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 The page here on FrathWiki is out of date in some points, but not what regards the language's morphosyntactic alignment.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?)

I see. So you mean something else than what I thought. It is indeed considered very likely that the Guanche language belonged to the Berber family, which AFAIK indeed shows a nominative-absolutive system (as is found in many other Afroasiatic languages as well, and probably to be reconstructed for Proto-Afroasiatic). It indeed makes sense that the Fortunatian language has adopted such a system under the influence of a Guanche Berber substratum. It nicely sets off the language from the large number of romlangs that either maintain Latin case distinctions or drop them! --WeepingElf 12:51, 14 August 2012 (PDT)

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Cases and Declensions

Proto-Fortunatian, the stage that set off Fortunatian from the Latin, reduced the Latin cases and declensions to two cases (nominative and accusative) and three declensions (1st declension feminine, 2nd declension masculine and neuter, and 3rd declension). The complete elision of the accusative singular endings in -m changed the nominative-accusative system into a 'marked-nominative' system in all declensions except the 2nd declension neuter, which was unmarked for case in both singular and plural. The 3rd declension also lacked a case distinction in the plural. Under other circumstances, the instability of such a system and the contribution of Etruscan-speakers to Proto-Fortunatian would suggest a sudden collapse into a system of no cases whatsoever. The Proto-Fortunatian speakers, however, contained a large number of Guanche converts, whose native Berber tongue not only contributed much vocabulary, but also pushed the marked-nominative system into a true nominative-absolutive system. Guanche also contributed to the shift from Latin's SOV order to Proto-Fortunatian's dominant VSO, but that is not the subject of this section. 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, from Proto-Fortunatian to First Stage Pre-Fortunatian, the 2nd declension neuters were redistributed to the 2nd declension masculines and 1st declension feminines: 1fem NomSg -a AccSg -# NomPl -e AccPl -aʃ 2masc NomSg -ɨʃ AccSg -# NomPl -i AccPl -oʃ 3epicene NomSg -s, -ʃ AccSg -# Pl -eʃ In the next stage, from 1st Stage Pre-Fortunatian to 2nd Stage Pre-Fortunatian, the 3rd declension nouns were redistributed between the 1st and 2nd declensions. Now the declensional system of Early Fortunatian matched 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 20:44, 23 August 2012 (PDT)