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.
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 The page here on FrathWiki is out of date in some points, but not what regards the language's morphosyntactic alignment.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)
--LinguarumMagister 20:44, 23 August 2012 (PDT)
