Grammar
Grammatically Proto-Uralic was an agglutinative language with at least six noun cases and verbs inflected for number, person, mood and tense. There were three numbers, singular, dual and plural. Proto-Uralic was a nominative–accusative language. Verbs may have had a separate subjective and objective conjugation, the latter of which was used in connection with a definite object.
Grammatical gender was not recognized and no Uralic language does so even today. Noun articles were unknown. The plural marker of nouns was *-t in final position and *-j- in non-final position, as seen in Finnish. The dual marker has been reconstructed as *-k-, but the dual number has been lost in many of the contemporary Uralic languages. The nouns also had possessive suffixes; possessive pronouns were not found.
The cases had only one three-way locative contrast of entering, residing and exiting. This is the origin of the three-way systems as the three different ones in Karelian Finnish (illative/inessive/elative, allative/adessive/ablative, translative/essive/exessive). The partitive case, developed from the ablative, was a later innovation by Fennic languages.
The cases were:
- nominative (no suffix)
- accusative *-m
- genitive *-n
- locative *-na / *-nä
- ablative *-ta / *-tä
- lative *-ŋ
Further cases are occasionally mentioned, e.g. Robert Austerlitz's reconstruction of Proto-Finno-Ugric includes a seventh, adverbial.
Verbs were conjugated at least according to number, person and tense. The reconstructions of mood markers are controversial. Some scholars argue that there were separate subjective and objective conjugations, but this is disputed; clear reflexes of the objective conjugation are only found in the easternmost branches, and hence it may also represent an areal innovation. Negation was expressed with the means of a negative verb *e-, found as such in e.g. Finnish e+mme "we don't".
Read more about this topic: Proto-Uralic Language
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