Poswa nouns

Poswa preserves the six noun cases of the parent language with almost no changes in meaning or form, apart from regular sound changes. The possessive has weakened into a genitive when used with definite nouns, however. e.g. teppiopwas mupawabub "the length of the rope". Poswa has not added any new cases; so there is still no dative case and the various uses of the locative case are not distinguished.

• Nominative: The default form of the word, used as the subject of a sentence and also in genitive phrases when not indicating possession; paslam "fire"; paslam boša "fire hearth; fireplace".
• Accusative: Always marked by -p, shows the object of a verb. Žazba pasliap blabwambi "The girl put out the fire".

Number and animacy

Animacy

Poswa distinguishes between animate and inanimate nouns, but there is no grammatical marker distinguishing the two; they simply must be learned. However, in nearly all cases, the difference follows semantics, so this is not a source of difficulty for students of Poswa.

Body parts, and inalienable nouns in general, inherit their animacy from an implicit "parent noun", and therefore are understood as animate nouns in any context, even if the person whose body they belong to is a corpse or a doll. It is not necessary for the parent noun to be in the sentence if it can be implied from context. Thus the sentence Wavwub wepuwap baepobbi means "My fingers pressed into the sand" because the final -i on the verb baepobbi "pressed" indicates that the subject of the sentence is the speaker. Wavwub just means "fingers", but despite not being marked with a possessive ending, inherits its 1st person meaning from the verb. Thus, for example, the sentence Wavwub wepuwap baepobbel means "His fingers pressed into the sand" simply because the verb ending has changed. This pronoun-free setup is the usual manner for talking about sentences where a body part is the subject; however, adding a pronoun such as fo "I" would not be incorrect.

In a very old stage of the language, an infix -a could be inserted into any inanimate noun to make it an animate one. A few doublets still survive, but this infix was never used often and few speakers are aware of its former existence.

Number

Plural suffixes

There is no "grammatical" plural in Poswa in the sense that there is not a separate table of forms for plural nouns in each declension. To pluralize a noun, either -by or -bum is added. The difference between the two is that -by implies separation amongst the individual items being described, whereas -bum implies that they are working together. An animate noun can take either of the two suffixes depending on which meaning is intended; inanimate nouns have a fixed plural form, however, in a manner similar to the way nouns have genders in Spanish and some IE languages. Learning the pattern here is much more difficult than learning the difference between animate and inanimate nouns because there is no significant connection between the semantic meaning of a noun and the categorization of that noun as belonging to the -by or the -bum class. Such words are simply called "by nouns" (blwaššum) and "bum nouns" (bumblaššum) in Poswa.

The -by and -bum suffixes interact with the nouns they modify, particularly those ending in voiceless consonants, using the same sound rules that other compounds do. For example, the noun paspys "square" pluralizes to paspyžbum because of a sound rule automatically changing all sb to žb. Poppup "knife" changes to poppubum because of a sound rule automatically changing all pb to bb and another one causing the simplification of the second of two consecutive geminate consonants. The -by suffix merges in different ways.

Loanwords are generally placed into the bum class, making it the more productive of the two. A small number of native words have changed class over time, often due to reanalysis. For example, the native word for "rain" was pleb, a regular development from Babakiam piyu. But this came to be seen as a plural consisting of a dummy stem ple and the plural suffix -by (the final y is usually ommitted in Romanization, as there are no words with a plain final -b.) Thus a new word, ple, meaning "raindrop" was coined, which has no Bābākiam form. Then, a new plural plebum came to be used for the more common noun "rain", and pleb fell out of use. A similar story explains what happened to the commonest word for an army. Originally, the word for army was pamby, a regular development from Bābākiam pamimiu. This was a singular noun. However, it came to be reanalyzed as a plural, and given that the -by suffix generally denoted things that were seen as separate pieces, not part of a greater whole, the word was changed to pambum to reflect a unified army. Note that this new word has no singular form, and that "double plural" forms such as *pambumbum used to mean "armies (plural)" are considered inappropriate. Instead the pambum word is used with a modifier meaning "several", "many", or whichever meaning is intended.

Singulatives

From nouns that denote crowds or mass nouns, a singulative suffix -ba can be added to denote one piece or one member of it. For example mabem means "soap", and mabemba means "a bit of soap; some soap (to clean with)". Note that this -ba suffix is derived from Bābākiam viba, not ba, and therefore does not collapse the way some other suffixes beginning with -b do; the /b/ remains always a /b/.

Possession

Possession markers can be placed on any noun, e.g. papwopwa "dog"; papwopio "my dog"; poppup "knife" ---> poppuwio "my knife". The stem to which the possession marker attaches is called a soppu. These are historically related to the verbal inflections and thus can be mapped one-to-one with them; however, they behave as nouns.

Inalienables

It could be said that there are actually two types of possessive markers: the plain type which can be applied to any noun, and a different type that is mostly used with inalienable nouns such as body parts. Poswa does not actually consider this to be a type of possession, but rather groups it with the demonstratives. Its meaning is often equivalent to a locative rather than a possessive, provided one thinks with a mindset that "the arm on me" refers to one's own arm whereas "my arm" could mean an "arm" that one has purchased as a store.

Definiteness

Poswa has no articles or demonstrative pronouns, so distinctions such as English "the dog", "a dog", "my dog", and "that dog" must be made in other ways. Generally, a noun used in bare form at the beginning of a sentence is best translated with the English indefinite article unless context makes it clear that it is referring to a previously mentioned entity. Thus, a sentence pair like English "A horse was asleep in the field. The horse woke up when it began to rain." would be translated with the same word for horse, with no additional affixes, in both sentences. To indicate a "new" horse, most often the suffix -pamy "other, another, different" is placed on the second instance of the noun.

