Tarquesta Quenya case system is possible!

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k1234567890y
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Tarquesta Quenya case system is possible!

Post by k1234567890y »

Tolkien has stated that Tarquesta Quenya has many cases while it does not distinct nominative and accusative forms anymore like Old Quenya and Parmaquesta Quenya, that is, Tarquesta Quenya has a neutral alignment in nouns while it has many nominal cases.

Originally I doubted that if it could happen in natural languages, as the distinction between agents and direct objects usually persist longer than some oblique cases, but later I saw the info about Ket language(the last surviving member of Yeniseian languages) in WALS, which states that Ket has a neutral alignment in nouns while it has many nominal cases.(see http://wals.info/languoid/lect/wals_code_ket for relevant information)

On Thursday I found and borrowed "A Descriptive Grammar of Ket" by Stefan Georg from a library, and I confirmed the correctness of the data of WALS about the alignment and nominal case system of Ket.

"A Descriptive Grammar of Ket" states that "In sentences with two actants(seems that he means "arguments" here), A and O, A will always precede O, thus disambiguating these fundamental semantic roles by means of word order alone"(page 105).

The declension table of Ket nouns is shown below, the table is taken from page 103 of "A Descriptive Grammar of Ket":

Singular:

Masculine:

Nominative: -Ø
Genitive: -da
Dative: -daŋa
Benefactive: -data
Ablative: -daŋal
Adessive: -daŋta
Prosecutive: -bes
Instrumental: -as
Abessive: -an

Feminine/Neuter:

Nominative: -Ø
Genitive: -di
Dative: -diŋa
Benefactive: -dita
Ablative: -diŋal
Adessive: -diŋta
Locative: -ka
Prosecutive: -bes
Instrumental: -as
Abessive: -an

Plural:

Masculine/Feminine("animate"):

Nominative: -Ø
Genitive: -na
Dative: -naŋa
Benefactive: -nata
Ablative: -naŋal
Adessive: -naŋta
Prosecutive: -bes
Instrumental: -as
Abessive: -an

Neuter("inanimate"): same to singular Feminine/Neuter forms.

It does not only prove the naturalness of the case system of Tarquesta Quenya, it also proves the naturalness of the case system of Dothraki(inanimte nouns in Dothraki don't have distinctive plural forms).

These are only my personal opinions, they may not be correct; also, this post should be deleted if its contents possess copyright violations.

Unrelated, I have ever made my reconstruction of Proto-Yeniseian using words provided by Wikipedia...
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Re: Tarquesta Quenya case system is possible!

Post by gach »

Staying in the same region, certain dialects on Khanty have a decent number of cases (ten can be found in the Surgut dialect) despite only having a distinct accusative on pronouns. Having optional object conjugation on verbs helps. The language also shows a lack of genitive, which is fairly common for even case rich languages that make use of possessive suffixes.
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Re: Tarquesta Quenya case system is possible!

Post by Salmoneus »

Closer to home, I know it's not a huge number of cases, but the general phenomenon can be seen in Gaelic, which has a nominative/accusative, a genitive, a dative, and a vocative.

It doesn't seem much of a stretch to me to stick some prepositions onto, say, the dative, and end up with something like the Quenya system.
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Re: Tarquesta Quenya case system is possible!

Post by Lambuzhao »

gach wrote:Staying in the same region, certain dialects on Khanty have a decent number of cases (ten can be found in the Surgut dialect) despite only having a distinct accusative on pronouns.
:?: :!: :?: [o.O] :?: :!: :?:

SO let me get this straight - the pronouns in Khanty only have NOM & ACC cases, and a suffixed GEN/POSS ?
Do the pronouns reflect the other oblique cases with suffixes as well?

I am curious, b/c in my :con: Rozwi (and ultimately its sisterlangs as well) a rich case system was adopted for nouns (and, for a time, adjectives as well) during the 'Middle Period', while, for the longest time, personal/interrogative/relative pronouns had a bare minimum of 3 cases: NOM ACC GEN.
Personal pronouns, especially 1SG, 2SG, 1PL, 1DU & 2DU, eventually adapted the oblique nominal cases to their declensions. The 3SG and 3PL pronouns are robustly recalcitrant in their continued paucity of case-forms.


