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Noun-verb agreement

From:FFlores <fflores@...>
Date:Wednesday, November 10, 1999, 14:56
I have a question: how do nouns agree with verbs, besides
the usual stuff (person and number)? Do you know of langs
that use different pronouns for different kinds of verbs?
Because I've discovered, to my dismay, that Nolt Lethris,
the Old Tongue (ancestor of Drasel=E9q) seems to have this
kind of agreement; pronouns (maybe clitic ones, but indeed
free at some point) that include a consonant, as an affix or
infix, which varies according to the verb. These pronouns
are also marked for tense, I guess like Teonaht does, and
in later history their position becomes fixed (postverbal)
and even later they merge with the verb. For example:

        ndar=E1s tuyerhe        (>> modern _drast=FCer_)
        cross  2p.PST
        'you crossed'

The past tense is here marked by the preffix <-uy->; _t-erhe_
is the pronoun root. But if the verb is of another declension:

        tese buyerhe    (>> modern _tesb=FCer_)
        lie  2p.PST
        'you lied'

Here the pronoun root is _b-erhe_. It's not just a matter of
leaving the consonant on the verb, since the phonotactics doesn't
allow it most times, and the positions could be reversed (tensed
pronoun first, and then the verb). This characteristic consonant
doesn't appear (at this stage) in finite forms of the verb (though
it does appear in the infinitive and participles). It doesn't seem
to have any semantic meaning (though it could have had one, in
earlier times). Plus (forgot to mention) it appears not only as
a prefix to the 'real' pronominal root (here, _erhe_), but also
as an *infix* sometimes!

What can I do? Help please!


--Pablo Flores
  http://draseleq.conlang.org/pablo-david/