Siye: Animate Instrumental Case -neki
Current Martian Year: 2220 A.D.
Diligent readers may recall that it is rude, ungrammatical, and even immoral to use the Instrumental Case -ki with animate nouns. If one should suffer the misfortune of needing an animate instrumental, such as a ditransitive causative construction in the imperfective mood, one must resort to circumlocutions such as -ne koki 'by the hand of'. Note that the circumlocution prefers the more alienable Genitive Suffix -ne to the inalienable Possessive Suffix -me.
Another possibility, more rarely used in careful composition, oral or written, but the source of the case suffix under discussion, is the use of the dummy noun e- and the Instrumental Case suffix -ki to form a postposition eki which takes the Genitive Case to form -ne eki. This form, most common in rapid speech, deteriorated before 2192 into -neki, but did not receive authorization until the new locative cases, Illative -nemtu, Elative -nemsum, and Inessive -nemkim, did so.
In the last 2190s, there was a brief attempts by bolder writers to liberate the Animate Instrumental Case from its subordinate status in clauses, but by 2199 the effort had been abandoned. It is worth noting that such episodes of experimentation are not rare in the history of Standard Siye. The Guild of Scholars does not oppose the natural change of a language over time, but seeks to regulate it so that all may communicate clearly and there are less disputes that could flare up into armed conflict.
Diligent readers may recall that it is rude, ungrammatical, and even immoral to use the Instrumental Case -ki with animate nouns. If one should suffer the misfortune of needing an animate instrumental, such as a ditransitive causative construction in the imperfective mood, one must resort to circumlocutions such as -ne koki 'by the hand of'. Note that the circumlocution prefers the more alienable Genitive Suffix -ne to the inalienable Possessive Suffix -me.
Another possibility, more rarely used in careful composition, oral or written, but the source of the case suffix under discussion, is the use of the dummy noun e- and the Instrumental Case suffix -ki to form a postposition eki which takes the Genitive Case to form -ne eki. This form, most common in rapid speech, deteriorated before 2192 into -neki, but did not receive authorization until the new locative cases, Illative -nemtu, Elative -nemsum, and Inessive -nemkim, did so.
In the last 2190s, there was a brief attempts by bolder writers to liberate the Animate Instrumental Case from its subordinate status in clauses, but by 2199 the effort had been abandoned. It is worth noting that such episodes of experimentation are not rare in the history of Standard Siye. The Guild of Scholars does not oppose the natural change of a language over time, but seeks to regulate it so that all may communicate clearly and there are less disputes that could flare up into armed conflict.