Re: Elvish ideas ...

I promised writing something on the pronominal system of Meghean, my Elvish
language. What's done yet is personal and possessive pronouns.

Subject personal pronouns and possessive pronouns are formally the same (idea
nicked from Turkic), and consists of proclitics attaching themselves to the
finite verb and the thing possessed respectively. Some of the forms may be
subject to revision, but I think the pl forms at least are set.

person  1st  2nd  3rd
sg      se-  ra-  te-
pl      me-  ea-  cha-

(Note the perfectly regular pronunciations _te-_ [tSe-] and _ea-_ [ja-])

Notice that this means that with pronominal possessors we've got the opposite
WO compared to with nominal ones. Cf _meghean_ "our words" with _ghean
thaiean_ "the orcs' words" (=Yargish).

(_Taea_ ['ta.ja] "orc", definite pl possessive _thaiean_ ['Ta(j).jan], is from
Yargish _taya_, the ergative of _tay_ "orc". With stems of this unusual shape,
the difference between normal and possessive forms easily gets mostly
theoretical.)

The object personal pronouns are enclitics, attaching themselves to verbs and
prepositions. They're descended from the same original independent pronouns as
the subject/possessive ones - the ancestral language used only WO to
distinguish case roles - which should be rather obvious from the forms:

person  1st  2nd  3rd
sg      -es  -ar  -eth
pl      -em  -ii  -ach

(Remember, _ii_ is [ej].)

One can, of course, attach both a subject and an object pronoun to a verb; eg
_mechoareth_ "we ate it". I'll be back with examples involving prepositions as
soon as I get around to inventing some ...

I've also conjured up a future auxiliary _beor_. Futurizing the above gets us
_mebheoreth coar_ "we will eat it" - the auxiliary assumes the argument
structure and syntactic position of the main verb, which is then added as a
bare stem.

                                                          Andreas

PS I see I forgot to thank BP for helping me naming this thing. Thanks, BP!

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