Most interesting. I will need to read up more on Khanty, for sure! :wat:

Thanks!
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Re: Tarquesta Quenya case system is possible!

Post by k1234567890y »

gach wrote:Staying in the same region, certain dialects on Khanty have a decent number of cases (ten can be found in the Surgut dialect) despite only having a distinct accusative on pronouns. Having optional object conjugation on verbs helps. The language also shows a lack of genitive, which is fairly common for even case rich languages that make use of possessive suffixes.
thank you for your information :)

maybe Khanty dialects are also inspirations of Tolkien?
Salmoneus wrote:Closer to home, I know it's not a huge number of cases, but the general phenomenon can be seen in Gaelic, which has a nominative/accusative, a genitive, a dative, and a vocative.

It doesn't seem much of a stretch to me to stick some prepositions onto, say, the dative, and end up with something like the Quenya system.
ok...thank you for your information :)

Although I think the case system of Gaelic languages were reduced from an earlier and more elaborate one.

By the way, I think the case system of Ket is developed from an earlier system with far less case distinctions.
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Re: Tarquesta Quenya case system is possible!

Post by gach »

Lambuzhao wrote:SO let me get this straight - the pronouns in Khanty only have NOM & ACC cases, and a suffixed GEN/POSS ?
Do the pronouns reflect the other oblique cases with suffixes as well?
The pronouns do have all the same adverbial cases as nouns, all of them formed by agglutinating suffixes. It's just that the personal pronouns add an accusative into the paradigm. There's also no genitive on either nouns or pronouns. Possessors are encoded as nominatives.
Most interesting. I will need to read up more on Khanty, for sure! :wat:
It's a nice language. There's Filchenko's grammar of Eastern Khanty linked in the resources thread. You'll find tables of nominal declension on p. 84 and pronominal declension on p. 112 (pages 111 and 139 of the pdf respectively).
k1234567890y wrote:maybe Khanty dialects are also inspirations of Tolkien?
It's unlikely that he'd had access to too much of documentation from Khanty, let alone smaller languages from the area. But it shows how you don't necessarily have to have direct references to natural languages to achieve naturality of a grammatical feature.

Yet another language from the area, which nearly fits to the pattern, is Enets. The language does have separate nominative, accusative and genitive along with a small set of local cases, but most often the three core cases merge together into a single undifferentiated form.
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Re: Tarquesta Quenya case system is possible!

Post by k1234567890y »

gach wrote: It's unlikely that he'd had access to too much of documentation from Khanty, let alone smaller languages from the area. But it shows how you don't necessarily have to have direct references to natural languages to achieve naturality of a grammatical feature.

Yet another language from the area, which nearly fits to the pattern, is Enets. The language does have separate nominative, accusative and genitive along with a small set of local cases, but most often the three core cases merge together into a single undifferentiated form.
thank you for your information :)

by the way, are you a linguist? or you just have read much about languages?
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Re: Tarquesta Quenya case system is possible!

Post by gach »

k1234567890y wrote:by the way, are you a linguist? or you just have read much about languages?
Just someone with a bend for reading academic literature. (My actual field is physical sciences and data analysis.)
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Re: Tarquesta Quenya case system is possible!

Post by k1234567890y »

gach wrote:
k1234567890y wrote:by the way, are you a linguist? or you just have read much about languages?
Just someone with a bend for reading academic literature. (My actual field is physical sciences and data analysis.)
roger that, and thank you for your information about Khanty and Enets again :)

by the way, is it possible that that's an areal feature to apply the same form for all core arguments while still use other cases for obliques?
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Re: Tarquesta Quenya case system is possible!

