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Classical Seesh: Lesson #4: Shorter Nouns
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A short lesson on noun conjugation/accusatives
This public article was written by [Deactivated User] on 20 May 2022, 02:39.

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Nouns in Seesh are nominal ('a thing') by default and can't be made accusative ('the thing'), a feature that may seem weird to speakers of European or Semitic languages, but is used in many natural languages. This isn't to say that specific things aren't marked, they're just not marked by an accusative form. Instead, they're marked with a demonstrative (like 'this, that, those, or these') if you've got to specify that a certain object is the same object as the object you were talking about in another part of a conversation. And because Seesh is strongly head final, the demonstrative comes after the noun ('thing this'); a bit like an adjective.
Nouns aren't marked for the genitive case (like how you add ''s' in English), and a genitive is implied by pure juxtaposition (the thing being owned to the owner) or by using 'have/has'. This means that the copula (is, be, was, were) can never be dropped unless you own the thing that you're trying to say that you are.
Luckily for you, number is really easy. Nouns start out as singular, and can be made either plural by suffixing 'de' or paucal ('some of' a thing) by suffxing 'daaβ. If there's a verb specific number of a thing, add a numeral after the noun.
Because I like making examples, here are some nouns and gentives:
barrālda
barrāldade
barrāldadaaβ
barrālda tsezīīɸ
barrāldade tsezīīɸde
dēntde barrāldade
lēnt barrālda
barrālda tsezīīɸde betāālde
lēntde barrālda tsezīīɸde betāālde


This isn't really a part of the lesson, but the compound nouns at the end of Lesson #3 were really difficult, so here's a kind of answer key with my best guesses/approximations for anyone who did their homework.
'βāmtdiibiʙāɸ' doesn't pass the macron test, but there's no doubt that βāmt (mouth) has to be the root word. This just leaves diibiʙāɸ. 'Diib' is a common suffix meaning a group of things, and diibiʙāɸ colloquially means mountain or boulder, so βāmtdiibiʙāɸ must mean either a mountain base (like the 'mouth' of a river) or a large ravine that could be interpreted by people that don't know any better as a mouth.
'tapōōdzmidātiβpōōdzaal' is a bit deceptive, it should be tapōōdzmidātiβ pōōdzaal because pōōdzaal just means 'new', like the adjective, so I'm just going to analyze tapōōdzmidātiβ. The macron trick works here, so tapōōdzmi and dātiβ are the two roots. The head is tapōōdzmi (newspaper) and the modifier is dātiβ (music). So this is pretty unambiguously a new issue of a music magazine or the Seesh equivalent of the Billboard top 100.
'zhīīdesāānzosa' also follows the macron rule, so zhīīde is the head and sāānzosa must be the modifier. Zhīīde is the plural of zhīī (road or path) and sāānzosa is the word for both a night and the moon, zhīīdesāānzosa must mean 'lunar cycles' or 'the phases of the moon'. It could also be some moon super-highway.
'lāββaashīīdzlshāniir' is just a wildcard. For a start, it's is actually a compound verb, you can tell by the 'iir', but compound verbs still follow compound noun rules, so I included it. The macron trick kind of works here, 'lāββaa' must be the head, and 'shīīdzlshāniir' must be the modifier, but 'shīīdzlshāniir' is, in itself, a compound of 'shīīdzl' and 'shāniir'. To save you some time, 'shīīdzlshāniir' meaning sheep who are sleeping. So if you treat shīīdzlshāniir as the modifier and lāββaa (number) as the head, that gives you a meaning of something like 'the number of sleeping sheep' or 'the sum of the sleeping sheep'.


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