Posted by Jonathana Tegire on 19:55 2/26/02
In reply to: (none)
Airanasin! I was reading over your rules for Verdurian names, and I'm not quite clear on several points. San nahadana Tegirenaital (in Tigerian), san shana is simply the given name plus the family name. But san nahadana Veradurinaital (in Verdurian), you use a name, a "patronymic" and a "family name." I'm okay with that. But then you introduce how to go about forming the names. San Nahadana Tegirenai does not have a "genitive," as far as I can tell. And I'm sure I'm not familiar with "declension." But maybe something gets lost in the translation. Could you please explain these to me?
- Jonathana Tegire,
Sana Duhanathana Tegirenai (son of Duhanathana Tegire).
Declension is inflecting a noun or adjective for case. Different languages have different cases; Verdurian (like German) has nominative, genitive, accusative, and dative. Latin has these four plus the ablative and occasionally the vocative. Russian has an instrumental... Finnish has no less than 15 cases.
English has two cases, usually called "subject" and "possessive". In "my father's house", 'house' is in the subject case, 'father' is in the possessive. The possessive is something like the Verdurian genitive. In Verdurian we'd write dom pirei esë, where dom 'house' is in the nominative, and piro 'father' appears in its genitive form pirei.
You can read more about case in the Language Construction Kit, or about Verdurian case in the Verdurian grammar.