Migdal

The Fundamentals of Proto-Ethúlic Grammar [Nominal Morphology]

Morphology - Nominals

Overview

Proto-Ethúlic Nominals decline based on case, number, and grammatical gender. There are 11 known cases in Proto-Ethúlic: nominative, accusative, genitive, elative, allative, dative, ablative, essive, abessive, comitative, and instrumental. elative, allative, dative, and ablative are often grouped as 'locative cases'. There are three numbers: singular, dual, and plural; and two genders: non-feminine and feminine.

Ablaut

Aside from very few exceptions, nominals are non-ablauting, meaning, the stem vowel does not change from one wordform to another. However, when an adjective is derived from a noun or a verb (the latter being more common), the adjetival form is almost always in long grade, whereas the noun tends to be in short grade. This means that nouns and adjectives derived from verbal roots usually make a pair of short and long stems, for example:

*dʰár- 'darkness' vs *dʰā́r- 'dark' < *dʰṛ- 'to darken'
*blán- 'water' vs *blā́n- 'wet' < *bḷn- 'to wet'

Case Endings

A table of the case endings can be seen here:

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