Talk:Fortunatian

I'm changing Fortunatian to a nominative-absolutive language, given its geographical location. If there are any nominative-absolutive conlangs on FrathWiki, I'd like to inspect them.

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What about these unquestionably beautiful islands is the reason for this consideration? (Not that a nominative-absolutive language wouldn't make sense there.) For a nominative-absolutive conlang on FrathWiki: as far as I know, "nominative-absolutive" is more or less a synonym of "active-stative", and my main conlang Old Albic is such a language. The page here on FrathWiki is out of date in some points, but not what regards the language's morphosyntactic alignment. --WeepingElf 09:56, 8 August 2012 (PDT)

My understanding was that nominative-absolutive languages use the nominative for the subject of an intransitive verb, and for the predicate (I've been reading about Afroasiatic). Fortunatian is a Romance language whose speakers have been influenced by Berber languages. Cetain Berber dialects have developed and often dropped nominative-absolutive systems. My concultural assumption is that the ancestors of the Fortunatian speakers came into contact with one such tribe in the Fortunate Isles (I'm assuming that the Guanche were of Berber extraction). The starting point of Fortunatian grammar is the elision of Latin accusative singulars ending in -Vm. For a long time, I assumed that it was necessary to either drop case marking (my original design for Fortunatian) or find a new suffix (e.g., -ync, -onc, -oc < hunc, hanc, hoc). But now that I know that a nominative-absolutive language can zero-mark the non-nominative case and that there are nominative-absolutive dialects of Berber, I thought it would be interesting to make Fortunatian a two-case nominative-absolutive Romance language. -Linguarum Magister (what happened to my time stamp?)

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Cases

The earliest stages of Fortunatian had two cases, and three declensions - the accusative signular was unmarked in all cases: 1fem NomSg -a AccSg -# NomPl -e AccPl -aʃ 2masc NomSg -ɨʃ AccSg -# NomPl -i AccPl -oʃ 2neuter Sg -# Pl -a 3epicene NomSg -s, -ʃ AccSg -# Pl -eʃ In the next stage, the 2nd declension neuters were redistributed to the 2nd declension masculines an 1st declension feminines, leaving this system: 1fem NomSg -a AccSg -# NomPl -e AccPl -aʃ 2masc NomSg -ɨʃ AccSg -# NomPl -i AccPl -oʃ 3epicene NomSg -s, -ʃ AccSg -# Pl -eʃ Then the 3rd declension nouns were redistributed between the 1st and 2nd declensions, matching the male-female dichotomy of the Berber languages: 1fem NomSg -a AccSg -# NomPl -e AccPl -aʃ 2masc NomSg -ɨʃ AccSg -# NomPl -i AccPl -oʃ --LinguarumMagister 19:21, 13 August 2012 (PDT)