Mezhat's Relational Nouns: view article

Relational nouns combine with a locative case marker and a possessive construction to describe location just like in the English phrase in front of -- however, since it lacks an in vs on distinction in cases or prepositions, Mezhat makes much more extensive use of this construction than English does.

There are quite a few relational nouns. Many of these words have additional meanings when not acting relationally, such as şi, which means both 'by, near' and 'space, area' depending on the context.

Noun	Relational Meaning	Other Meaning
su	atop, on (top of)	surface, top
ři	in, within	belly, stomach, inside
wel	on (attached to, hanging from), around
şi	by, near	area, space
ccef	above, over	cloud, fog
däf	under, beneath
tib	beside, next to	hand
täş	in front of, before	face
um	behind, after	back
cib	during	time
far	at the bottom, base of	foot
hys	at the top of	mountain, peak

Note that cib is only used when required for clarity; otherwise, time related concepts are generally conveyed without a relational modifier (so that they are polysemous with the concept of "at"). There is also a separate preposition/adverb for "when" as in "when it happened...", which may be used.

Before we move on to examples, it's also worth going over the way possessive constructions work in Mezhat: the noun that is possessed is marked for possession with a suffix that agrees with the possessor, and then the possessor follows that noun in the unmarked (nominative or absolutive) case. In transliterated English, an example would be "Motorcycle-his Captain America" for "Captain America's Motorcycle."

Dwissefme bes řihefnjö hys.
dwiss-ef-me
see-3Third person (person)
neither speaker nor addressee.ANAnimate (gender/class)
alive, moving-1SFirst person singular (person)
speaker, signer, etc.; I bes
fire ři-h-ef-njö
in-EEpenthetic
something 'meaningless' inserted for structural reasons-3Third person (person)
neither speaker nor addressee.ANAnimate (gender/class)
alive, moving.POSSPossessive (case)
owns, has-LOCLocative (case)
'in, on, at' etc mountain
I see fire in the mountain.
✎ Edit Article ✖ Delete Article

Comments