Teonaht: Difference between revisions

This chart on the main pronouns is repeated, for clarity's sake, in the section on verbs. These prefix to verbs except for '''broffyn, brossyn,''' and '''brottwav.''' Inclusive and exclusive "we" makes a distinction between an addressee (or addressees) who is included from or excluded in a group with the speaker. The difference between '''fy''' and '''sy''' is (familiar and formal "you") is not one of number, as in most of the Indo-European languages, but of intimacy and formality, closeness and distance. Teonaht has an indefinite pronoun much like the German ''man'' in '''õn/bõn/mim.''' Also like the Germanic languages, Teonaht has a dual formation. Closeness and distance and one-on-one are important in expressing relationships.

! colspan="3" |'''a. Nominative (Agentive and Experiential)'''

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==== '''Emphasized nominative or subject''' ====

Very often one may want the nominative pronoun to lead the sentence, as in the French ''moi'' of ''Moi, je suis arrivé etc.'' The following paradigm for the emphasized subject is the only form of the pronoun to make a distinction between subject and participant. Ordinarily, this distinction is ignored, the absolute form being used for both cases, but in some instances the agentive (which takes the suffix '''-i''' (pronounced like a ''schwa'') is useful in some contexts, especially when you are formally addressing someone whom you don't wish to offend by putting his pronoun in the "non-volitional" (universally conceived in T. as the weaker case): '''Syryi, Hmeo, krekinvand tyr nuarsy bado''', "You, Sir, had a bad dream too." This is of course a compromise; '''nuarsy bado''' exhibits non-volitional morphology (used of actions like dreaming, or enduring dreams), but at least some agency is returned to the important man in the emphatic pronoun at the beginning. Pronounced, incidentally, exactly like "Syria."

! colspan="3" |b. Emphasized Subject

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==== Accusative and Oblique Cases ====

Teonaht does not make a morphological distinction between accusative and dative/ablative/locative (what I call the "oblique cases"), but prefers to express these other relationships through prepositions. Here's the chart:

! colspan="3" |'''c. Accusative and Oblique Cases.'''

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|'''mimin''', "some"

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! colspan="3" |'''d. Genitive Case.'''

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There is a special (more often poetic) form of possessive pronoun that is used only in infixed positions and mainly with the gerund/infinitive: between the gerundive prefix rem- and its gerund, the prepositional prefix and the conjunct verb, and many adverbial prefixes. No dual forms are used:

! colspan="2" |'''Infixed Pronoun Forms.'''

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