Riphean: Difference between revisions

Oselish has three noun genders, termed animate, inanimate and collective by native grammarians. These correspond to masculine, neuter and feminine genders in other Indo-European languages. The correlation between grammatical gender and biological gender is much less in Oselish than in other IE languages, due to the influence of Uralic languages.

As in Latin and Greek, Oselish has various declension paradigms for nouns. Some common ones are:

Gender has been almost completely regularized in Oselish, again due to Uralic influence -- it is correlated with morphology, so all nouns ending in ''-e'' are collective, even nouns like ''aste'' (bone), which derives from the Old Oselish neuter noun ''haste''. Most notably, Oselish pronouns do not inflect for gender, as in Armenian and Persian, but adjectives do; adjective genders follow lexical animacy when the noun is second or third declension and they follow nominal morphology for first declension nouns. There is also a distinction between attributive and predicative adjectives, with predicative adjectives never taking suffixes: