Cenyani grammar reference

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Possessive pronouns

Inflection patterns are at the bottom of the page.


Usage

Possessive pronouns are independent forms of the genitive personal pronouns, and correspond to English “mine”, “yours”, “his/hers/its” and so on.

Unlike plain genitive personal pronouns, possessive pronouns do inflect for case; however, since they are separate from the nouns they modify, they inflect for case according to their role in the sentence rather than the role of their respectice nouns, which are in fact probably absent from the sentence containing the possessive pronoun. Consider the following (nonsensical without context) sentence: “I like yours, but mine is bigger”. In Cenyani, this sentence would have both “yours” and “mine” be possessive pronouns, the former in the accusative case, the latter in the nominative.

Möšci [ˈmøːʃki] möšc-i like-PRS
ä [æˑ] ä I
tišic, [ˈtiʃik] teš-(i)c yours.SG-ACC.SG
[rɛ] but
yaš [jaʃ] yaš-Ø mine-NOM.SG
a [a] a is
octoli. [ˈoktoli] octo-li big-COMP

“I like yours, but mine is bigger.”

Possessive pronouns also have to agree in number with the noun(s) they modify: a possessive pronoun which modifies a plural noun uses the plural declension. (Note how the sample above is in the singular.)

Noun cases and numbers are described in nouns.

When used with adpositions, possessive pronouns behave exactly like nominal/substantial adjectives: they require the adposition to be detached. You can read more about adpositions and their detachment on the adpositions page, and more on nominal/substantial adjectives on the adjectives page.


Inflection

Because possessive pronouns are only modifications of genitive personal pronouns, I will not list all the pronouns here. Below are only the general inflection patterns used to form possessive pronouns. Possessive pronouns inflect depending on what they end in; V stands for any vowel. Some pronouns are irregular in their inflection: they, too, are of course listed below.

nom.acc.dat.exp.
Singular
teš teštišictišittišir
myš mišmišcmištmišir
-Vš -[y]-c-t-ir
all others -[y]-yc-yt-ir
Plural
all -i-ic-it-ir
Conceptual
all -öc-öt-ör