What do you mean by nominative-absolutive?

God I have such a dumb name on here...

And by "nominative-absolutive" I mean marking the nominative and the accusative cases separately. It's also referred to as a "marked nominative" language.

Some info on Dravidian Languages would be really nice. I was reading Robert Caldwell's "A Comparative Grammar of Dravidian Languages" and got some interesting information, but I'm not sure how current his reasoning is since he keeps saying that there are a number of traits found in Dravidian Languages that are "distinctly Scythian". By "Scythian" does he mean Uralic? I remember reading on Wikipedia that linguists have compared the structures of Uralic and Dravidian languages before and come to different hypotheses about how the two superfamilies are related, but none of them have been accepted. Something on Proto-Dravidian specifically though, because I'm not sure if some of the features of Old Tamil that I would like to use in my construction of this Sprachbund would be valid at the Proto-Dravidian stage, such as classifying nouns as "rational" and "irrational". The idea is to have that be the trigger for the development of inverse number as nouns are further classified according to how they appear (in groups or not in groups), which eventually evolves into a mixed singular-plural and collective-singulative numerical system...

In most IE languages, the nominative case of nouns or pronouns (generally, as a subject) inflects differently from the accusative case (generally, as a direct object).

Thus, in Latin, puella is nominative singular and puellam is accusative singular.

Well, for anyone who was still interested in Calderish and Turjakese, I've recently picked them back up, and made a few changes. See... it had been a couple of years since I'd done anything with them, and I realized that I had never written anything down about the grammar anywhere except for my brain. So, here is the revised version of "Calderish", where I actually know what's going on:

Mrentoħo ešioŋen ketaketalk yob wiiltemnebalk oníirabekek. Oħan, Samikšoħ narkenalk siħabugalk, oríieltepusoħ usíie nišen nanenerenen.

Born/3rd pers. pl. pass. v./ free/past. Part./ diginity/ poss. Marker/ and right/pl./poss. Marker/ human/pl./omn. As well, Endow/non-past/3rd pers. pl./ reason/poss. Marker/ conscience/poss. Marker/ act/ subj. 3rd pers. pl./ adjective forming preposition/brother each other/loc. pl.

As you can see, the language is agglutinating, but not ergative-absolutive as I had previously written it (simply because I couldn't remember which affixes were marking the ergative case). Word order is VOS, and it kind of cort of conjugates verbs for passive voice as well as active. Such as in the verbal stem /mrent/ where we see the 3rd person plural marker /oħ/ plus a passive marker /o/. Active voice always comes before the fusional verb markers, and can be seen in the verb "endow" with the suffix /ik/ which is then followed by 3rd person plural marker /oħ/. Not sure why this developed. A distinct feature that I thought was a little different (but probably found all over the place on Earth) is the presence of an omnial plural by reduplication of a distributive plural suffix /ek/. /ek/ would normally refer to a specific group of people, but comes to have a more generalized meaning (all of humanity, as opposed to this group of people) when reduplicated.

I also think that I'm going to rename this language "Prassian". I had formerly been working on a conlang that I called Prassian, but I didn't like the sound of it. I'll have to rework the phonology as well now that I've done some more reading (since I was 17, lol), but there it is for now.

Oh, and the incredibly complex verbal system that I had in mind before is out the window.