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--- Padraic Brown wrote: > Ahem! French kept them for quite a while; and Kerno > still has a case system. It's not as full or healthy > as Wenedyk's case system appears to be, though! It's > declensional system is also quite different. It has > kept the nominative and oblique; singular and plural; > masculine and feminine; and the declensions are based > on a rearranged stem system. [...] Wow, your declension system is really something! I have two questions, though. I see there are two different words for "hand", obviously derived from the same Latin word: "la manus" and "la manuw". Does that mean that the word simultaneously evolved in two separate directions and your Kerno speakers never were able to make a choice? Second question: how did Latin "corpora" evolve to "y chorpuroer" and "y chorpuroeres"? That sounds like stuttering to me :) > There's a lot of room for irregulars; That somehow doesn't surprise me. > [...] and many words are suppletive: > > la fowea y chavuren > la vowea y chavuren > (cave) Is this also the case with "manus" and "manuw"? [...] > Wow - neuter. Romanian has kept the neuter. I suppose > Slavic still has neuter? What cases do W's Slavic > adstrate have? Yes, AFAIK every Slavic language has the neuter, which was a major reason for me to keep it in Wenedyk. The original Slavic cases are: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative, and vocative (the latter being as rudimentary as in Latin and Greek, but nevertheless it survived in Polish and a few others). I have of course been considering the possibility of introducing more cases in Wenedyk than the four I actually elected. For example, I played with the idea of expanding the Latin construction mecum, tecum, vobiscum etc. into a full instrumental case. However, I was not happy with forms such childisch-looking forms like "domku", "domuku", "domyku", or "domorku". At last I decided that it was a bad idea and abandoned it. This would never have become a real case anyway. Another possibility would have been the development of the ablative case into an instrumental. At this moment I even don't remember if I have considered that possibility, and if so, why I didn't do it. Probably because the ablative has almost no forms of its own in Latin, reason enough for it disappear :) And the locative case -i was already archaic in Classical Latin. The only way to introduce it into Wenedyk would have been either through the ablative, or through adoption of some Slavic endings. The latter is an option I definitely don't want: first of all because it's cheap, and besides, this kind of direct quotiations would make the language look like a stupid joke. Phonology and orthography are allowed to be Polish, but morphology is supposed to be Latinoid. > The survival of four cases is a (pleasant) surprise. > Is it common in W for words like "dom" to switch > genders (domus was feminine)? In the case of "dom" that's no big surprise, since it exists in Slavic, too, where it is always masculine. But yes, I think it is quite possible that all feminine words of the fourth declension have become masculine under the influence of their forms. Jan ===== "Originality is the art of concealing your source." - Franklin P. Jones __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Everything you'll ever need on one web page from News and Sport to Email and Music Charts http://uk.my.yahoo.com