Ŋʒädär: The absolutive and the unabsolutive cases

The absolutive case in Ŋʒädär has a slight complication: for some nouns, it is in fact marked with an explicit absolutive morpheme in the singular, which is omitted before other case suffixes. For these nouns, the roles usually covered by the absolutive are also somewhat redistributed. However, the naked stem - the unabsolutive - also is a case of sorts, with a few interesting quirks:

• It is used whenever the noun is an attribute of another noun, regardless of whether this is possession or some other type of attributeness.
• It is used when the noun is a complement of copulas and the like.
• It is used when forming compounds, regardless what case the compound normally would take the noun in.

This case only appears as a plural case with two nouns, warga-n (pl. warg-umu), mountain, and märsi-n (pl. märs-ümü) autumn. For most other nouns, the plural forms restore the regular case system.

 
A handful other nouns with this case include:

ük'cö-n house
pulko-n loot
gosto-n leather
xamla-n honey (lacks plural altogether)
seŋe-n peace
sop'a-n salt
mükcä-n a herb not unlike parsely
vusro-n rot, pus

They all end in -n, but not all nouns ending in -n end in an -n absolutive marker.

In some dialects, this case is also used with intransitive subjects, and as object of imperatives. In eastern dialects, it has generally been completely lost.

Detail #296: A Restriction on Possession

In Proto-Uralic (and even possibly Proto-Finnic), possessive suffixes could not be applied to subjects. This leaves an interesting morphological consequence in modern Finnish - subjects with possessive suffixes on them are morphologically indistinguishable from objects with possessive suffixes on them, even when there's significant differences in the subject and object forms:

season:
nominative: kausi
accusative: kauden
possessed nom-acc:

1sg: kauteni
2sg: kautesi
3sg/pl: kaudensa, kauteaan
1pl: kaudemme
2pl: kaudenne

We could of course imagine a similar thing with any type of possession - note that Uralic probably permitted using nouns and pronouns in the genitive as possessors of subjects. Semantically, though, it's obvious that subjects can be possessed - they might just maybe be slightly less likely to be so than objects and such, or there might not even be any statistical difference there.

Now, we still need a method for that, and a few options appear:

• some kind of oblique argument of the verb
• some 'other type' of attribute (analogous, say, to the English 'of'-genitive or somesuch)
• not actually permitting possessed subjects, instead demoting possessed subjects to some kind of oblique position, or comparable position to the causee of a causative (the whole possessive construction with subjects could very well be perfectly analogous to causatives)

Now, we can start imagining interesting other differences: in English, for instance, "-'s" covers the same syntactical spot as "the" and other determiners. We could imagine that subjects generally either have a much more restricted set of permitted things in that position, or even none at all; maybe subjects in this language only can be subjects if they're definite, and other agents that are closely related to the verb must be in some kind of oblique position, or maybe there must be some kind of pseudo-definite dummy noun with the actual agent as an attribute of some kind.

Further, one could of course have determiners for subjects behave oddly - maybe they migrate to a position similar to that of an auxiliary, so:

dogs all_(verbal morpho) bark
dogs some_(verbal morpho) like playing fetch

But

I saw some cats

Detail #295: Agreement with the Subject in Case Marking

This post uses the distinction between argument and adjunct without really ever providing any specific defition. I Should probably sometime actually 

Imagine a language where the case markers of direct arguments of the verb show some kind of agreement with the gender and number of the subject. We come up with a set of object markers that - maybe with some syncretism - thus marks mostly the agreement features of the subject, but to some extent also marks some agreement features of the object.

For the other cases, for arguments of the verb the congruence marker only codes the gender-number of the subject, and there's a separate morpheme marking the number of the argument. This number marker marks the gender of the noun itself, not that of the subject.

For adjuncts of the finite verb and for both the arguments and adjuncts of infinitives, the noun takes its own gender's case marker.

To illustrate such a system, I guess a three-gender system is suitable. Let's assume a very IE one, i.e. with three genders, one masculine, one feminine and one neuter.

In the system I came up with , the masculine and feminine objects take their own gender's accusative marker as object marker when the subject is neuter. When the subject is of the same gender as the object, they take their own gender's default morpheme - the one used for adjuncts and infinitive objects.

However, when a masculine subject and feminine object or vice versa occur, a special set of morphemes are used. Slightly more complicated in the singular than the plural, however, with more syncretism in the plural.

Finally, for the other cases as arguments, a masculine singular subject triggers masculine singular case markers, a feminine plural subject triggers feminine plural case markers, etc. If the argument and the subject are of the same gender-number marking, the argument's own number-morphology is lost.

Sargaĺk Words: Family Terminology

xane - mother
ərges - father
simi - oldest son
simižar - oldest living son, if the oldest one has passed away
tame - any other son
siminša - the full set of sons (masc)
tamu - daughter
tamunša - the full set of daughters (masc)
lisna - baby, infant
žəgon - kid (from around three up to about thirteen years)

kəsimos - older brother, uncle
kətamos - any other brother
kətamsu - any sister or aunt

boxan - grandmother
borges - grandfather
olinu - ancestors (m, sg.)

