Ćwarmin: Some Marginal Cases

I previously mentioned that Ćwarmin has a number of marginal cases. Some case forms fill gaps in the regular case system for a few nouns, others are limited to just a few nouns altogether. Here are three such marginal cases:

1. Postpositional Case

This case exists for:

• Many nouns that refer to locations that designate parts of a town or village or buildings in general (tretke - town, city, badku - village, wundarś - marketplace, open square, winćə - city gates, rumb - temple, wicxə - house, wruŋna - castle, sirni - temporary building
• agricultural locations (acres - karaž, granaries - perəc, barns - birsi, fallow land - saŋmoru, pasture land - grundu)
• waterways (iməl, river; udug lake; žewə a sound or a narrow maritime passage in general, rəige bay, cove)
• the noun 'ćan', table.

Its suffixes are: singular: -(i)ši|-(u)šu, plural: -(i)žwi|-(u)žwu, paucal: -(i)žmi|-(u)žmu

Morphologically, there's a tendence for the forms to be slightly irregular:

ćan - canšu - ćažwu - ćažmu

winćə - winši - wižwi - wižmi 

wicxe - wiči - witwi -  wimi

karaž - karažžu - karažwu - karažmu

iməl - imiši - imižwi - imižmi

grundu - grundu - gružwu - gružmu

birsi - birsi - biržwi - biržmi

tretke - treči - trežwi - trežmi 

udug - urušu - uružwu - uružmu

It is used with most postpositions.

2. By Order|Permission Of
Titles of authority, family members. There's also the word 'har' ("mr", "mrs", "ms") which serves to combine with person names and can carry this morpheme.

singular indefinite: -sada|-sədə plural indefinite: -samu|-səmi

singular definite: -sandan|-sənden plural definite: -samman|-səmmin

Thus, we get forms like 

tergisədə = by order|authority of a clergyman

jehisəmmin = by (long-standing) obligation to or grant by the royal crown

jehisənden = by order or obligation from the ruling king

Even though notionally definite, har takes the indefinite forms when combined with a name

Geres hasada - by order of (mister) Geres

tretkitite hasamman = by permission|order from the town's men

3.  'Along'
The postposition 'along' - šimšim - has merged with a few nouns.

iməl, river: singular: imitčimš plural: imiwšimš

runa,  road: singular runšumš , plural: runawšumš

wundarś, marketplace: wundruśšumš (more generally 'in the market'), no plural

grundu, pasture - grunšumš:  following a herd on a foraging trip

Ćwarmin: The Verb

The Ćwarmin verb behaves fairly straightforwardly for an agglutinating language: it has a stem, to which suffixes and prefixes are added. Some morphophonological things do occur, though.

A few verbs:

to eat - sewkən to drink - itrin  to grip - brewən to reside, to live somewhere, to stay somewhere - twam to walk - rakam to read - xaukam to see - saulto talk - ragamto breathe - taucon

 The form given above is the infinitive. It is not quite similar to the English infinitive, in that it mostly serves as a gerund. However, for most verbs it is fairly close to the verb stem and thus it is a good place to start. -an, -in, -am, -en, -jul, -jig all are suffixes that carry some grammatical information, and some verbs can take several different ones when forming infinitives:

to think - hacan, hacam, hajul

Some slight change in meaning may occur, i.e. hacan signifies thinking about things, hacam tends to pertain to beliefs and convictions, and hajul denotes planning and such. Not all infinitives showcase such a variety of meaning, and the meanings imparted by the different suffixes seem somewhat inconsistent - there is but almost a pattern there.

Non-past (a.k.a. present)

The non-past is formed by removing the infinitive marker and applying the following suffixes:

	singular	plural	paucal
1st	-er|-ar	-e|-o	-ei|-ou
2nd	-əc|-ac	-in|-un	-ie|-wu
3rd	-i|-u	-iy|-uw	-irə|-ura

The paucal has other uses than paucal number. -er, -iy, -in, -id, -iwe, -iru all cause some changes:  . -i, -in, -irre, -iwe, -iru cause changes along these lines:

sewkən  → sewcer, sewkə, sewkei, sewkəc, sewćin, sewćie, sewći, sewćiy, sewćirə

ragam   → raźar, rawo, rawwu, ragac, ragun, rawwu, ragu, raguv (rav), ragura (ragra)

taucon  →  taućar, tauco, taucou, taucac, taućun, taućuu, tauću, taućuv, taućura

-l- sometimes also turns into ź or w

saul   → saular, sauwo, sauwwou, saulac, sauźun, sauwwu, sauwu, sauwuv, saura

Immediate past

The immediate past is formed from the infinitive by use of the subject complement case. I.e. sewkən → sewkəmce, itrəmce, brewəmce. Further forming a personally inflected verb form for this is done for the singular and plural first and second persons, omitting the final e, to obtain sewkəmcer, sewkəmco, sewkəmcəc, sewkəmćin, but these forms are optional.

The object complement case is used in a slightly similar way for causative constructions.

Non-immediate past

The non-immediate past is formed by the suffixes -i(n)-| -u(n)-, sometimes omitting the final consonant of the stem: sewkir, sewkine, sewkinei, sewkinəc, sewkini, sewkini, sewkin, sewkinð, sewkinrə.

