Dairwueh: Semi-genitive Adjectives

In Dairwueh, there is a set of adjectives whose congruence pattern is slightly off. Their behavior differs in one particular spot: for nominative nouns, their marking is masculine genitive. (The one exception is the word sabrin, "unusual, foreign, strange" which is in the feminine plural genitive with nominative nouns).

Not only do these behave slightly oddly within noun phrases (and fail to have comparative marking altogether), they also behave weirdly with copulas.

The main examples that are widespread through Dairwueh dialects include

koŋsat: last, final, complete
rəmgat: tired
lodat: correct, right, entitled
satpat: sturdy, firm
nestat: ancient
bartat: partial, incomplete, one among many, a few among many

Notice that the -at suffix in all of these is the genitive masculine morpheme, so the roots will consist of the adjective without that suffix.  Less widely distributed examples that are found in the capital area prestige dialect are

sxundat: wafer-thin
ropsat: bloody (from 'rapəs', blood, from *rrabx, bleed)
julkat: lazy
silgat: rank, rancid
xugat: brave
xsəlrat: avid, skilled, obsessed
tagrat: content
nalkat: sad
rusnat: smooth

With the copula, this type of adjective is marked by the preposition 'lo', when marking having that quality, and by the preposition 'əre' when marking acquiring that quality, and no congruence marking with regards to gender or number appears. The adjective then is in the masculine instrumental (-ŋa) with 'lo', and masculine accusative (-na) with 'əre'.

Demonstrative-quality adjectives in Dairwueh

By adding certain suffixes to adjectives or verbs in Dairwueh, they acquire a quality-wise demonstrative meaning.


Doxs embəl šildrot laxerıŋlo
Need I.dat spear.acc long-thus.acc
I need a spear this long (usually accompanied by visual cues)

Purıŋla!
Kneel! (like I do) - often, when used with imperatives, either the person uttering the imperative will demonstrate how to, or the action is prompted by culturally significant reasons - such as an emperor or other important person arriving or participation in religious rituals.

It can also have an adverbial function:

Surdunıŋla, kwarša eme vepnətıŋla
burden(v).thus, fight-1sgpast I weak.thus
thus burdened, I fought as weakly as I did/comparably weakly (per some external standard)

It can also have a somewhat intensifying function, although most often preceded by or followed by some kind of thing by which to measure the degree of the quality:

Erbaŋ Kalt krasn.ıŋla - agre.šne əkn ke əkn
is.3sgpres Kalt stupid.thus - understand.not one and one (~one plus one)

Šartəriŋŋla!
damn.3sgpast-thus
"fuck it". After the third person past tense suffix -iŋ, the -ı- part of the -ıŋla suffix tends to be omitted.

Detail #49: Case system detail / Vocatives

Imagine a language with vocatives and with case congruence on adjectives. Further imagine the language has some kind of intensive or superlative adjective formation, either of indo-european style or just some kind of more general intensifying meaning.

Now, it would be rather natural that vocatives never use non-intensive/non-superlative adjectives; the actual meaning-change involved would be somewhat negated by the presence of the vocative, though, as even a 'good' friend would be called 'best friend!' in such a construction, and everyone was aware of the grammatical rule there. Thus, lexical items would have to be used instead to distinguish intensities instead of morphological devices.

One could even imagine a language where there are no explicit vocative markers, except the restriction on non-superlatives in vocative NPs. One could of course have some (morphologically) superlative/intensive dummy adjective for this role too, if no other adjective is present?