Thursday, November 26, 2015

Dairwueh: A Restriction on Personal Pronouns

A number of prepositions in Dairwueh cannot take a personal pronoun as an object, but have no restriction on nouns. Here is the full list of prepositions with this restriction. Almost all nouns here are presented in their accusative form, due to the prevalence of prepositions taking the accusative.
əre NOUN.ACC: on account of noun, due to noun, on behalf of noun, for the sake of noun.
 With a personal pronoun this requires a slight periphrasis:
əre vevna tarna
prep my.acc.masc issue*.acc.masc
 * or thing, or errand or (court) case, debt, credit.
The nouns that can be use differ a bit depending on the semantics of the situation, e.g.
sgutavne əre vevna tarna: do not stop on my account
sgutavne əre uvivna greivna: do not stop by my orders (essentially indicating that I never gave such orders - notice that 'order' is always in the plural)
sgutavne əre veve pira: do not stop for my pleasure (indicating that I would not be pleased by such cessation)
 The preposition ves, viz. around, across, along, near to, before takes sabtar (steps), murna (place), nimina (face). For this particular preposition, sabtar is mainly used when the referent of the pronoun is or was moving during the time span for which he also was a location. Murna implies a more stationary situation, and nimina implies rather restricted location - not so much around as near to, before.

Aub takes nimina (face) or ridinu (soul).

I (to, at), ma (at, in on), lo (of, from) can take baren (house.dat), variŋa (fortunes.dat), murar (place.dat), murivit (places.dat). Mesrit (walk(noun).dat) only occurs with i and lo.

Nist (against, after, in opposition to, in response to) takes salmat (voice.instr), krunŋa (grip.instr), streiŋa (attack, strike, lashing out), mlirar (from nominative root mri-, words), vurnat (neck). The different meanings conveyed by the different nouns should be somewhat clear - nist ... vurnat fairly clearly parses as a physical location, nist salmat/krunŋa/streiŋa/mlirar all permit a variety of responses or oppositions to something depending on context.

No comments:

Post a Comment