Avestan – Morphology, Part 2
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Peschl, Benedikt
The topic of this lecture is the nominal morphology of Avestan, with regard to both word formation and inflection.
 Hello there, my name is Benedikt Pechel. Welcome back to the second video on morphology out of our introductory series on the Avestan language. The focus of this video lies on the noun. More precisely, I'm going to give you a broad overview of how nominal stem formation and inflection works in Avestan. Further, more specific topics, we will look at our inner paradigmatic up-laut and heteroclysis, and the alternation of nouns between different stem classes, as well as some features surrounding the grammatical category of number. So let's get started. As discussed in part one of our videos on morphology, the main device used to derive nouns and adjectives from roots in Avestan is suffixation. A large number of suffixes is used for this purpose, and their distinctive semantic features are often difficult to make out. Only a small selection of available primary suffixes, that is suffixes attached directly to the root, is listed here. So for instance, the suffixes A, T, T and 2 are all used to derive nouns from the root mgaigjag, meaning to live. So we get gaia, life, gaitha, living being, gt, living and jatoo. Life, subsistency. Note that in these derivatives, the root appears in three different shapes, gaia, gt and g. Historically, these represent three different up-laut variants. I have also added an example for two more primary suffixes, man, which forms verbal abstract nouns like some of the other suffixes above, and tar, which forms agent nouns. You can look at the examples here. In contrast to the primary derivatives, we have just been looking at some nouns resist any further subdivision into root and suffix. Here we may differentiate between nominal root stems, which lack any sort of link to a verb, and root stems which simultaneously function as verbal roots. Examples for the first category would be ab, water, and krup, body. Examples for the second category gar, a song, a song of welcome, and wach, word, which stand besides the verbal roots gar to welcome and wach to say. A second class of suffixes, besides those used in primary derivation, are those used to build secondary derivatives, often adjectives, from existing nominal stems. Typical representatives include a, j, w, w, and chan. The last has an initial laryngeal, the former presence of which is still detectable from the meter of the garthas. The first two of these five suffixes can be broadly characterized as denoting affiliation. The second, the remaining three, all indicate possession. So let's look at some of the examples here. There's a noun aya, de, and if you attach a suffix a to that, it becomes an adjective, aya ra, of the de, or belonging to the de. Similarly, there's a noun geitha, the world of living beings, and in this case if you substitute the suffix a by ya, it becomes an adjective, belonging to geitha, belonging to the world of living beings. Before we turn to our next topic, the inflection of nouns, I need to point out a principle morphological distinction that runs through the inflection of avestan nouns and verbs alike. Namely, the distinction between thematic and athematic inflection. This refers to the fact that both nouns and verbs show partly distinct sets of endings, depending on the presence or absence of a stem final vowel a. The latter is conventionally called the thematic vowel. In the Young-Avestan texts, we can observe a tendency to use thematized forms, in other words, thematic forms built to originally athematic stems. This must be due to the fact that thematic inflection is generally regular and uniform, whereas athematic stems tend to exhibit upload, and sound change has often obscured the morphological structure of the inflected forms. Let us take a brief look at a sample paradigm illustrating the inflection of a noun in Old Avestan. Our sample words are the masculine astem ahura, and the neuter astem urtha, utterance, both thematic stems. To keep things simple, we shall not go into the differences between thematic and athematic inflection here, at least not systematically. I won't read out all the forms of the paradigm, but we can see that Avestan knows eight cases, nominative, accusative, vocative, dative, ablative, instrumental, genitive and locative, and three numbers, singular, plural and dual. Outside of the nominative and rarely the vocative, the declension of neuter astems is the same as that of masculine stems. Only in the nominative there is a difference, as you can see here. Nouns with feminine gender, the third out of three genders in Avestan, never end in athematic Raoul. That is, they are generally of the less regular athematic types. Interestingly, in the nominative plural of masculine thematic stems, two distinct endings are used, here exemplified by ahura and ahurangho. They don't have any known functional difference, but the one, a, as in ahura, is from a historical perspective identical with the ending of the neuter. The other, ahurangho, as in ahurangho, represents an extension of the expected animate nominative plural ending, that is also attested in Vedic. Looking at the older Avestan case inventory as such, we note an imbalance regarding the degree to which case is formally distinguished in the three numbers. In the singular of thematic nouns, a