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Nidâri: Difference between revisions
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===Nouns=== | ===Nouns=== | ||
Nouns inflect for gender, number and case. The original Proto-Duaric gender system consisted of at least eight noun classes, perhaps even up to eleven<sup>‡</sup>, descended from an earlier system that distinguished animacy through noun classifiers. Of | Nouns inflect for gender, number and case. The original Proto-Duaric gender system consisted of at least eight noun classes, perhaps even up to eleven<sup>‡</sup>, descended from an earlier system that distinguished animacy through noun classifiers. Of their complex noun class system, Nidâri preserved four of them. | ||
Animacy still has some correlation amongst the surviving noun classes, with animacy tending to decrease from left to right across the noun classes. However, the animacy distinctions have blurred, with some of the nouns in the protolanguage being reassigned to another class due to syncretism, as can be seen in the Class IV nouns, where the singular nominative and genitive are wildly irregular, whereas the plural nominative and genitive are, with a few exceptions, quite regular. | Animacy still has some correlation amongst the surviving noun classes, with animacy tending to decrease from left to right across the noun classes. However, the animacy distinctions have blurred, with some of the nouns in the protolanguage being reassigned to another class due to syncretism, as can be seen in the Class IV nouns, where the singular nominative and genitive are wildly irregular, whereas the plural nominative and genitive are, with a few exceptions, quite regular. | ||