the manner of speaking". | Like other Eastern varieties, Kirtumur does not possess a strong stress and thus it generally does not cause any vowel reduction of unstressed syllables (a feature, shared with Kērsalur, but not with some westernmost dialects, like Ilusal). A stress is generally fixed on the root vowel of a word, but some suffixes can cause the stress shift to the right, like the inanimate locative marker ''-enei'' which receives stress on its first vowel ([ˈlum] "surface" - [lu.ˈmɛ.nɛɪ] "on the surface" ) or the negative active present conjugation, which shifts the stress to the person suffix ([ˈkʰɑ.tʰɑ] "to stop" - [kʰɑ.ˈtʰeɪ.ŋi] "I'm not stopping him/her". In composite words the stress always falls on the second root vowel or a suffix - [nɑm.sɑ.ˈlir] "speech, the manner of speaking". | ||
==Morphology== | |||
The word is perhaps the most basic unit of grammar and morphology deals with the internal structure of words. Kirtumur is consistently classified as an [[w:Agglutinative language|agglutinative]] language. Although it differs from a standard agglutinative language, where each morpheme carries one meaning and they remain unchanged after their unions. Some of its morphemes act similarly to morphemes in a [[w:Fusional language|fusional language]], which tend to use a single morheme to carry multiple meanings. For example, the verb ''misa'' ("to eat") has the first-person singular subject present tense form ''misi'' ("I eat it"); the single suffix ''-i'' represents both the features of the direct agreement between first and third persons and present tense, instead of having a separate affix for each feature (although the present tense morpheme can also be analysed as zero). | |||
Prefixes and suffixes make up a single grammatical word together with the stem they are attached to. Thus, a verbal form makes a single word, as the parts of a verbal form always | |||
occur in a fixed order and cannot be separated from each other. Stem and affixes together make up a single linguistic unit that cannot be broken up in any way, while clitics (such as noun case clitics) are grammatical words, because they can be separated from the linguistic units they are attached to, but they are not separate phonologically from nouns they modify. | |||
===Nouns=== | |||
Nouns is an open class in Kirtumur. In principle, the number of nouns is unlimited. Apart from a large number of simple nouns, there are numerous complex nouns, most of them compounds, such as ''wimmuk'' ("basket", from ''wek-'' "cover" and ''muk'' "bundle"), but derivation by means of affixes is also common. Nouns are inflected for three grammatical categories: [[w:Grammatical case|case]], [[w:Possession (linguistics)|possession]] and [[w:Grammatical number|number]]. The category of [[w:Grammatical gender|gender]] (or animacy) is tied to the former categories. Nouns are not marked for definiteness and there is no article. | |||
====Animacy==== | |||
Kirtumur has two nouns classes, mostly based on [[w:Animacy|animacy]]. Humans, gods, all living organisms, stars and planets belong to animate gender, while everything else belongs to inanimate gender. Groups living beings are inanimate, even though the singular subjects that comprise them are animate. This animacy distinction is marked on nouns with different case forms, but it also shows itself in pronominal and verbal agreement. | |||
====Number==== | |||
Kirtumur nouns inflect for three numbers: singular, dual and plural, though only animate and a few naturally paired inanimate nouns can have dual forms. | |||
The dual and plural of an animate noun are indicated with suffixes: ''-u'' (dual) and ''-ek/-ak'' (plural). The marker is attached directly to the animate noun regardless of its position in a noun phrase, while the plural marker is attached to the last word of a noun phrase, if the noun is inanimate, and has the form ''-ka/-kan'' depending on case markers, attached to it. Dual of naturally paired inanimate objects behaves the same way as the dual of animate nouns. The number marker always comes before any case markers and behaves either as a suffix or a clitic depending on the class of the noun, which it modifies. | |||
====Case==== | |||
The category of case is expressed by enclitic case markers which are attached to the last word of the noun phrase whose case they indicate. | |||
[[Category:Languages]] | [[Category:Languages]] | ||