distinct form is assigned to all of the eight cases, only in athematic inflection the ablative and genitive singular are not distinguished. In the plural by contrast, the nominative, invocative, as well as the dative and ablative are harmonimous, and in the dual, the syncretism goes even further. The slight discrepancy between the singular and plural as observable in older Avestan increases when we move on to younger Avestan. In the younger Avestan, the ablative ending i-bio, athematic bio, takes over the function of the instrumental ending aish, athematic bish. Simultaneously, the athematic ending of the ablative singular is recharacterized by the element t, taken from the thematic inflection. This way, the one remaining instance of case syncretism in the singular is removed. In other words, increasing syncretistic tendencies in the plural contrast with increasing differentiation in the singular. Standing besides the one of thematic and athematic stems, the inflection of demonstrative, interrogative and relative pronouns can be regarded as a third, distinct type of inflection. In the masculine neuter, it largely follows the thematic inflection, exhibiting the same inventory of cases and numbers. Shared features with thematic noun inflection against the athematic inflection include the following. The ablative singular and instrumental plural of thematic nouns and pronouns ends in aht and aish respectively. Whereas athematic nouns have aht and bish. In fact, it is generally agreed that some of the differences between thematic and athematic inflection in early Indo-European languages are due precisely to the influence of the pronominal on the thematic inflection. But there are differences as well, as here illustrated by the demonstrative ta, that. The nominative plural masculine is toy in older western and te in younger western. Both are from older Thai. These contrast with the plural of thematic nouns, which as we have seen is a or annghu. Similarly, the pronominal endings of the nominative accusative singular neuter is ti as in tat that, whereas that of thematic nouns is m. A distinctive feature of nominal inflection in a western is the inner paradigmatic upload, which regularly affects certain classes of athematic stems. Thematic nouns, by contrast, are exempt from any sort of inner paradigmatic upload. As a general rule, only athematic suffixes a subject to upload in a western. For instance, the agent noun da ta creator appears in its full grade, da ta, in the accusative form da ta ran. But in a genitive, the zero grade variant tr is used, da thro. We have already seen some examples of this phenomenon involving other suffixes as well in our first video on western morphology. Note that the change of the voiceless top ti, as in the full grade form of a suffix, ta, to a fricative in da thro is the result of a decisive sound change in the prehistory of a western, which turned plosives into fricatives when followed by a consonant. Whereas suffix upload is widespread with athematic nouns, upload of the root syllable only occurs as an archerism preserved by a small selection of nouns. Examples are the words for lifetime, aju, which for instance in the genitive singular is jaush, and the word for path, pantor, which in the aplative singular is patho. Simultaneous suffix upload and the effects of past sound change, also involving the effects of larynges here, add to the synchronic irregularity of these nouns. As a further peculiarity, a western knows a type of heteroclitic nouns, that is, nouns in whose stem two suffixes alternate. I am talking about the so-called r-n-stems. This is a multi-productive class of neuter nouns, whose nominative accusative singular shows a suffix ending in r, either the suffix ar or the suffix war. In other forms of the paradigm, these are replaced by a corresponding suffix ending in n. Examples are the words for day, ajar, and the word for continent, karchvar, with the suffix war. The genitive singular of the former is ajan, from former ayans, where the suffix has changed to an instead of ar, and the nominative plural of the later is karchborn, where the suffix has changed from war to an. You may remember from the previous video, that the plural of neuter consonant stems is formed by lengthening the vowel of the suffix. So that's why we get the long-grade suffix van here, instead of short-grade van. A problematic phenomenon of Younger Western is the fact that in this later stage of the language, some nouns seem to oscillate between different stem classes. Or according to another viewpoint, inflectional endings proper to one stem class begin to be used with another stem class as well. A well-known case with a significant number of apparent examples is the use of long-A stem endings in the plural of neuter thematic stems. For example, whereas the regular plural of the neuter thematic noun hvartha is hvartha, we also find a plural hvartha, which looks as if it was built from a feminine A stem hvartha. In a case like this, we could be dealing with a proper ending variant, or maybe the result of a genuine conflation of the inflectional paradigms of neuter A stems and A stems. But at least in part, such forms may actually not represent the plural of thematic stems at all, but that of distinctive collective stems in A, which are itself derived from the thematic stem. So then in this case, what we are dealing with is not a problem regarding inflectional morphology, but