Naeso/Grammar

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This page describes the grammar of Naeso.

As with all other pages with votes on them, please keep checking back often! Your vote counts!

Basics

• Naeso is fusional.
• Naeso uses VSO word order.
• Word types:
  • Nouns: Naeso has nouns.
    • Verbal nouns: Naeso has verbal nouns.
  • Verbs: Naeso has verbs, including sou "to be" .
    • However, Naeso does not have the verb "to have". "To own", "to carry", "to possess", "to keep", etc, and also an existential structure can replace it.
  • Adjectives: Naeso has adjectives.
  • Adverbs: Adjectives/adverbs are a single class of modifiers.
    • I think that we should consider making adverbs a different class from adjectives, created by inflecting adjectives, to resolve the ambiguity with multiple descriptors discussed below. We could maybe even make things that describe adverbs another class, created by using the same inflection on adverbs. —MJ

Nouns

Nouns in Naeso are most commonly found as part of a prepositional phrase. They inflect for the genitive and various plural forms. The following table uses the words anka "duck" and ian "cat" as examples:

	nominative	genitive
singular	anka / ian	ankabi / ianbi
additive plural	ankan / ianun	ankabin / ianbin
associative plural	ankadun / iandun	ankabin / ianbin
collective plural	ankati / ianti	ankabin / ianbin

Verbs

• Verbs do not conjugate according to subject or object.
• Verbs inflect for Mood/modality and Aspect.
• Verbs do not inflect for tense (we have the temporal preposition fui for that), validationality, or plural.

What moods are marked by inflection?

• Interrogative.
• Imperative/hortative/jussive, for first, second, and third person.
• Abilitative, i.e. equivalent of English "can/may" auxiliary verbs.
• Desiderative, i.e. equivalent of English "want/wish" auxiliary verbs.

Question

I have found two interrogative suffixes: -li and -tu. What have we to do? --MM

We determined early on that we would let usage define meaning. Those words have been 'voted in', which means they're free to use when you decide to use Naeso, but their exact meaning (what kind of questions they're used for) was purposely left open-ended. --BF

Modifiers

This section is about adjectives and adverbs, which are a single class of modifiers.

When you want to apply multiple modifiers to the same noun, just string them together after the noun, e.g. "my red fish" could be dovui dol sibi or dovui sibi dol. Use a comma when ambiguity seems likely, i.e. when it might be uncertain whether a modifier modifies another modifier or the noun.

Comparison

In Naeso, comparison and similar things (e.g. "more", "most", "less", "least", "very") are formed using a suffix on the modifier. For example, 'a very large house would be house large very.

For comparing two things, you would uses a…

2011-6-16

"than" particle — 2/1 (FH,BF,/MM,)

… after the adjective with the comparison suffix, and then add the element to compare to. For example, "better than the book" would be good-more than book. There could also be a second "than" particle for constructs like "this tastes better than it looks": taste good-more than look bu ke, bu ua.

I propose another possibility - it can be expressed by using just genitive case: good-more book-gen ("better than the book"). In the second case we will use verbal nouns: taste good-more it-gen look-gen. --MM.

2011-6-20

genitive comparison — 1/2 (MM,/FH,BF,)

• I see three problems with this: 1, with this the principle that adjective phrases can be ordered however you want would become invalid. 2, it would make recursion stop working. 3, the example with verbal nouns does not fit into Naeso's existing style at all. —FH

Pronouns

This is the complete table of personal pronouns in Naeso.

	singular	plural
1st person	si	lynh (inclusive) sim (exclusive)
2nd person	y pae (someone who recently joined the chat) tha (someone who's been part of the chat for a while)	ym
3rd person	ze the (male human) je (female human) ke (nonhuman) ipu (current participant in the current chat) yl (sometime but not current participant in the current chat) tyma (nonparticipant in the current chat)	bel

Naeso also has other pronouns including:

• ua and inna — this and that
• poynh — the interrogative pronoun
• soa — the pronoun for the last (most recent) line of chat posted by the speaker
• ky — the pronoun for the last (most recent) line of chat in general

Gendered singular pronouns

Naeso has optional gender-marking in its third-person singular pronouns. The pronoun "ze" can be used for a specific person whose gender is unknown or which the speaker doesn't wish to specify (the equivalent of Esperanto "ri"), or for a nonspecific person (the equivalent of French "on", Esperanto "oni", formal English "one").

IRC-oriented singular pronouns

Naeso has distinctions in its second-person pronouns depending on whether the addresse is a regular on IRC or is only occasionally on the current channel.

Naeso has optional distinctions in its third-person pronouns depending on whether the mentioned person is a participant in the current chat, someone on IRC at times but offline (or possibly away) at the moment, or someone who's never on IRC. The pronoun "ze" can be used for a specific person whose IRC status is unknown or which the speaker doesn't wish to specify, as well as for a nonspecific person.

How, if at all, those will be used outside of IRC, will be determined by actual usage.

Prepositions

It's been decided that Naeso has prepositions, and that it will use prepositions for marking cases/thematic roles. A fair number of prepositions have been voted in on the Dictionary pages and others are currently being voted on.

The most animate or topical preposition (i.e., roughly the "subject") in a given sentence will inflect for definiteness (i.e., equivalent of "the/a" in English). Typically this will be "ku", "jen", or "bu" (see the Dictionary page).

Other prepositions can be marked for definiteness for clearing up ambiguity or artistic reasons.