Post by gach »

k1234567890y wrote:by the way, is it possible that that's an areal feature to apply the same form for all core arguments while still use other cases for obliques?
Maybe, though it's probably derivative of other areally shared features. In Enets the merger in the core cases is clearly phonologically driven but both it and Khanty have possessive suffixes and optional object agreement on verbs (used to code the more topical objects), so living without clearly separate genetive and accusative is made easy.
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Re: Tarquesta Quenya case system is possible!

Post by Curlyjimsam »

A language with lots of cases whose nominative and accusative merge due to sound change is unlikely to just lose all its others overnight, though it may be more likely to lose them eventually.

Languages like Latin and German, while they do still make a nominative/accusative distinction, have neutralised it for a lot of nouns.
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Re: Tarquesta Quenya case system is possible!

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Allemanic German dialects have a case called Nomakkusativ, which is derived from merging accusative and dative, while they still retain dative and genitive forms.
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Re: Tarquesta Quenya case system is possible!

Post by G64 »

Curlyjimsam wrote:Languages like Latin and German, while they do still make a nominative/accusative distinction, have neutralised it for a lot of nouns.
That's what I was going to say.
In Latin nominative and accusative always coincide with neuter nouns, and often coincide in the plural NOM and ACC of plural feminine and masculine nouns (except I and II declension and most pronouns).
Neuter are actually treated as if they didn't have the distinction NOM/ACC, cf. "Quod dixisti verum est" (What you said is true), where the determinative pronoun "id" has dropped ("Id quod dixisti verum est"). This should only be possible if determinative and relative pronouns share the same case, yet in this example one is in nominative and the other in accusative.
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Re: Tarquesta Quenya case system is possible!

Post by cntrational »

Indic languages typically merge nom and acc, but retain other cases. The suffixes got reanalyzed to clitics, though.
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Re: Tarquesta Quenya case system is possible!

Post by HoskhMatriarch »

G64 wrote:
Curlyjimsam wrote:Languages like Latin and German, while they do still make a nominative/accusative distinction, have neutralised it for a lot of nouns.
That's what I was going to say.
In Latin nominative and accusative always coincide with neuter nouns, and often coincide in the plural NOM and ACC of plural feminine and masculine nouns (except I and II declension and most pronouns).
Neuter are actually treated as if they didn't have the distinction NOM/ACC, cf. "Quod dixisti verum est" (What you said is true), where the determinative pronoun "id" has dropped ("Id quod dixisti verum est"). This should only be possible if determinative and relative pronouns share the same case, yet in this example one is in nominative and the other in accusative.
I thought that's how it was in PIE in the first place. I thought neuter nouns were originally inanimate and inanimate nouns weren't likely to be the agent of a sentence so they didn't have distinct nominative and accusative forms.
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Re: Tarquesta Quenya case system is possible!

Post by Ephraim »

The merger of the nominative and accusative of neuters goes all the way back to PIE. IE languages that have retained both the neuter gender and the nom–acc case distinction also tend to retain this merger, like many Slavic, Germanic, and Middle Indo-Aryan languages, as well as Greek, and to some extent Albanian. Even English may retain some trace of the merger in the personal pronouns: he–him, she–her but it–it (although both him and her are actually old datives, not accusatives). The origin of this merger may be a be hard to know with any amount of certainty but we can speculate. The masculine and neuter declension was generally identical in PIE in cases other than the nominative, accusative and vocative.

In West Germanic languages, the nominative and accusative have typically also merged in the plural of all genders. This is true even in the relatively morphologically conservative Old High German, which still distinguishes three genders in the plural (although only in the combined nom–acc case). The only exception here is the first and second person personal pronouns. For nouns, the nominative and accusative have typically merged in the singular as well. Weak masculine and feminine nouns (n-stems) are the exception, and perhaps also feminines in –in. Old English did have distinct accusative forms of strong feminine nouns, sometimes even in the plural (although it had more syncretism in general than OHG).

To a some extent, the West Germanic nom–acc merger is the result of sound changes (like the widespread loss of final *z). But not always, sometimes one form seems to have been generalized to both cases.
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