Nambāno

Nambāno or Nambanno is a Namb dialect cluster spoken throughout the Qnōp' lowlands in the first and second millennia AGS.

h and hu
In addition to this core inventory of consonants, h and hu /hʷ/ typically appear in the popular literary language Standard Nambāno and may have been prescribed in speech in some dialects or sociolects. These were present in Old Nambāno but generally were lost around 900 AGS, around the time of its diversification into the Nambāno Proper dialect continuum and the first introduction of writing to Qnōp'.

Nasal vowels
Some fringe dialects of Nambāno feature nasalised long vowels, derived from coda nasal consonants in Old Nambāno. These consonants are still written in Standard Nambāno, though no variety of Nambāno Proper retains the nasalisation. Old Nambāno VN is instead reflected by plain long vowels, thus Nambāno itself is typically pronounced /naːbaːno/.

Nouns
Nouns fall into three animacy categories which determine their inflection and syntactic behaviour:


 * 1) Personal — Personal names, roles and titles e.g. "father" or "lord", deities, rivers, some other named objects
 * 2) Animate — Unnamed humans, animals
 * 3) Inanimate — Everything else

Nouns generally have two alternating stem forms which take suffixes marking case and number. The inflection of a noun falls into one of four categories, which determines which cases the noun can take.

Cases
Nambāno uses six core cases:


 * Absolutive — The least marked case, the direct object of a verb.
 * Dative — Motion towards, target, recipient or beneficiary.
 * Comitative — Coordination, equal accompaniment, i.e. not instrumental.
 * Oblique — The patient of a verb, instrument or attribute.
 * Ablative — Motion away from, general location, source, cause or agent.
 * Genitive — Generic relationship, usually bidirectional.

As well as two additional cases present on certain animate nouns:


 * Nominative — The agent or sole subject of a verb, can also be used as a vocative.
 * Possessive — Ownership, a one-way relationship.

A table of all case suffixes is shown below

Singular nouns
The most common inflection is the singular paradigm. Nouns which take the singular inflection have a discrete, countable form, which includes all animate and many inanimate nouns. As well as the typical set of six cases, nouns in the personal category replace the absolutive with the nominative case and can use an additional possessive case.

The ablative case can operate as an ergative for animate countable nouns, a feature unique to Nambāno and one of many ergative features of the language.

The oblique case typically has an instrumental meaning, often acting more like a comitative (with, in the company of) for animate referents, leaving the actual comitative case for coordination only (and, as well as).

Unlike the typical ergative alignment, personal nouns follow a nominative-accusative pattern, where the nominative is used to mark transitive agents and intransitive subjects and the oblique represents objects of transitives. The nominative case also has a vocative function. Animate nouns can be elevated to personal nouns by use of the nominative and possessive cases, which can be used as an expression of reverence or respect for an animal.sadā ran-huim-ē īz-ā

INTERR.DAT EMPH-travel.IPFV-2/3 pig-NOM

"What's up, pig?"The possessive case expresses ownership, as opposed to the generic relationship of the genitive.

Plural nouns
Personal nouns are always singular, but inanimate and animate singular nouns usually have an associated plural form ending in -e in the absolutive. The nominative and possessive cases are not present on plural nouns, and the comitative and oblique are identical in form to the singular.

three-ABS.PL tongue-ABS.PL PRS-IND-hold-1

"I speak three languages"

Mass nouns
Mass nouns use uncountable suffixes, as well as taking the typical set of core cases.

Mass nouns typically end in -ō in the absolutive case, but can end in any other long vowel -ā, -ē, -ī.

Unique nouns
Unique nouns are analogous to the personal nouns of the countable inflection paradigms, but represent a distinctly separate category of things, mostly place names, celestial bodies and the names of months and other time periods.

Unique nouns are morphologically characterised by a stem-final /t/ or geminate obstruent, and the absolutive which always ends in -ō. The case paradigm features the loss of the dative and ablative cases, with their roles absorbed into the oblique and genitive respectively. In fact, the oblique serves primarily as a dative case in the unique inflection. This can be traced back to the Proto-Koyanic allative *-ukʰū, originally unrelated to the oblique *-isl̥u/*-ur̥l̥u, with all merging into *-xu in Proto-Gäj.