one regarding derivational morphology. The examination of these kinds of interesting innovations in later Western is unfortunately hampered by the shaky transmission of most of these texts. A case in point is that it has been argued that feminine A stems occasionally attest plural forms which look like those of neuter A stems. An example is one occurrence of the noun heina, aami, along A stem, and in that occurrence, heina is inflected in the ablative plural, and it looks like it was neuter A stems. So we get the form hynerbio, which is distinctive for A stems, actually, from the deceitful armies. But actually, the confusing Manuset transmission in a case like that makes it very difficult to take the example as a genuine witness of this particular phenomenon. And that's the problem with most of these kind of stem class alternations we have. We simply don't have enough examples to validate whether they are real. Much less questionable is the observation that otherwise, arithmetic nouns occasionally show thematic forms in younger Western. For example, the only attested form of the root compound dyno-dis, showing the vision or religion, is the thematic nominative dyno-disso. We know that, at least originally, the underlying stem of this form must have been arithmetic because a stem dyno-disso, a thematic stem, would not formally correspond to any known type of compound. The question is then whether dyno-disso is nevertheless built from a stem dyno-disso, which has been secondarily thematized from the original root stem, or whether the form should be regarded as an arithmetic stem equipped with a thematic ending. In the remaining minutes of this presentation, I would like to point out a few phenomena surrounding the category of number in a Western nominal structure. One concerns the counting of nouns. When counting nouns in a Western, the quantity unit usually appears in the plural, or with groups of two, in the dual. The case form is the one required by the context. See the first example on the slide. Ah-mya-vah-sheh-vazonte-chath-vah-ruh-ah-vanto. Four racehorses, chath-vah-ruh-ah-vanto, pull-vah-zonte-this-chariot, ah-mya-vah-sheh. So here, ah-vah-vanto, the counting unit of chath-vah-ruh-ah-four appears in the plural and in the nominative, as required by its role as the subject of the clause. Note that the numerals from one to four reflect according to gender and case, and also number in a Western. That's why chath-vah-ruh-four stands in nominative plural masculine as well. From one hundred onwards, however, the quantity unit may appear in the genitive, in the genitive plural, to be precise. So, we get examples like hasangrem-baishasanom-bayvare-baishasanom, one thousand hasangrem-remedis-baishasanom, ten thousand bayvare-baishasanom, remedies. With remedies, not in a nominative plural, but in the genitive plural this time. Next, a few words regarding the use of the dual in noun inflection seem appropriate. The dual is most frequently used with reference to body parts or other items which come in natural pairs. For instance, see the older Western form ashi-bhiya with the two eyes from the noun ashi, which usually occurs in pairs. Ashi-bhiya is the instrumental dual form of ashi. These kinds of nouns will rarely be used in the plural. So, one could suppose that the dual endings simply function as variants of the plural endings when they occur with certain nouns. But in fact, dual inflection also frequently occurs with nouns other than those denoting natural pairs, which shows that the dual is fully alive as a grammatical category. Thus, when the poet of the older Western gathas talks about two principal kinds of mental attitude or two spirits, main yu, the dual main yu is used, the long u. A peculiar phenomenon in the Western is the use of the elliptical dual to refer to a group of two which is conceived of as a logical pair. Thus, tevishi, the dual form of the noun tevish, meaning strength, is used as an equivalent to a set phrase which usually is attested as a dvandva compound, tevishi uttayuti, strength and stability. So, instead of using these two elements, simply one dual is enough, which then points to both members of the logical pair. And the same can be said about the dual of the word for mortar, havana, here in the genitive dual, havana yos. If used in the dual, it doesn't refer just to the mortar, but also to its logical counterpart, the pestle. Finally, I'd like to draw your attention to another interesting though disputed phenomenon in a Western. It has been argued by the French-Indo-Europeanist Xavier Tromblais that the language of one specific Young-Western text, the V-Dev-Dat, contains evidence for a nominal category, numerative, a fourth number, so to say, besides singular, dual and plural. Descriptively, this refers to the use of the thematic, nominative, accusative, plural ending, a, for a thematic nouns, but only then, when they are used as counting units with numerals. In the V-Dev-Dat, we thus find examples like chvash chafna, with this so-called numerative form of the word for knight chapan, instead of the expected accusative plural chapano. According to Tromblais' attractive proposal, this may continue the formula value of the ending a, not as a plural, but as a collective marker in a Western. I thank you for watching and I hope you will join me again for the third and last video about the mythology of a Western, in which we will look at the Western verb.