The use of the tenses will be described in more detail once the discourse particles are described, in combination with how they interact with case and tense. Omitting the person inflections reduces the certainty. This is utilized, although not mandatorily so, to mark inferred knowledge or knowledge by hearsay.

Passive voices

The regular passive promotes an object to subject status and marking. The agent can be present in the general ablative case. For those verbs that permit the regular passive, person congruence is lost. The suffix is replaced by -aśp. The indirect object being promoted to subject by a different passive is permitted for all verbs, and is formed by replacing the person marker with -əźbel|-ažbul. The past passives are more complicated and they use various weird constructions.

Participles

Combinations of the basic cases and the infinitive serves a lot of the participle-like needs of Ćwarmin. However, a large number of adjectival derived forms that may reasonably be called participles exist. Their formation and use is not described here, and is subject to great lexical variation. Ćwarmin resides on the edge of a sprachbund where this is one of the central languages. The preponderance of pseudo-participles is not the only shared trait, but their use is much more limited to adjective-like constructions in Ćwarmin.

Short Sketch #5: Definiteness marking and definiteness types

Definiteness is a thing some languages do not grammaticalize to the extent English does, and on the other hand, some languages have it even more grammaticalized - see, e.g. how it influences both adjective and noun inflection in Swedish, how it affects verbs in Hungarian, and so on.

Let us try out a slightly more complex thing. Some languages have three levels of definiteness, e.g. known to listener, known to speaker, and indefinite. 

Example, based on sample sentences from some pidgin, I don't recall the source where I saw these:

1. I am looking for a car → any car will do.
2. I am looking for one car → there is a specific car, but the listener is not expected to know which.
3. I am looking for the car → the listener too knows which car you are looking for.

(Also notice how "this" is acquiring a similar usage in colloquial English, c.f. any google result for "so this girl|dude|chick|guy|... walks|says|..." This is clearly not a deictic use of this, but rather a pragmatic use where it marks 'there is a specific girl that did it, but you probably don't know who she is, but I might refer to her in the future so she's significant enough for the narrative.)

Now, it seems rather natural to me that different constituents of a sentence will be differently likely to be marked for different types of definiteness, and this could easily lead to different kinds of arguments having very different marking strategies as well as a different number of distinctions.

An obvious example are languages where the object can be marked for definiteness by differential object marking, but other constituents have nothing of the sort. Usually, there is good likelihood that the subject is definite - even more so for the topic, but as topics and subjects often coincide, well, there you go.

A draft of this kind of a system would be something like:

• definite non-subject (2 or 3) topics trigger extra auxiliary verb that only carries congruence and has no semantic content

• definite subjects (2 or 3) trigger congruence in the verb (alternatively, see short sketch #1 for another strategy that could be used here)

• definite objects (3) trigger congruence in the verb and accusative case
• definite objects (2) trigger accusative case
• indefinite objects (1) take neither

• other definite (3) non-topic nouns trigger congruence on adpositions
• other non-topic nouns (that is, (2 or 1) functioning by virtue of case marking as an argument of the verb) do not trigger any congruence strategies
• different definiteness correlates with different case systems, something along these lines:
• 3:     nom - acc - dat - lat - abl - part - gen - instr
• 2:     nom - acc - dat        - abl          - gen
• 1:     nom                  - lat -         abl
• All topics, however, no matter definiteness, use the full (3) case system
• The lative for indefinitive nouns is identical in form to the dative for definite (2/3) nouns.

Other parameters could affect different systems: maybe animates have a different number of levels of definiteness from inanimates or whatever, ... however, something along these lines seems fairly intricate and interesting imho.

Detail #19: Instrumentals and Possessives

Many languages express X has Y somewhat along the lines of With X is Y. What case or adposition appears with X is language-specific, and can be locative or comitative or anything. Both Finnish and Russian use (mainly) locative expressions.

Some languages mark the object as some kind of oblique, though. English has a phrase that is somewhat similar to it:

She is with child.

Now, that is a rather special case, but illustrates the kind of marking I am discussing here. wals.info informs that this type of construction actually appears. Personally, I find some kind of instrumental marking to be very suitable for this (except maybe in certain specific types of phrases or under some circumstances - restricting this to non-human objects seems rather reasonable, for one, or some similar cultural restriction).

is.1sg  cup.instr - "I have a/the cup"

is.3pl dogs.instr = "they have dogs"

Furthermore, I find it reasonable that the instrumental case could be the case marking for any possessed noun -  the instrumental case doubling as head marking in possessive constructions. Why instrumental? Well, there seems to be a vague correlation between using a thing as a tool and owning it.

The idea by which it becomes evident that I am a one-trick pony is this: reflexive possession of objects marked by the noun object being marked by the instrumental case.

He drive.past.3sg car.instr = he drove his own car

He drive.past.3sg car.acc = he drove a/the car 

Alternatively, the distinction could work like this:

He drive.past.3sg his car.instr = he drove his own car

EDIT: reading through the earlier posts, seems this is fairly close to another post in content. Meh. It is an ok rephrasing that may be easier to understand for people not that familiar with ergativity and such. Well, I will leave it behind and try to avoid similar embarrassment in the future.

He drive.past.3sg his car.acc = he drove his (someone else's) car