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.

	abs	erg	dat	instr	part
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	-ǎ	-abui		-ǎbuist	-ǎ
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.

Dairwueh: A Short Description of the Case System and its Use

Dairwueh has a case system along these lines:

nominative | accusative | dative | genitive | locative-instrumental

The nominative serves a rather restricted set of uses - subjects, nominal and adjectival complements, arguments of prepositions that are semantically similar to complements of copulas, vocative uses, sometimes also topics that have semantic roles that are rather far from anything that could be the subject.

The accusative serves as direct objects, object of a few adjectives and prepositions, subjects of the verbs 'naxmal' (expect), 'rəntigi' (withstand), and 'drumal' ('repeat'), and complements of objects.

The genitive serves as possessors, definite transitive subjects, certain objects (of the verbs 'surdəl' 'to burden with, to be burdened with', 'gəš' 'to disapprove', 'əseaŋl', 'to marry'), pre-prepositional nouns and the objects of several prepositions.

For this purpose, a pre-prepositional noun is a noun that kind of forms its own hanging utterance in a sentence in combination with a prepositional phrase:

Kadŋi ori i sembern, tauhat ma derilŋa

sit-3sgI he at table.dat, beer.gen in glass.loc-instr

Often, pre-prepositionals are body parts, clothing articles or tools: coat on him, hat on head,  knife in hand, hand on oar, foot in air. One adposition only ever appears with both preprepositionals and a regular complement - vas - which basically works a bit like 'being', the complement always basically being a descriptor of the preprepositional. If the subject is a pronoun or otherwise markedly definite the preprepositional is assumed - especially if a concrete noun - to be the possession of the subject or otherwise under it control.

The dative serves as indirect object, object of several prepositions, subject of several verbs, object of several verbs, possessors of certain nouns (generally highly animate ones), direct object of verbs that have an intensifying dummy object.

An intensifying dummy object is a semantically bleached object whose only function is to intensify the verb. These often are grammaticalized expletives:

Šamgito si xaugna mešdar

rule she INTENSE.acc husband.dat - she rules her husband strongly, xaugna originally being the name of a really minor demon in Dairwueh myths.

The locative-instrumental serves to mark place and instrument, but also manner with abstract nouns. It appears with some prepositions and as object of a few verbs. In many dialects it also marks possessums, overruling most of the case rules given above - in most dialects that have this, there's still the exception that subjects still tend to be nominative or genitive when possessums.

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.