Re: Development of Silindion verbal inflection

Hallo!

Elliott Lash wrote:

> As I have shown before many times, in Silindion there
> are two main endings for the 3rd person singular [in
> the present tense], namely, -n and -r.
>
> Example:
>
>    teken  "he praises X"
>    anar   "he promises"
>    mir    "he falls"
>    nen    "he gives X"
>
> The main difference between them is often that -n is
> for transitive verbs (not universal however) and -r is
> for intransitive verbs (not universal as well).
Which makes sense.  A possible origin may have been an ergative/absolutive
or an active/stative system of some sort.

There are quite a few languages with different transitive and intransitive
conjugation suffixes.  I have seen that in Eskimo languages, for instance.

> What I'm beginning to understand is that, in some time
> in Silindion's past it must have had a SPLIT
> inflection system of some sort. This can account for
> the less than straightforward distribution of -r and
> -n. (I'm not sure exactly how, but it's a start of a
> theory).
>
> Anyway, beyond this assumption of an ancient split
> system, I also think that the basic divisions in
> inflection for Silinestic (Silindion's immediate
> predecessor) must have been the following:
>
> predicate with two arguments:
>   *tekk-Vm       nistad       lawando-m
>    praise-3A/3P  king[AGENT]  hunter-[PATIENT]
>  "the king praises the hunter"
>
> predicate with one argument:
>   *an-Vr       nistad         gelet¨¥-di
>    promise-3S  king[SUBJECT]  gold-[GENITIVE]
>   "The king promises gold"
>
> [this is intransitive, really "makes a promise of"]
This makes sense.

> predicate with no arguments:
>    tekkn-V                     lawando-di
>    praise.stative-[empty 3s]   hunter-[GENITIVE]
>    "The hunter is being praised"
>    "There is praising of the hunter"
>
> (the verb here is a n-stative derivative of the root
> TEKK "praise". N-statives as derivatives are very
> archaic, and mostly have become grammaticalised as
> passive 3rd singular presents in Silindion. One
> n-stative which is still derivational is   <ser-n- "to
> be ready"> as opposed to <ser- "to prepare">)
>
> So, this means that the suffixes -Vm and -Vr may be
> compound suffixes,  -V-m and -V-r, with -V being an
> empty 3rd singular, -m relating that 3rd singular to
> an object, -r relating it to a subject. Found by
> itself, the verb remains neutral as to argument count.
>
>
> Is this at all plausible?
It is.  And I once again enjoyed reading about another facet of your
beautiful language's complexity.

Greetings,

Jörg.