 Hello there, my name is Benedikt Pechel.  Welcome back to the second video on morphology out of our introductory series on the Avestan language.  The focus of this video lies on the noun.  More precisely, I'm going to give you a broad overview of how nominal stem formation and inflection works in Avestan.  Further, more specific topics, we will look at our inner paradigmatic up-laut and heteroclysis,  and the alternation of nouns between different stem classes, as well as some features surrounding the grammatical category of number.  So let's get started.  As discussed in part one of our videos on morphology, the main device used to derive nouns and adjectives from roots in Avestan is suffixation.  A large number of suffixes is used for this purpose, and their distinctive semantic features are often difficult to make out.  Only a small selection of available primary suffixes, that is suffixes attached directly to the root, is listed here.  So for instance, the suffixes A, T, T and 2 are all used to derive nouns from the root mgaigjag, meaning to live.  So we get gaia, life, gaitha, living being, gt, living and jatoo.  Life, subsistency.  Note that in these derivatives, the root appears in three different shapes, gaia, gt and g. Historically, these represent three different up-laut variants.  I have also added an example for two more primary suffixes, man, which forms verbal abstract nouns like some of the other suffixes above,  and tar, which forms agent nouns. You can look at the examples here.  In contrast to the primary derivatives, we have just been looking at some nouns resist any further subdivision into root and suffix.  Here we may differentiate between nominal root stems, which lack any sort of link to a verb, and root stems which simultaneously function as verbal roots.  Examples for the first category would be ab, water, and krup, body.  Examples for the second category gar, a song, a song of welcome, and wach, word, which stand besides the verbal roots gar to welcome and wach to say.  A second class of suffixes, besides those used in primary derivation, are those used to build secondary derivatives, often adjectives, from existing nominal stems.  Typical representatives include a, j, w, w, and chan.  The last has an initial laryngeal, the former presence of which is still detectable from the meter of the garthas.  The first two of these five suffixes can be broadly characterized as denoting affiliation.  The second, the remaining three, all indicate possession.  So let's look at some of the examples here.  There's a noun aya, de, and if you attach a suffix a to that, it becomes an adjective, aya ra, of the de, or belonging to the de.  Similarly, there's a noun geitha, the world of living beings, and in this case if you substitute the suffix a by ya, it becomes an adjective, belonging to geitha, belonging to the world of living beings.  Before we turn to our next topic, the inflection of nouns, I need to point out a principle morphological distinction that runs through the inflection of avestan nouns and verbs alike.  Namely, the distinction between thematic and athematic inflection.  This refers to the fact that both nouns and verbs show partly distinct sets of endings, depending on the presence or absence of a stem final vowel a.  The latter is conventionally called the thematic vowel.  In the Young-Avestan texts, we can observe a tendency to use thematized forms, in other words, thematic forms built to originally athematic stems.  This must be due to the fact that thematic inflection is generally regular and uniform, whereas athematic stems tend to exhibit upload, and sound change has often obscured the morphological structure of the inflected forms.  Let us take a brief look at a sample paradigm illustrating the inflection of a noun in Old Avestan.  Our sample words are the masculine astem ahura, and the neuter astem urtha, utterance, both thematic stems.  To keep things simple, we shall not go into the differences between thematic and athematic inflection here, at least not systematically.  I won't read out all the forms of the paradigm, but we can see that Avestan knows eight cases, nominative, accusative, vocative, dative, ablative, instrumental, genitive and locative, and three numbers, singular, plural and dual.  Outside of the nominative and rarely the vocative, the declension of neuter astems is the same as that of masculine stems. Only in the nominative there is a difference, as you can see here.  Nouns with feminine gender, the third out of three genders in Avestan, never end in athematic Raoul. That is, they are generally of the less regular athematic types.  Interestingly, in the nominative plural of masculine thematic stems, two distinct endings are used, here exemplified by ahura and ahurangho.  They don't have any known functional difference, but the one, a, as in ahura, is from a historical perspective identical with the ending of the neuter.  The other, ahurangho, as in ahurangho, represents an extension of the expected animate nominative plural ending, that is also attested in Vedic.  Looking at the older Avestan case inventory as such, we note an imbalance regarding the degree to which case is formally distinguished in the three numbers.  In the singular of thematic nouns, a distinct form is assigned to all of the eight cases, only in athematic inflection the ablative and genitive singular are not distinguished.  