in the absolutive case: besuro (fish [sg.]) → besuro-bi (fish [pl.]). For all other cases, the suffix is -za; thus, "of the fish [pl.]" becomes besuro-za-s. Case There are eight syntactical and a much larger number of locative cases, which distinguish three categories: location, orientation, and direction. Thus, counting the locative and non-locative cases together overall, there are 39 cases. Tsez is an ergative–absolutive language, which means that it makes no distinction between the subject of an intransitive sentence and the object of a transitive one. Both are in the unmarked absolutive case; the agent of the transitive sentence is in the ergative case. According to Ramazan Rajabov, the oblique stem of 42% of the nouns is different from the absolutive stem. Some nouns change their internal structure (such as a vowel), but others add one of about 20 so-called "thematic suffixes" to their end, to which the other case suffixes are attached. For example, the word for "language" or "tongue" is mec, but its oblique stem is mecre-, hence its plural is mecrebi, the ergative mecrā and so on. Rajabov says that the choice of the correct thematic suffix is sometimes difficult even for native speakers. It is likely that their origin lies in an application of two different plural forms, in a similar way as in English the word "children" actually has two archaic plural endings: -(e)r and -en. In Tsez it is sometimes even possible to use both the archaic and the regular and more productive -bi plural for a word. Syntactic case suffixes Of the two genitive cases, the first is used as attribute to an absolutive head noun and the second to an oblique one. That means, that the Genitive 1 is used for phrases like žekʼu-s is (the man's bull), and the Genitive 2 is used for žekʼu-z is-er (for the man's bull). The Equative 1 is used to make comparisons, like besuro-ce (like a fish) and can also be attached to other cases. Rajabov suggests 3 more syntactical cases, namely possessive 1 (-łay), possessive 2 (-xu) and abessive (-tay). However, their status is debatable, as they seem to show both inflectional as well as derivational tendencies. Locative case suffixes The allative case is also called 'versative'. In the distal paradigm, it is used in the sense of "behind" or "beyond" and is then called 'posterior'. Of the forms, the upper one shows the