Re: Degrees of volition in active languages (was Re: Chevraqis:asketch)

The Gray Wizard wrote:

> > How did this double marking evolve in your fictional history?
> > This is highly interesting.  Most languages use one and only one system
> > of marking semantic relations or cases, but Amman-iar uses two different
> > of them.
>
> Not enough is known about the protolanguage Vulanayal to be certain, but
> linguists speculate that it occurred through a combination of language
> mixing from as many as four different sources at very widely separated
> times.  The ur-language of amman seems to have been primarily active.  A
> very early contact with Grey Elves (long before the coming of the
> Numenoreans) apparently added a nominative/accusative case marking to
> possibly all pronouns, but at minimum to the speech-act pronouns.  With the
> coming of the Numenoreans, two new sources of language mixing occurred.
> Since the escaping Numenoreans were of the court of Amandil of Andunie, they
> still spoke Sindarin and influenced the language of amman primarily
> lexically.  However, as Numenoreans they also spoke Adunaic (possible some
> Sindarin/Adunaic) Creole) and it was the latter that is thought to have
> added the ergative influence.
Adunaic was ergative?  Based on the sketchy description of Adunaic in one of
Christopher Tolkien's "History of Middle-Earth" volumes, the morphological case
system seems to me to have been modelled loosely on Berber, with a "bound" case
used for postverbal objects and genitives and a "free" case used for preveral
subjects.  Or am I misremembering?

Matt.