Active case-marking natlangs (was Re: What is needed in an conlang classificatory system?)

daniel andreasson <daniel.andreasson@...> writes:

> Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
>
> > 1. Some fictional languages display combinations of features not
> > attested in natlangs.  For example, I have heard multiple times that no
> > active language has yet been found that marks nouns for case that way -
> > those that are known are all head-marking.  But several case-marking
> > active languages exist in the realm of fiction (e.g. Nur-ellen and I
> > think also Chevraqis).
>
> And Rinya! :)  And Georgian. Of course, Georgian could be argued
> to be a head-marking language because of all the stuff you put on
> the verb root, but it does inflect NPs for case. And Georgian displays
> active alignment in the aorist tense by marking the NPs with different
> case suffixes. So it should count as a case-marking active natlang.
Of course, how could I forget?!  Where did I leave my mind?  Georgian is
pretty familiar to me, I used it once as a counterexample against Marcus
Smith's claim that active case-marking systems don't exist!  It also
plays a role in my musings about what historical linguists think what
Nur-ellen is related to in my con-universe. In that conworld, some
linguists try to link Quendian to Kartvelian exactly on the ground of
that.  The case marking patterns are really strikingly similar, down to
the use of the dative for subjects of verbs of perception, even though I
didn't know about the Georgian system when I designed Nur-ellen.  There
are differences, though: Georgian allows inanimate nouns in agentive,
and the system of degrees of volition I have designed for Nur-ellen is
AFAIK not paralleled by Georgian.

> Svan and Laz also work as Georgian. Ts'ova-Tush (or Bats) has optional
> free-standing pronouns which are marked for case with active alignment
> (although there is obligatory agreement marking on the verb) so you
> _could_ count Tso'va-Tush as well.
>
> That makes for at least four natlangs and at least three conlangs.
And that ain't all of them.  There is Winfired P. Lehmann's hypothesis
that Proto-Indo-European might have been active (with case marking) at
some earlier stage, which he claims manifests in the peculiarity that
PIE neuter nominatives fall together with the accusatives: these cases
arose from agentive and objective, respectively, and the neuters are a
remainder of an old inanimate class which did not have an agentive case,
such that the objective was pressed into service as both.  I haven't
read Lehmann's argumentation, but I am quite fond about this hypothesis;
this model would come even closer to my Quendian model than the
Kartvelian one, especially considering that the use of dative subjects
with verbs of perception is attested in quite a number of IE languages
and can thus be safely reconstructed for PIE as well.  In my
con-universe, again, this hypothesis has gained much acceptance, and
gives even more credibility to the widespread assumption that IE and
Quendian are related to each other.

Greetings,
Jörg.

--
"Bus, bi, bo, bum, bo; bi, borum, bis, bos, bis!"