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This rule is worth knowing because it is used in other rare instances of Teonaht mutation (which arise when certain words appear out of their customary word order: for instance, when a predicate noun or adjective follows the copula where it should precede--'''lynna vandivar''', "she is a dancer" '''(fandivar)'''. See the page on Syntax for more information. | This rule is worth knowing because it is used in other rare instances of Teonaht mutation (which arise when certain words appear out of their customary word order: for instance, when a predicate noun or adjective follows the copula where it should precede--'''lynna vandivar''', "she is a dancer" '''(fandivar)'''. See the page on Syntax for more information. | ||
=== Articles === | |||
The article in Teonaht, once a marker for gender, now solely marks case, and, by its positioning, definiteness or indefiniteness. The true indefinite is without marking: generalized singulars (''tah uaflas,'' a bird will fly), the predicate in a copula construction (''hdand li zef,'' a doctor the man is). The marked indefinite uses a special article developed from the word for "one," and means "a certain" or a "single" one which has not yet risen to the status of definiteness. | |||
{| class="wikitable" | |||
! colspan="2" |'''DEFINITE:''' | |||
|- | |||
|'''le''' | |||
|Agentive (formerly nominative masculine) | |||
|- | |||
|'''li''' | |||
|Experiential (formerly nominative feminine) | |||
|- | |||
|'''il''' | |||
|Accusative and Oblique | |||
|- | |||
|'''ilid/ild''' | |||
|Genitive | |||
|} | |||
{| class="wikitable" | |||
! colspan="2" |'''INDEFINITE:''' | |||
|- | |||
|'''uõa''' | |||
|'''Agentive''' | |||
|- | |||
|'''uõ(n)''' | |||
|'''Experiential''' | |||
|- | |||
|'''uol''' | |||
|'''Accusative and Oblique ''' | |||
|} | |||
Agentive ''uõ(n)'' has a nasal ending before words beginning with a vowel. Sometimes the particle in the object case is suffixed: | |||
:'''harod-uõl uõa kohsa bettaiel''' | |||
:"a rabbit a dog caught." | |||
:("a dog caught a rabbit") | |||
Ordinarily there is no plural form for the article, except in the case of the Nenddeylyt nouns (listed below), where you have '''les, lez, lis, liz''' and '''ils/ilz'''which merely pick up the initial plural tag on the noun--hence this is more of a spelling convention than a morphology. Sometimes, however, these are analogized for Teonaht nouns as well (especially nouns starting with vowels), and you get a pleonasm (see the section below on Nenddeylyt plurals): | |||
:'''liz/ilz ytanneyn''', "the feet" | |||
:(plural marking at the end of both words: -z, and -n) | |||
There is no genitive case for the indefinite article, the genitive affix usually attaching to the front of the indefinite noun (see "Possession" below). | |||
'''uõ hohza vlar''', | |||
"a wind (indef.S) loud." | |||
[i.e., "a loud wind"] | |||
'''Hohz-uõl ryttepron,''' | |||
"a wind (indef.O) I feel." | |||
Or: | |||
'''Hohza ryttepron,''' | |||
"I feel wind." | |||
But: | |||
'''neome hohzid ryttepron,''' | |||
"a breath of wind I feel." | |||
A note about the indefinite article; Teonaht prefers to leave the indefinite noun unmarked, especially if you are speaking of things as general and as unspecified as wind, time, air, sky, and so forth. The indefinite article has more limited application in Teonaht than it does in English, being used mainly to specify "a certain one" of general things that does not yet enjoy specification. So here's the general rule for marked indefinite nouns: these are individual persons or objects, to be distinguished from a collective or mass entity, that show up on the scene for the first time before they have been singled out from the rest of their type: | |||
:'''Ar il verinyn elry atwa;''' | |||
:"To the park (def.OO) did I walk;" | |||
:'''uol zef, lindrel-lo kohs--uol, elry ke''' | |||
:"A (certain) man (indef.O), led he a dog (indef.O), did I see." | |||
:("I walked to the park; I saw a man walking a dog.") | |||
:'''Pom il zef elry jane, uo il kohsa ry sõvuin.''' | |||
:"With the man (def.OO) did I talk, and the dog (def.O) I pet[ted]." | |||
The indefinite indicates a certain man of many. The definite shows that there is now a specified man and his dog. One could just as easily say, and without ambiguity, '''zef elry ke''', "I saw a man." But the advantage of the indefinite article is that, like the definite article, it expresses agentive/experiential information about the noun it modifies. So it is more common for it to appear when the noun is the subject, obviously: '''Uõa zef elry harimar mante,''' "a man came here"; '''Uõ kohsa ai winyfdarem elai lis''', "a dog, its feeding it got" ("a dog was fed"). | |||
The unmarked indefinite noun can also signify a collective: | |||
:'''Te uafla''' | |||
:"A bird flies"; but also: "birds fly." | |||
To disambiguate these two, Teonaht will often use the habitual or consuetudinal ending: | |||
:'''Te uaflom.''' | |||
:"A bird/birds will fly." | |||
But the marked indefinite also helps clarify the difference between the collective and the singular concept. Take the phrase that was chosen for the CONLANG t-shirt: "invent a language." As in English, T's '''kalalya''' can refer to a specific language or language in general, language in the abstract. "Invent language" is not the same as "invent A language." So we have ''uol kalalya hadhaf'', which commands one to make a specific language instead of to speak or to create poetry. "Make war," "make love," these are similar phrases in English that do not specify a single war or a single love. | |||
An old form of the indefinite article suffixes -il, -ili, -ilz and -iliz onto nouns (see the "Tower of Babel" passage), but is only used in very formal speech. See more about this in the section on "Verbs." | |||
The Teonaht article precedes the noun, and is often prefixed to it and treated as one word. Hence, the double letters signify a change in stress, as though the unit were a new word. The same is true of the prefixed personal pronoun '''y/ry''' in '''ryttepron''', below: | |||
:'''blar lihhohza; ilhhohza ryttepron.''' | |||
:"loud the wind; the wind I feel." | |||
Likewise, the oblique object articles will often bond with the preposition: '''aril''', "to the"; '''celuõl''', "in a"; '''euil''' "to the" (this last needs the glide "u" to bond '''e''' and '''il'''). | |||
==Syntax== | ==Syntax== | ||