Sargaĺk Invariant Nominal Suffixes

One of the conlinguistic historical mysteries of Sargaĺk is the origin of the invariant suffixes that some nouns take. Most of them are very short, and in fact Sargaĺk itself carries an example of such a short suffix. Below is a table of Sargaĺk as inflected in different case forms to demonstrate the effect of the invariant suffix (which does have morphophonological variation, however):

nominative: sarga-ĺk
accusative: sarga-ta-ĺk
pegative: sarga-tat-ĺk, sarga-tat-ok
comitative: sarga-mai-ĺk, sarga-mai-jk
locative: sarga-ru-k, sarga-ru-ĺk
ablative: sarga-tsa-ĺk
lative: sarga-rne-ĺk, sarga-rne-jk

A few other examples are: widow, tam-ra, forest, dun-sus, cause, reason, pin-hac, life, sin-sus, time, baus-hac, limp foot, nic-hac, clan, family, sask-ra, breast, vun-tak, breath, kime-hac. Counting all dialectal forms, the full list runs at about 95 entries, and the set of suffixes contain -ĺk, -sur, -hac, -tak, -ra, -ver, -savn, -ark - in order of how common they are. Finally, there's four suffixes that each appear in one word, and they are somewhat peculiar. More on those later.

There does not seem to be any strong connection between these suffixes and morphological gender, nor does there seem to be any strong semantic reason to consider them derivational affixes - although -ra often appears with terminology that is related to clans and families and procreation, and -hac often seems to be some way of turning abstractions or qualities into things - nic-hac seems to be related to nikar, limp, and kime-hac to kimede, life, spirit.

Finally, we get to the exceptional suffixes. The suffixes -apar and -sindas are bisyllabic and have an asyllabic stem to which they are suffixed: ĺ-apar, sand bank,t-sindas, traditions of the village, also attested as k-sindas in a few dialects.

The final exceptionalal suffixes are -kartuk, birch sap harvest and -bersan, border between clans' claims which share the prefix ε-, viz. the empty string. Thus, one could just as well say that for these two nouns, case affixes are exceptionally prefixes. Thus, the case table for kartuk is:

nominative: kartuk
pegative: tatkartuk
comitative: maikartuk
locative: rukartuk
ablative: tsakartuk
lative: ŕnekartuk

Finally the question of historical origin of such a system remains. There are some tantalizing phonological similarities to the secondary cases in Bryatesle, and there are semantic clues that these may be cognates - i.e. the words that use them seem to be such that they could often have occurred with the relevant suffix. Another clue is in some old folk songs, where these suffixes do appear on other words, and these words may have different suffixes in different verses. The origins of -apar, -sindas and -bersan are probably a secondary development after the split from Proto-Dairwueh-Bryatesle. This analysis would require that the Proto-language from which they all originated had a secondary case system in place, and that it was lost in Dairwueh, as well as in Sargaĺk, with these few suffixes being a fossilized remain of it.