Ŋʒädär: The absolutive and the unabsolutive cases

The absolutive case in Ŋʒädär has a slight complication: for some nouns, it is in fact marked with an explicit absolutive morpheme in the singular, which is omitted before other case suffixes. For these nouns, the roles usually covered by the absolutive are also somewhat redistributed. However, the naked stem - the unabsolutive - also is a case of sorts, with a few interesting quirks:

• It is used whenever the noun is an attribute of another noun, regardless of whether this is possession or some other type of attributeness.
• It is used when the noun is a complement of copulas and the like.
• It is used when forming compounds, regardless what case the compound normally would take the noun in.

This case only appears as a plural case with two nouns, warga-n (pl. warg-umu), mountain, and märsi-n (pl. märs-ümü) autumn. For most other nouns, the plural forms restore the regular case system.

 
A handful other nouns with this case include:

ük'cö-n house
pulko-n loot
gosto-n leather
xamla-n honey (lacks plural altogether)
seŋe-n peace
sop'a-n salt
mükcä-n a herb not unlike parsely
vusro-n rot, pus

They all end in -n, but not all nouns ending in -n end in an -n absolutive marker.

In some dialects, this case is also used with intransitive subjects, and as object of imperatives. In eastern dialects, it has generally been completely lost.