Recently, I’ve had a reinvigorated interest in the Basque language, after having first taken an interest for a paper I published a couple years back in Glossa. Of course, I’m hardly the first linguist who has taken an interest in this beautifully compelling language and so it is unlikely that I will be able to offer any profound insight that hasn’t already been noticed. Even so, I did want to share some thoughts that recently came to mind upon learning the nominal inflection paradigms from Rudolf de Rijk’s 2008 book. As an Indo-Europeanist, the Basque nominal inflection system already impresses me with its vast array of cases (exactly how many depends on how you count, but at least 15), much more than the Indo-European 8 (Nominative, Accusative, Instrumental, Dative, Ablative, Genitive, Locative, Vocative). Basque, like other (more) agglutinative languages e.g. Finnish, has many locational cases, including the following: Inessive ‘in/on X’, Ablative ‘from X’, Allative ‘to X’, Terminative ‘up to X’, Directive ‘in the direction of X’. And precisely within the Basque locational system, there is one notable property that caught my attention, namely, that the Basque locational cases distinguish between inanimate and animate forms. The following table summarizes the Basque cases using the noun herri ‘town/village/population’. Much could be said about the above table, but the important thing to notice here is that the (final) endings for the locational suffixes are the same in both the animate and inanimate locational cases i.e. inessive -an, ablative -tik/-dik, allative –(r)a, terminative –(r)aino, directive –(r)antz, but the distinction between animate and inanimate is observable in the middle. Specifically, in the animate forms, the locational endings (and the affix -gan-) are added on to the genitive forms. In the animate forms, those endings are added directly to the root (well okay ... the indefinite singular and (definite) plural have an intervening -ta- and -eta-, respectively). Thus, herriarenganaino ‘up to the population’ can be parsed as: herri-a[Def]-ren[Gen]-gan[locational affix]-aino[terminal] By contrast, the inanimate form would be: herri-raino[terminal] So, to sum up, in Basque the animate locational forms require using the genitive as an intermediate form before adding the locational endings. Let us now transition to a second language (or rather, family of languages) with an animacy distinction in its nominal paradigms, Slavic, taking Russian as an example for now. Consider the nominal inflection paradigms of two Russian masculine nouns. For the above paradigms, look closely at the nominative, genitive and accusative forms. Notice that nominative and accusative are the same in the animate noun ‘telephone’, whereas genitive and accusative are the same in the animate noun ‘student’. Thus, animate masculine obey the following formula: N ≠ A = G; inanimate masculines obey this formula: N = A ≠ G. Therefore, here, as in Basque above, the genitive case is of crucial importance in displaying the animacy distinction in the sense that the animate paradigm uses the genitive as the basis for the formation of other cases, where the inanimate paradigm does not do this. The final animacy distinction I will discuss in this blog post comes from a much more familiar language to me ... German. In German, animacy occupies a little corner of the grammar and can only be seen in the so-called weak masculine nouns. In this class of nouns, animate nouns take a genitive singular ending in -en, whereas inanimate nouns take genitive singular in -ens. Observe the table below. Conveniently, the word for ‘student’ occupies the animate class just as it did above in Russian. As German speakers know, the weak masculine paradigm is somewhat odd in that German nominal inflection is really mostly seen in preceding determiners (der, die, das etc.) or adjectives rather than on the noun itself, with some notable exceptions (genitive singular, dative plural). Furthermore, in spoken German, the weak inflection might be avoided, especially for a higher frequency noun like Student. Still, to the extent that there is an animacy distinction in German, it is visible in one place and one place only: the genitive case!
So, why is it that the genitive case plays such an important role in animacy distinctions? Are all of these facts about Basque, Russian and German just coincidences? Or is there some reason that animacy and the genitive case might be linked? In this post, I won’t provide a definitive answer, but it doesn’t seem so surprising that animacy should be linked with the genitive. Genitive in its most prototypical function denotes possession. Possession, in turn, would commonly involve human (or perhaps an animal) doing the action. Perhaps this is why the genitive case occupies such a key position in animacy distinctions.
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