No accusative marker on 'horse'?

[luckeon]

Hi everyone,

I'm writing a school paper on Dothraki, and cannot figure this sentence out. This is how I've glossed it:

Jano-Ø   lajak-i    ost-Ø      hrazef.
Dog-NOM    warrior   -GEN   bite-S.PST   horse-***
‘The warrior's dog bit a horse.’

Why is horse not marked for the accusative (hrazefes?)? The absence of a case ending makes it look like the Nominative case, but that doesn't seem to make sense.

Thank you,

[luckeon]

Compare:


Anha       saj-ak          sajo-es.
I.NOM      mount-1S.PRES   steed-ACC
‘I mount the steed.’

[Qvaak]

Dothraki has two kinds of words, animate and inanimate. These are grammatical categories, so it's quite normal that you can speak of a same thing with both animate and inanimate nouns - sajo is an animate noun, hrazef inanimate. Inanimate nouns are simpler in many ways, and this is to say they carry less explicit information in their declension scheme. If an inanimate noun in nominative ends in consonant, the nominative and accusative cases are identical; if it ends in vowel, the vowel is dropped or changed to epenthetic /-e/.

[luckeon]

Thank you so much! It didn't occur to me that horses could be inanimate! (especially to the horse-loving Dothraki!)

[Hrakkar]

Keep in mind that 'animate' and 'inanimate' do not necessarily completely follow whether or not an item is alive or not. It is a kind of 'gender', and in linguistics, 'gender' doesn't necessarily have to do with sex, like you see in French and Spanish. In fact, David Peterson has indicated that inanimate and animate words correspond to a not-totally-explained gender system of 'grass words' and 'sky words'. Thinking on this, it is not totally implausible for hrazef to be inanimate, as a horse is a terrestrial animal and eats much grass.

There are some other horse terms that are animate, though.

[luckeon]

The way I see it, it appears almost as though 'horse' functions like a mass noun (~'horse-ness', therefore inanimate), whereas 'stallion', 'steed' etc are specific kinds of horses and therefore animate.

[ingsve]

The way I see it, it appears almost as though 'horse' functions like a mass noun (~'horse-ness', therefore inanimate), whereas 'stallion', 'steed' etc are specific kinds of horses and therefore animate.

Yes, that's possibly true. Inanimate nouns are often mass nouns.

David has stated that the animacy of nouns make sense when looked at in a historical perspective but not in modern day Dothraki. David started by creating a proto-plains language from 1000 years in the past and then developed Dothraki as a decendant language from that.