Re: Language uploaded, finally...

> I'm a bit curious about your 2p inanimate pronouns.
>
>           Nominative   Object-possessive
> Singular     twi             te
> Plural        na             nu
>
> When do you use them? I can't come up with any
> situations where I would need to address something
> inanimate with "you".
>
> So, how do you define animate and inanimate, and in
> what situations do you use twi, te, na and nu? If
> animals are included in "inanimate" I can understand.
>
> If they are rarely used, it seems such a shame to use
> the beautiful words "na" and "nu" for those rare occasions.
Well, the 2p inanimate (& 3p inanimate) would be used most
often in poetry.  "Oh rock, you are so very solid..." something
like that would us the 2p inanimate.  But "Oh sky, ..." would
use 2p animate since the sky would be seen as animate.  And since
Ihro does not have grammatical, set, permanent gender, it's really
up to the speaker to decide whether he wants to use 2p animate or
inanimate for the antecedent.  Thus, water might be considered
animate but ice inanimate, etc.

Or if you wanted to imply that someone was figuratively dead,
you might speak of them in the 2p inanimate.  To take an example
from the current American political scene:  the people making
jabs at Al Gore -- comparing him to a tree, etc -- would probably
talk about him in the 2p inanimate.

> And a question from the syntax part:
>
> I'm a bit confused regarding this:
>
> "The nominative case is used as the subject and direct
> object of transitive and intransitive sentences. The
> object-possessive is used as the object of prepositions
> and as a modifier to show possession."
>
> Does this mean that:
>
> 1. Subject and object of transitives are marked with NOM
>    and subject of intransitives too. That is, there is
>    no distinction at all between them. (This seems to be
>    the case judging from your example below.) The OBJ-POSS
>    is only used for objects of prepositions and possession.
>
> 2. That NOM is used as subject of intrans. and object of
>    trans. which would make it an ergative language.
>
> Your explanation is a bit fuzzy. Though I guess my first
> guess is the right one.
>
> Fa    anaa    ta   cai    fa    eio       uto eio       eto
> I.NOM man.NOM that he.NOM I.NOM past.verb hit past.verb see
> 'I saw the man who hit me.'
>
> Judging from this, my guess is that my first alternative is
> the correct one. Is it?
Generally, the nominative is used everywhere except as the object
of a preposition or in the possessive.  So, #1 would be correct.
The wording is a little awkward, isn't it...

> If this is it, you could call the OBJ-POSS case something
> like "prepositional-possessive". Including the word "objective"
> makes one think it marks objects of transitives. At leaste
> that's what I thought.
Yeah, I guess that would be better.  I'll have to go change that.

> It is a bit unusual to have a marker for all NPs in subject
> and object position when there is no distinction between them,
> though not unlikely I guess.
The -a nominative case ending is a holdover from Proto-Ihric which
distinguished between an ergative case and an absolute (absolutive?)
case.  Over the years the inflections for erg & for abs merged into
the -a for nominative, and given a few more decades/centuries the
-a for nominative will probably merge with the -a stem vowel for
nouns.


Andy

http://home.earthlink.net/~gllaurents/