Wednesday, October 28, 2015

Dairwueh and Bryatesle Indefinite Pronouns

The Bryatesle indefinite pronouns, according to my old grammar for Bryatesle, followed the pattern given below:


(7) DN
(1) SK(2) SU(3) I/NS(4) QU(6) IN         A
(5) COND(8) COMP  A 

(9) FC
lermud, lertën, lerbat/lervind, lerden/lertar. White fields where never assigned a pronoun!
I like the ler- series of indefinites, especially as it is closely related to the relative pronouns of Bryatesle but not to the interrogative ones (which creates a nice unusual situation, typologically - although it probably could be explained by recourse to historical developments). Lerden and lertar differ by whether the free choice is 'free choice among some options' or 'free choice with infinite options'. Although I like this series, I am inclined to reject it now in favour of this somewhat simpler and improved series:

(7) DN
(1) SK(2) SU () (3) I/NS () (4) QU (6) IN
(5) COND(8) COMP

(9) FC
bale, dury, uka
An extra detail is that dury sometimes stretches in to I/NS, sometimes even as far as (2) SU, but I couldn't be arsed to make a gradient in the background of (3). Another extra detail is that mass nouns tend to take the definite secondary case marking when determined by an indefinite pronoun.

In Bryatesle, all of these can be used both independently and as determiners. They seldom take secondary cases, but when they do so they tend not to mark their primary case at all. Their inflectional stems are bal-, dir-, uk-/mys- (mys- appearing for non-nominative cases in a few dialects).


Dairwueh is somewhat similar:

(7) DN
(1) SK(2) SU(3) I/NS(4) QU(6) IN
(5) COND(8) COMP

(9) FC
vael-, nur-, mik-
Here, the blue field sometimes spills over into (6) IN, but more often, red spills into (2) SU, and at times it may reach (3) I/NS. Unlike Bryatesle, these cannot be used independently, and need some extra morpheme in order to be able to stand independently. In most dialects, this is the interrogative pronoun del, which is prefixed to the pronoun: delvael, delnur, delmik.

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