In the plural by contrast, the nominative, invocative, as well as the dative and ablative are harmonimous, and in the dual, the syncretism goes even further.  The slight discrepancy between the singular and plural as observable in older Avestan increases when we move on to younger Avestan.  In the younger Avestan, the ablative ending i-bio, athematic bio, takes over the function of the instrumental ending aish, athematic bish.  Simultaneously, the athematic ending of the ablative singular is recharacterized by the element t, taken from the thematic inflection.  This way, the one remaining instance of case syncretism in the singular is removed.  In other words, increasing syncretistic tendencies in the plural contrast with increasing differentiation in the singular.  Standing besides the one of thematic and athematic stems, the inflection of demonstrative, interrogative and relative pronouns can be regarded as a third, distinct type of inflection.  In the masculine neuter, it largely follows the thematic inflection, exhibiting the same inventory of cases and numbers.  Shared features with thematic noun inflection against the athematic inflection include the following.  The ablative singular and instrumental plural of thematic nouns and pronouns ends in aht and aish respectively.  Whereas athematic nouns have aht and bish.  In fact, it is generally agreed that some of the differences between thematic and athematic inflection in early Indo-European languages are due precisely to the influence of the pronominal on the thematic inflection.  But there are differences as well, as here illustrated by the demonstrative ta, that.  The nominative plural masculine is toy in older western and te in younger western.  Both are from older Thai.  These contrast with the plural of thematic nouns, which as we have seen is a or annghu.  Similarly, the pronominal endings of the nominative accusative singular neuter is ti as in tat that, whereas that of thematic nouns is m.  A distinctive feature of nominal inflection in a western is the inner paradigmatic upload, which regularly affects certain classes of athematic stems.  Thematic nouns, by contrast, are exempt from any sort of inner paradigmatic upload.  As a general rule, only athematic suffixes a subject to upload in a western.  For instance, the agent noun da ta creator appears in its full grade, da ta, in the accusative form da ta ran.  But in a genitive, the zero grade variant tr is used, da thro.  We have already seen some examples of this phenomenon involving other suffixes as well in our first video on western morphology.  Note that the change of the voiceless top ti, as in the full grade form of a suffix, ta, to a fricative in da thro is the result of a decisive sound change in the prehistory of a western,  which turned plosives into fricatives when followed by a consonant.  Whereas suffix upload is widespread with athematic nouns, upload of the root syllable only occurs as an archerism preserved by a small selection of nouns.  Examples are the words for lifetime, aju, which for instance in the genitive singular is jaush,  and the word for path, pantor, which in the aplative singular is patho.  Simultaneous suffix upload and the effects of past sound change, also involving the effects of larynges here,  add to the synchronic irregularity of these nouns.  As a further peculiarity, a western knows a type of heteroclitic nouns, that is, nouns in whose stem two suffixes alternate.  I am talking about the so-called r-n-stems.  This is a multi-productive class of neuter nouns, whose nominative accusative singular shows a suffix ending in r,  either the suffix ar or the suffix war.  In other forms of the paradigm, these are replaced by a corresponding suffix ending in n.  Examples are the words for day, ajar, and the word for continent, karchvar, with the suffix war.  The genitive singular of the former is ajan, from former ayans, where the suffix has changed to an instead of ar,  and the nominative plural of the later is karchborn, where the suffix has changed from war to an.  You may remember from the previous video, that the plural of neuter consonant stems is formed by lengthening the vowel of the suffix.  So that's why we get the long-grade suffix van here, instead of short-grade van.  A problematic phenomenon of Younger Western is the fact that in this later stage of the language, some nouns seem to oscillate between different stem classes.  Or according to another viewpoint, inflectional endings proper to one stem class begin to be used with another stem class as well.  A well-known case with a significant number of apparent examples is the use of long-A stem endings in the plural of neuter thematic stems.  For example, whereas the regular plural of the neuter thematic noun hvartha is hvartha,  we also find a plural hvartha, which looks as if it was built from a feminine A stem hvartha.  In a case like this, we could be dealing with a proper ending variant, or maybe the result of a genuine conflation of the inflectional paradigms of neuter A stems and A stems.  But at least in part, such forms may actually not represent the plural of thematic stems at all, but that of distinctive collective stems in A, which are itself derived from the thematic stem.  So then in this case, what we are dealing with is not a problem regarding inflectional morphology, but one regarding derivational morphology.  