When speaking of grandparents, whether they're maternal or paternal such can be specified, oddly enough, by just inserting 'mother' or 'father' in the pegative-genitive:

xantat borgen : mother's father (not 'mother's grandfather')
ərgesta boxan : father's mother (not 'father's grandmother')

minu - wife
aŋul - husband

ŋolmi - manners, with regards to family.

ecdə - relatively close family (but wider than nuclear family)
miv - village, but also relatives
ecdo - house and privileges (m)
ecdak - inheritance

Adjectival Congruence in Sargaĺk

In Sargaĺk, there is a very limited case congruence: an NP-initial adjective or determiner takes a case-specific congruence marker. However, the congruence is not entirely trivial:

• The familiar comitative does not have congruence morphology of its own, but uses regular comitative morphology on adjectives.
• Both masculine and feminine singular nominatives have a zero congruence marker on adjectives. Demonstratives distinguish the two, however, as do a few other quantifiers and determiners.
• The ablative's adjectival congruence marker is identical to the regular oblique marker in the singular.
• For non-nominative NPs, any intervening adjective takes an oblique, gender-specific morpheme.

The cause for this system seems to be providing cues as early as possible for parsing. 

Now it's time for some example phrases:

p'ĺxo : pig, swine (m)
kor p'ĺxo : big swine
žaŋ-a p'ĺxo : that swine

kor-ta p'əlx-ta : big swine (pegative)
žaŋ-ta (kor-ə) p'əlxta : that big swine
goŋ-ta (kor-ə) p'əlxta : dumb (big) swine (pegative)
kor-sa p'ĺx-a : dumb swines
goŋ-sa kor-eg p'ĺx-a : dumb swines (pegative)
goŋ-eg p'əlx-tsa : from the dumb swine
kor-eg goŋ-eg p'əlx-tsa: from the big dumb swine
goŋ-əssa p'ĺx-əssa : from the dumb swines


č'onku : bottle
kor č'onku : big bottle
kor-air č'onk-air : big bottles
kor-sta č'onk-sta : big bottles (peg)
k'ilp č'onku : full bottle
k'il-tat č'on-tat : full bottle (pegative)
žaŋ-u k'ilp č'onku : this full bottle
žaŋ-tat k'ilp-i č'on-tat : this full bottle (pegative)
žaŋ-rut k'ilp-i č'onk-rut : in this full bottle
ža-rne k'ilp-i č'onk-ərne : into this full bottle
žaŋ-el k'ilp-el č'on-əssa : from these full bottles

As can be seen, the oblique masculine marker is -ə, the oblique feminine is -i. In the plural, they are -eg (masc) and -el (fem).

For complements of verbs, the oblique markers are used if the state expressed is fairly constant, i.e. 'he is tall' or the like, whereas if it is more temporary, no congruence marker is used.

Case in Answers in my Conlangs

Single-noun answers to questions sometimes in some languages do not necessarily preserve case. If we think of English prepositions as case markers, the two possibilities can be seen below:

Case Preserving:
Q: To where are you going?
A: To Närpes.

Non-case Preserving:
Q: With what are you going to build it?
A: Blood, sweat, tears, nails, wood and a hammer.

My conlangs have slightly differing approaches to responses. Ŋʒädär permits case preservation, but also permits some non-preservation - oblique cases that are not preserved are replaced by the locative, whereas dative, genitive-comitative and complement cases are replaced by the absolutive.

Q: vär xogon t'e-k bürü-ŋö-z
Q: you house what-instr build-fut*-direct
with what do you intend to build a house?
A1: altaŋ-rak
A2: altaŋ-ŋa
A: (with|at) brick

* the meaning of -ŋö- varies with the verb root and with surrounding morphemes.

Ćwarmin requires case preservation, except with direct objects and quirky case subjects: for all of these, an answer in the nominative is permitted.

Q: u kar-ar?
Q: (s)he what-from?where is he from?

A: kirəc-ər
A: from far away

Q: bec kar-ac źarkus-amca
Q: you who-acc meet-recent_past
who did you meet?
A1: Garan
A2: Garan-uc
Garan-(acc)

Sargaĺk preserves case except the pegative, which is replaced by the nominative in short answers. 

Dairwueh preserves case except in situations involving quirky case, where the nominative or the accusative can appear instead, depending on whether the noun asked for is subject or object. One minor exception is that nominative interrogative pronouns with transitive verbs can take genitive nouns as answers, if the noun given for the answer is definite.

Finally, Bryatesle does not preserve secondary case ever in short answers. Subjects and objects can preserve case, but may also be marked by nominative (regardless whether it's subject or object, or even quirky case subject or object that is being asked for). The two other cases can be preserved, or be given in the answer in the accusative case.

Detail #294: An Unusual Way of Marking Reflexives

A thing that could be somewhat interesting would be to form reflexive objects by using a preposition and a pronoun. In the example sentences, I'll use eg as that preposition:

I washed eg me
I washed myself

However, this could also provide a way of doing reflexive possession:

he sold eg car
he sold his (own) car

he sold his car
he sold another third person's car

This would qualify as a preposition on syntactical grounds - whatever syntactical differences you find in the language between objects and prepositional phrases, you'd need to have this line up with the prepositional phrases: this might include omitting object marking on the verb, not permitting certain transformations, requiring the noun to be in some specific case.

We could also restrict this from combining with other prepositions, thus making 'by him', 'from him', etc not distinguish reflexive and other third person.

If the language permits reflexives in subject position (which some languages do in positions such as 'he₁ doesn't know that he₁'s won the lottery', this could be made interesting by requiring a verb voice that lacks syntactical subject altogether, and for which the 'eg [Noun]' phrase is the demoted subject.