Re: No plural morpheme

Hi,
Ta for your interest: the breakdown is as follows:-
bere = see
engu = horse
i-ne-da = ergative auxiliary-1ps subject-3pso object
i-ne-ra = ergative auxiliary-1ps subject-3ppo object
(ppo =  omina has, in both 2nd and 3rd person forms, two variants; a
'normal' 2 and 3 person, and an "exalted" version, used when talking about
"presences", royalty, great historical persons, etc. Here, it's just a
common old horse, so the ordinary (ppo) form is used.)
The auxiliary carries all the weight, basically, as in Basque. It even
includes a relative pronoun suffix -n: "bere sin inedan" = "The horse that I
saw was black". Where there is an object, all transitive verbs have an
ergative form, which is i- followed by whatever subject and object forms are
necessary. Omina is an aspect language and has no tense, so "Bere engu
ineda" could also mean "I see the horse". Context effectively supplies any
notion of tense. Word order is pretty flexible as well, but the auxiliary
nearly always comes last in a declarative phrase, and is normally preceded
by the heaviest stress.
Mike
>
> I like the look of this, but what weight does the auxiliary bear? Is it
> "horse.see.I-it-past?"; "Saw.horse.I-it?" Usw. Is the "r" of "inera" a
> tap, trill; can we easily distinguish it from the "d" of "ineda"? Details,
> man, details! :)