Monday, May 9, 2016

Detail #277: Probably Blocked by Universals

So, apparently in some historical version of Czech, there was a situation where nouns with suppletive plural stems had the dual paradigm switch between the singular and the plural stem for different cases. This inspires the next post, which I am not sure if it's attested or not. Similar things has happened with umlauts in Germanic languages - even Old English, if I recall correctly - but I am unaware of any wholesale suppletion doing this.

Imagine something slightly weirder though. This table gives the stems for the noun forms, not the suffixes that express the case, in a language that would be slightly weirder:

sgpl
case 1AB
case 2AB
case 3AB
.
.
.
.
B
.
.
A
A
case n-1BB
case nBB
Notice that the numbers assigned to the cases is done so that A/B-cases go first, A/A cases go second, B/A cases go third, B/B cases go last. This is done just to make a reasonable way of speaking about these cases without having to name them or anything.
The morphology does clearly indicate as to whether a form is plural or singular, the stem itself is (mostly) not the only thing to determine that. How would a situation like this come about? (I doubt it would!)

Less weird would be something more regular like this:

sgpl
case 1AB
case 2AB
case 3AB
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
case n-1AA
case nAA
So, the most prominent cases have a suppletive root in the plural, which is lost in some oblique cases. Does not seem all that unbelievable? How about having the plural stem intrude on the singular instead?

Should these have the same pattern for all suppletive nouns? Should some permit using both in some forms? 

Finally, an option few conlangers seem to go in for is reducing the number distinctions in several cases - Chukchi only distinguishes singular from plural for inanimates in the absolutive, so it's attested in natural languages. One could imagine suppletive forms appearing in some cases and in the single plural form, although how that situation would have come about seems unclear to me.

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