TolsianR: Difference between revisions

Nouns have definiteness, gender, number, and case. The case system is actually very reduced, with only three cases : nominative, accusative, and genitive. Definiteness is marked by definite and indefinite articles which agree in gender and number with the nouns. There are two numbers, singular and plural. Finally, the gender system is fairly complicated, as it consists of two dimensions interacting : masculine vs feminine on the one hand and animate vs inanimate on the other. However, different parts of speech agree with these two gender systems : articles and adjectives will take masculine or feminine markings, while verbs are conjugated differently depending upon whether the nouns is animate or inanimate. Nouns themselves are marked for gender, and for animatedness when in the accusative or dative case. Also, when an adjective qualifies several nouns which are not all masculine or feminine, they take a neutral plural suffix ; but beyond those special cases, neutral has disappeared from TolsianR.

On many nouns ending in a vowel, gender is identifiable as -''e'' and -''o'' are masculine markers, while -''a'' is a feminine marker. But nouns ending with a consonant don't provide such cues. Animatedness is marked in the accusative case as the prefix will be ''ke''- (or ''k''- before a vowel) in the case of an inanimate noun, and ''dake''- (or ''dak''- before a vowel) in the case of an animate noun ; and in the genitive case, with a suffix ''-o'' for inanimate nouns (transformed into /w/ after a vowel) and ''-do'' for animate nouns (see section on cases for more details). Also, "natural" gender is usually reflected in the grammatical gender (nous which refer to male beings usually are masculine, and vice-versa) ; and "natural" animatedness is usually reflected in grammatical animatedness as well : people, animals and, it is worth noticing, plants, are usually animate, while objects, concepts etc are usually inanimate.

Nominative is unmarked, and corresponds to the functions of subject, attribute of the subject, but also other functions which are not covered by accusative and dative cases. Accusative corresponds to the function of direct object of a verb and is marked with a prefix which is different depending on the animatedness status of the noun : the prefix will be ''ke''- (or ''k''- before a vowel) in the case of an inanimate noun, and ''dake''- (or ''dak''- before a vowel) in the case of an animate noun. Genitive corresponds to the "possessor" of something and is marked with a suffix ''-o'' for inanimate nouns (transformed into /w/ after a vowel) and ''-do'' for animate nouns, although if the stem ends in a consonant diverse morphophonological changes take place depending on that consonant : aspirated plosives lose their aspiration ; voiceless obstruents become voiced ; the palatal nasal gets partially assimilated and turns into ''n'' ; the voiced velar fricative gets partially assimilated and turns into the plosive ''g'' (its distribution being limited to V_V contexts) ; prenasalised occlusives get totally nasalised (their distribution being limited to _V contexts) ; the bilabial fricative becomes a labio-velar approximan [w] ; and there's gemination with the dental occlusives : [dd]. Those changes are usually not reflected in the orthography.