The examination of these kinds of interesting innovations in later Western is unfortunately hampered by the shaky transmission of most of these texts.  A case in point is that it has been argued that feminine A stems occasionally attest plural forms which look like those of neuter A stems.  An example is one occurrence of the noun heina, aami, along A stem, and in that occurrence, heina is inflected in the ablative plural, and it looks like it was neuter A stems.  So we get the form hynerbio, which is distinctive for A stems, actually, from the deceitful armies.  But actually, the confusing Manuset transmission in a case like that makes it very difficult to take the example as a genuine witness of this particular phenomenon.  And that's the problem with most of these kind of stem class alternations we have.  We simply don't have enough examples to validate whether they are real.  Much less questionable is the observation that otherwise, arithmetic nouns occasionally show thematic forms in younger Western.  For example, the only attested form of the root compound dyno-dis, showing the vision or religion, is the thematic nominative dyno-disso.  We know that, at least originally, the underlying stem of this form must have been arithmetic because a stem dyno-disso, a thematic stem, would not formally correspond to any known type of compound.  The question is then whether dyno-disso is nevertheless built from a stem dyno-disso, which has been secondarily thematized from the original root stem,  or whether the form should be regarded as an arithmetic stem equipped with a thematic ending.  In the remaining minutes of this presentation, I would like to point out a few phenomena surrounding the category of number in a Western nominal structure.  One concerns the counting of nouns.  When counting nouns in a Western, the quantity unit usually appears in the plural, or with groups of two, in the dual.  The case form is the one required by the context. See the first example on the slide.  Ah-mya-vah-sheh-vazonte-chath-vah-ruh-ah-vanto. Four racehorses, chath-vah-ruh-ah-vanto, pull-vah-zonte-this-chariot, ah-mya-vah-sheh.  So here, ah-vah-vanto, the counting unit of chath-vah-ruh-ah-four appears in the plural and in the nominative, as required by its role as the subject of the clause.  Note that the numerals from one to four reflect according to gender and case, and also number in a Western.  That's why chath-vah-ruh-four stands in nominative plural masculine as well.  From one hundred onwards, however, the quantity unit may appear in the genitive, in the genitive plural, to be precise.  So, we get examples like hasangrem-baishasanom-bayvare-baishasanom, one thousand hasangrem-remedis-baishasanom, ten thousand bayvare-baishasanom, remedies.  With remedies, not in a nominative plural, but in the genitive plural this time.  Next, a few words regarding the use of the dual in noun inflection seem appropriate.  The dual is most frequently used with reference to body parts or other items which come in natural pairs.  For instance, see the older Western form ashi-bhiya with the two eyes from the noun ashi, which usually occurs in pairs.  Ashi-bhiya is the instrumental dual form of ashi.  These kinds of nouns will rarely be used in the plural.  So, one could suppose that the dual endings simply function as variants of the plural endings when they occur with certain nouns.  But in fact, dual inflection also frequently occurs with nouns other than those denoting natural pairs, which shows that the dual is fully alive as a grammatical category.  Thus, when the poet of the older Western gathas talks about two principal kinds of mental attitude or two spirits,  main yu, the dual main yu is used, the long u.  A peculiar phenomenon in the Western is the use of the elliptical dual to refer to a group of two which is conceived of as a logical pair.  Thus, tevishi, the dual form of the noun tevish, meaning strength, is used as an equivalent to a set phrase which usually is attested as a dvandva compound, tevishi uttayuti, strength and stability.  So, instead of using these two elements, simply one dual is enough, which then points to both members of the logical pair.  And the same can be said about the dual of the word for mortar, havana, here in the genitive dual, havana yos.  If used in the dual, it doesn't refer just to the mortar, but also to its logical counterpart, the pestle.  Finally, I'd like to draw your attention to another interesting though disputed phenomenon in a Western.  It has been argued by the French-Indo-Europeanist Xavier Tromblais that the language of one specific Young-Western text, the V-Dev-Dat, contains evidence for a nominal category, numerative, a fourth number, so to say, besides singular, dual and plural.  Descriptively, this refers to the use of the thematic, nominative, accusative, plural ending, a, for a thematic nouns, but only then, when they are used as counting units with numerals.  In the V-Dev-Dat, we thus find examples like chvash chafna, with this so-called numerative form of the word for knight chapan, instead of the expected accusative plural chapano.  According to Tromblais' attractive proposal, this may continue the formula value of the ending a, not as a plural, but as a collective marker in a Western.  I thank you for watching and I hope you will join me again for the third and last video about the mythology of a Western, in which we will look at the Western verb.
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