Nahónda: Difference between revisions

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Like Minhast, Nahónda has a four-way gender distinction: masculine, feminine, neuter animate, and neuter inanimate.  Just as in Minhast, Nahónda does not attach gender markers on nouns, but rather agreement affixes in the verb complex take up this role, each affix indicating the gender of its cross-indexed nominal argument.  The verb's agreement affixes cross-index core roles only, i.e. the agent and patient; nouns that serve in a peripheral role are unmarked.  Regardless, all nouns have inherent gender which must be memorized individually in order to select the proper verbal agreement affixes, or correctly identify the gender of a peripheral noun.

Nahónda distinguishes two core cases, agent and patient, and one oblique case, the genitive.  The Patient case is unmarked and serves as the direct object of most transitive verbs, and the subject of stative verbs.  The Genitive serves not only to mark possessors, but as the recipient with donor verbs, e.g. ''wíkha Džalo-da nitsata'' "Give Dzhalo the rope", the hearer of speech verbs, e.g. ''Enane-da kelómatáyelo'' "Speak to Mother!", as well as the direct or indirect object of transitive verbs belonging to other semantic types, e.g. Goal, Experiencer, etc.   

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Like its relatives Minhast and Nankôre, Nahónda makes a four-way distinction in its demonstratives.  Some forms, such as the Proximal and Medio-proximal demonstratives, show in the Agent forms an etymological relationship with Minhast. The Medio-proximal patient and Distal agent forms appear to be derived from the same source as in the corresponding Nankôre form.  A common etymology for the Invisible form among all the sister languages has yet to be found.  The Nahónda demonstratives are listed in the following table:

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Like many languages that fall in the Siouan Sprachbund, Nahónda developed a set of determiners that convey size and shape information of their noun heads. These determiners are descended from postural and motion verbs, reflecting an evolutionary pathway like the non-Siouan languages that developed similar determiners.  The verbs from which these articles developed from come from Nahenic roots.

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Nahónda employs a base-10 system, although remnants of a base-20 system exist, as in ''tsentsatsa'' "twenty" (c.f. Minhast ''šentāz'' "twenty") and ''tsatsentatse'' "forty" (c.f. Minhast ''saššentāz'' "forty").  Siouan influence manifests again, from the numbers eleven through nineteen in the form of the prefix ''ak-'', e.g. ''aktsunó'' "eleven" and ''aktsané'' "twelve".  The prefix is derived from the Lakota prefix ''aké-'' found in the numbers eleven and up, as in the Lakota numbers ''akéwaŋži'' "eleven", and ''akénuŋpa'' "twelve", both literally meaning "ten and one" and "ten and two", respectively.

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The polysynthetic Nohandaráy verb follows a templatic paradigm (c.f. Northern Iroquioan languages).

Nahónda verbs use special suffixes to differentiate whether the speaker is male or female.  These suffixes have no cognates in any of the Nahenic languages, but were adopted from their immediate Siouan-speaking neighbors, specifically, the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakota_language#Men's_and_women's_speech Lakota].  These suffixes are apparently a recent borrowing, as the forms are exactly the same as in Lakota, having undergone no morphophonotactic changes.

Nahónda lacks adpositions and verbal applicative markers to indicate the locational or directional relationship of a noun phrase.  Instead, postural and locomotive verbs are used to indicate [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thematic_relation thematic relations] such as Donor, Recipient, Source, etc.

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==Morphosyntactic Alignment==

Nahónda morphosyntactic alignment is classified as the Split Intransitive type, also known as an Active-Stative alignment.  Transitive clauses by definition take two core arguments, an Agent, and a Patient.  Intransitive clauses take only one core argument.  That the verb that core argument takes may denote either a state, e.g. "He is sick", or it may designate an action instigated by the the core argument, e.g. "He jumps".  In the first case, the core argument takes marking which indicates it experiences or is affected by the state, while in the second the argument takes another marker which indicates that it instigates an action or event.