Re: demonstratives

James O'Connell sikayal:

> As I'm doing my demonstrative system in elenyo right now, I was wondering
> how other people had done this. Do you have seperate demonstratives to
> demonstrative pronouns or are they combined? Do they show case etc?
The adjectival demonstratives in Yivríndil are prefixes, and they're
pretty sparse.  There are only two that would correspond to English
demonstratives at all:

ni - the/this
na - that
hé - the same
pé - another, a different
pa - some, any

These all go in the same inflectional slot and are parallel, which is to
say that they can't be used together.  These prefixes are also parallel to
the numerals, which means that Yivríndil can't say things like 'these
three men.'

To form the pronouns, these words are compounded with the 3rd person
pronouns, which form their oblique cases suppletively, and have an
animate/inanimate and gender distinction.  Thus you can have:

niel - this man
nielé - this woman
niul - this thing

With dative forms:

niélos - to this man
niélosé - to this woman
niétos - to this thing

etc.  The demonstratives don't have any irregularities of their own, but
they share the irregularities of the personal pronouns.

Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu
"It is of the new things that men tire--of fashions and proposals and
improvements and change.  It is the old things that startle and
intoxicate.  It is the old things that are young."
-G.K. Chesterton _The Napoleon of Notting Hill_
Conlanger code: CLI> l%p+++ cS:R:N:H a++ y n18d:6 X+++ A-- E-- L-- N2.5
Idmp k++ ia-- p+ m++ o+++ P d++ b++ Yivríndil

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