From: habarakhe4
Date: Tue Dec 17 2002 - 15:55:08 EST
NB: The notes here on Old Fortunatian have an etymological focus and
therefore should not be treated as a complete description of OF nouns.
M = masculine F = feminine N = neuter
Old Fortunatian had six basic noun classes and two poetic ones.
The accusatives in the basic noun classes are:
1F port#, port-a:s
2M er#, er-o:s
2N nomin#, nomin-a
3MF pisk#, pisk-e:s
3M que:sto:r#, que:sto:r-e:s
3F que:sta:r#, questa:r-e:s
The poetic noun classes were used in OF to replace masculine and
feminine nouns in poetic or rhetorical contexts. They were:
1P (=4F) port#, port-e:s
2P (=5M) e:r#, e:r-u:s
1P replaced 1F, 3F, and 3MF (when it was F); 2P replaced 2M, 3M, and
3MF (when it was M).
In the evolution from OF to Classical Fortunatian (CF) (I'm not such
a fool to call a language in progress 'Modern') 1P, 3MF, 3M, and 3F
merged. The default gender of the new category (fot.-,fikS-, petSor-,
petSar-#, -eS) was F except in the case of self-evidently M nouns
such as fat., fat.eS 'father', M, compared with mat.,
mat.eS 'mother', F.
The 3M words that were not self-evidently masculine but nonetheless
required a gender distinction moved to the category (#, -oS). 2P
survived as a kind of of augmentive noun class; thus er, eroS 'sir',
but er, eruS, '(mighty) sir'.
A parallel noun class has begun to develop in CF for the F; thus er,
eraS 'madame', but er, eriS '(most gentle) madam'. 1F, 2M, and 2N
(n@mn, n@mna) remain. Secondary noun classes (a, aS; o, oS; e, eS; u,
uS; i, iS) develop from the epenthesis of the appropriate vowel from
the plural suffix to singular nouns that end in hard-to-pronounce
final clusters (from the viewpoint of a Fortunatian, that is, not
from Mr Thalmann's ;) ).
Any questions or comments?
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.7 : Fri Oct 03 2003 - 12:19:45 EST