Re: Adunaic case system

On Saturday, March 19, 2005, at 04:12 , Patrick Littell wrote:

>> I don't think I've run across anything quite like the subjective and
>> objective cases elsewhere.  (They're not much like nominative and
>> accusative.)   Are
>> there natural language precedents?
>
> It's very unusual, although not impossible, for the subject to be less
> marked than the object.  (Presuming, of course, that when Tolkien says
> the "subject of a verb" he means both transitive and intransitive
> ones.)  It violates Greenberg's universal #38:
But IME almost all Greenberg's 'Universals' are violated by some natlang
or other. My understanding is that at best they are "universal
_tendencies_". In any case, the Normal (i.e. unmarked) form of the noun is
used as the subject of verbs (both transitive & intransitive) in Adunaic
if the verb has pronominal prefixes.
[snip]

> -- Subjective is used for the subjects of both intransitive and
> transitive verbs.  (I figure if they were treated differently, Tolkien
> would have mentioned it.)
except that Tolkien never completed his description of Adunaic - the
"Lowdham's Report" in the posthumously published 'Sauron Defeated' breaks
off before it reaches the verb. But there is certainly no evidence I know
of that the two types of verb would be treated differently.

>  That's really all there is to Nominative.
yep - but Adunaic 'Subjective' has other uses not covered by the
Nominative.

> -- Normal being used for direct objects (that are not part of a
> compound expression.)  I'd call this accusative with little
> hesitation.
Normal may also be used as subject - see above - and complement of "to be"
.

[snip]
> -- Genitive case being used for object incorporation. (I would treat
> (i) -- the object coming right before the verb, getting a different
> case than usual, and being treated as a compound expression -- as
> object incorporation.)
That's not how I understand Adunaic 'Objective' - it occurs _only_ in
compounds and reminds me far more of the 'construct state' of the Semitic
langs. I think equating with 'genitive' is incorrect; possession is shown
by the prefix _an-_  which is often reduced to _'n-_ (e.g. Bâr 'nAnadûnê
"Lord of Anadune"; Narîka 'nBâri 'nAdûn "The Eagles of the Lords of th
West").

(â = a circumflex; ê = e circumflex; î = i circumflex; û = u circumflex)
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On Saturday, March 19, 2005, at 04:20 , David J. Peterson wrote:

[snip]
> If I undertand these very vague descriptions correctly, then, yes,
> there are precedents.  The "objective" simply sounds like the genitive,
I do not agree - see above.

> only Tolkien gave it a different name.  Possibly to cover cases
> like the following:
>
> His stealing of the food.
> His killing by the murderer.
>
> Imagine the above were in a language that had a genitive case.
> "He" might just be in the genitive case, only in one instance it would
> be the object of the nominalized verb, and in other instance it
> would be the subject.  Latin made this distinction by using a possessive
> pronoun for one, and a noun/pronoun in the genitive for the
> other (I always forget which was which).
Mainly because Latin did not make the distinction! It was potentially as
ambiguous as English, tho objctive genitives are more common than
subjective ones.

[snip]
> As for the subjective, it doesn't sound like a case, but a copula.
> Quoting the two examples:
>
> _Ar-Pharazon kathuphazganun_ = 'King Ar-Pharazon the Conqueror'.
> Contrast _
> Ar-Pharazonun kathuphazgan_ = 'King Ar-Pharazon is (was) a Conqueror'.
>
> One is a noun phrase (the top one), which would need to be
> used in a sentence with a non "fully inflected verb".
Yes, the Normal form _kathuphazgan_ is used for the complement - the
Subjective _kathuphazganun_ shows the noun is in apposition to
_Ar-Pharazon_, i.e. the first is not a sentence.

> The second
> is a sentence.  So, then, it's not a case,
I agree.

[snuip]
> The "normal" is a case only in the sense that the nominative is
> a case for common nouns (not pronouns) in English.  That is, if
> you want to say English is a case language, then all common
> nouns can be inflected for one case--the nominative--and they're
> always in the nominative, no matter what construction they're
> in.
Basically - I agree. The Normal is the unmarked form of the noun.

> In other words, this is no more than a misuse of the word "case",
> and possibly a misunderstanding of the concept of "case".
I doubt that Tolkien had really misunderstood 'case'. My information is
that "it [Adunaic noun] is inflected for three forms that may be called
cases" which suggests that they are not cases in the traditional use that
Tolkien was familiar with from Greek, Latin, Old english, Old Norse &
Finnish. But I do agree that calling these forms 'cases' is not helpful
and I suspect that had Tolkien got around to revising & completing his
description of Adunaic he may well have defined things differently.

It seems that Adunaic was meant to have a "faintly Semitic flavour"
(SD:240). It has, for example, triconsonantal word-bases, thus G-M-L (star)
  producesactual words such as: gimli, gimlê, gimlu, igmil etc.

As I have said, Adunaic 'Objective' reminds me more of the 'construct
state' than anything else. Maybe one should be looking at Semitics langs
for the inspiration of Adunaic noun forms: Normal, Subjective, Objective.

Steg? Yitzik? Any ideas?

Ray
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Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight,
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as of the reason."      [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]

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