Friday, February 27, 2015

The Former Noun Morphology of Tatediem

Back when I first came up with the name and the concept of Tatediem, I wanted to have cases in it. In fact, my first post about it on this blog assumes it has the old case system that I originally envisaged for it; however, I never spelled it out in detail, and I figure doing so might be a good idea, because it's not entirely half bad.
absergdatinstrpart
singular
def-te-k:ı-k:ı-istik:-istik:
indef-∅-∅
-isti-isti
dual
def-ǎt-dəki-dnǎ-dak-dnǎ
plural
def-aftin-ambun-ambun-ǎmbust-ǎmbust
indef-abui
-ǎbuist
mass
indef-o/-e-o/-e-osti/-esti-ǎbuist-o/-e
There are some things I'd do differently, now ten years later. I might rather have conflated ergative and instrumental in part of the system, than ergative and dative. However, I might also have omitted mass as a 'number', and rather described mass nouns as having their own declension. The omission of indefinite dative makes some kind of sense - indefinite beneficients would call for a slight periphrasis. I think it's fairly likely that the indefinite plural would conflate absolutive and ergative if the indefinite singular does so - in fact, I find it more likely that the plural would do so than that the singular would.

Still, I like this system a lot even though it dropped out of Tatediem as it grew more noun-class-centered and less reliant on case. Might revive it sometime.

In many ways, playing around with a less case-centered language is pretty interesting.

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