some Proto-Quendic grammar (was Re: creating words (...))

Hallo!

On Fri, 14 Nov 2003 16:11:37 -0800,
Costentin Cornomorus <elemtilas@...> wrote:

> --- Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...>
> wrote:
>
> > And to make things even more complex, I fancy
> > that Proto-Elvish
> > is remotely related to Indo-European, and
> > explore the common
> > ancestor of both, which involves some rather
> > speculative internal reconstruction work on
> > Proto-Indo-European!
>
> Interesting! I didn't know that. Talarian is in a
> similar boat, being placed somewhere between IE
> and IH.
I assume that by "IH", you mean "Indo-Hittite".
Hence, Talarian would occupy a position similar to that of Tocharian.
Quendic (to use the provisional name of the family) is even farther
from the main IE stock than Anatolian, though closer than Uralic
(if the latter is related to IE at all).

>      Do you have any sketch of these endings
> or anything you can show us?
Yes!

The PQ noun had eight cases:

agentive       AS-0
genitive       AS-s
dative         AS-na
objective      OS-0
instumental    OS-i
locative       OS-as
allative       OS-ana
ablative       OS-ada

Herein, the abbreviations "AS" and "OS" mean "agentive stem"
and "objective stem", respectively.  The agentive stem always
ended in a vowel, which indicated gender and number:

masculine singular  -o
feminine singular   -e
epicene singular    -a
dual, all genders   -u
plural, all genders -i

Only animate nouns had an agentive stem, which also means that
inanimate nouns have no agentive, genitive and dative cases!
The objective stem always ended in a consonant; the OS of
an animate noun was AS + -m.

OK, you might ask what "agentive" and "objective" mean.
PQ was an active language (as are its daughters), and the agentive
denoted the agent of the verb, and the objective the patient.

Now to verbs.  The tense/aspect/mood system is still quite a mess,
and I won't mention it here.  Transitive verbs agree with both
subject and direct object in person and number.  There are two
sets of conjugation suffixes, one for agentive and one for
objective conjugation.  (Again, the language follows the
active type.)  In the transitive case, the objective ending
comes first, and the agentive ending follows.

The suffixes are thus:

Objective conjugation     Agentive conjugation

       Sg.  Du.  Pl.      Sg.  Du.  Pl.

1st    -ha  -hu  -hi      -ma  -mu  -mi
2nd    -cha -chu -chi     -tha -thu -thi
3rd    -a   -u   -i       -sa  -su  -si

If the object (or subject of a stative verb) is inanimate,
the singular endings are used regardless of the number
of the object.

(The digraphs |th| and |ch| represent dental and velar
aspirated stops, which have become fricatives in the
daughter languages.)

For example, "I love you" is _melachama_.

In Nur-ellen, the dual no longer exists, and the final vowels
have fallen off, but as /i/ causes umlaut, plural can still
be distinguished from singular.

Greetings,

Jörg.

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