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.