Definite: definiteness or state
Definiteness in Erzya is an inflectional feature of nouns and proper nouns, as well as adjectives, determiners and numerals when an NP head is contextually elided and the, more often than not, definite morphology aligned with that head is directly concatenated to the NP-final modifier. Definite morphology, when associated with the core cases: nominative, genitive and dative, is definite/determinate in nature, it indicates known and retreivable referents, on the one hand, and especially in the nominative indicates topic and post-posed topic.
Def: definite
Examples
- [myv] цёратне “the men”
- [myv] аванзотне “the ones belonging to his/her mother”
- [myv] ваксонзотне “the ones next to him/her”
- [myv] паксясотне “the ones in the field”
- [myv] кудовтомотне “the ones without homes”
- [myv] пандошкатне “the ones as big as mountains”
- [myv] сонзэ вастызь кода инязоронть “he was received like the king”
Ind: indefinite
Examples
- [myv] сонзэ вастызь кода инязоронь “he was received like a king”
Definite in other languages: [bej] [bg] [el] [en] [es] [fr] [ga] [hu] [hy] [it] [ky] [myv] [pcm] [pt] [qpm] [sga] [sl] [sv] [tr] [u] [urj] [xcl]