Noun declension overview

Noun declensions are complicated by the fact that unlike Poswa verbs, Poswa nouns change even the stem when an inflectional suffix is added. That is, there is no "barrier" between the stem and the suffix that keeps the stem mostly intact. Instead of declensional tables, the entire last syllable must be taken into account in order to determine the various forms. Thus it could be said that there is a declension for every syllable. However, with just a few simple rules, the patterns can be easily perceived.

Regular noun declensions

-a

The commonest noun declension is for nouns ending in -a. Below is the declension of pliopa "waste pail, trash can" (long words are used to prevent the suffixes from infecting the stem). Note that the line marked "(Oblique)" is not a case, but a stem that for some nouns is the same as the nominative, and for others is different. The oblique form of the noun appears in a few other constructions aside from case marking, as well.

For possession, 3rd person is used:

pliopa

Case	Free	Possessed(3p)	Attached
Nominative	pliopa	pliofa	pliofa
(Oblique)	pliopa	pliofa	pliofa
Accusative	pliopap	pliofap	pliofap
Locative	pliopam	pliofam	pliofam
Possessive	pliopas	pliofas	pliofas
Essive	pliopel	pliofel	pliofel
Instrumental	pliopob	pliofob	pliofob

-bum

The very common plural suffix -bum has its own declension, differing from both the -m class and the -um class. Below is the declension of wupsibum, meaning "citizens". Note the divergent possessive forms.

For possession, 3rd person is used:

wupsibum

Case	Free	Possessed(3p)	Attached
Nominative	wupsibum	wupsibwa	wupsibiae
(Oblique)	wupsibie	wupsibwa	wupsibie
Accusative	wupsibiep	wupsibwap	wupsibiep
Locative	wupsibiem	wupsibwam	wupsibiem
Possessive	wupsibies	wupsibwas	wupsibies
Essive	wupsibiel	wupsibwel	wupsibiel
Instrumental	wupsibie	wupsibwob	wupsibie

Irregular nouns

Poswa has many irregular nouns. Most of these are single-syllable nouns whose entire stem changes because the various suffixes placed after it "infect" the stem by causing various sound changes which were never ironed out. Many suffixes are really historically infixes, after all, and in the early stages of the language, when it was still known as Babakiam, an infix that changed even the initial consonant of a noun would not have been seen as irregular.

Body parts and suppletive plurals

Many words for body parts have suppletive plurals. Poswa nouns in general are not marked for number; the plural suffixes -by and -bum are not required to specifically mark out a noun as plural; they are often used to specify the "type" of plural being spoken about. On the other hand, words for some body parts are specifically used with a meaning specifying number. For example, pep means "hand" (singular), pwop means "hands" (dual), and pes means "hands" (plural). The difference between the dual and the plural in this context is that pwop is used with the meaning "both (of your) hands" whereas pes is used for any number of hands greater than one, without specifying whether they belong to the same person or not. Thus two people shaking hands are touching their pes, but one person pulling on a paper towel dispenser with both of his hands is using his pwop.

Many of these suppletive word families are short words, and are irregular in terms of their noun declensions as well. For example, the accusative form of lwep "thumb" is not the expected *lwetšep but lattšep. In Bābākiam, this pattern was perfectly regular, but it was never regularized as the sound changes destroyed the original pattern. (Note that the word for thumb is more commonly tšolwep, but the accusative of this is still tšolattšep, maintaining the same irregular pattern.)

Other irregular nouns

But most irregular nouns are not words for body parts. For example, the locative of the word blem "bottle" is not the expected *blidžem or *bledžem but miam. Similarly, the accusative of blub "milk" is not *blup or *blop or even something like *miop (in the manner of blem above), but blwop. One-syllable words often change their entire form to an alternate stem for case endings. These words are often also irregular with other suffixes such as the "illative", which is not normally considered a case. Thus to say "Pour the milk into the bottle!" one would say Blwop mivwam gwubi! However, note that there is also a specific verb meaning "to pour into a bottle; to bottle" which would yield the more regular-looking sentence Blwop blembwubi! In this sentence, the verb nu "to pour" mutates into bw but protects the "bottle" word from its own mutation. However, like all compound verbs, this one implies an indefinite meaning, and thus sounds roughly like the equivalent English sentence "Bottle the milk!" which one would not normally say to someone sitting with a bottle in front of them.

Most of the irregular nouns can be more easily understood if a second, "oblique", stem is perceived that appears on every case except the nominative, and which declines according to otherwise normal rules. This system works well because, while there are a lot of irregular nouns in Poswa, very few of them are irregular in more than one way. For example, blem behaves chaotically from the point of view of its main stem of blem, but is perfectly normal if one thinks of an alternative stem *mia. Likewise, if blub "milk" is replaced with an otherwise nonexistent *blwu, it too declines regularly according to the patterns expected of such a noun (although since there are two -u classes, one would still not know which of the two patterns to place blub into without already knowing the other forms).

Mistaken identity

Unlike many IE languages, there is no suffix for the nominative case. Thus it cannot be known for certain what case a noun seen in isolation is in. For example, twup means "louse", but it is also the accusative case of twub "urine", which is etymologically unrelated. The accusative of twup is also twup, one of only a few such words in Poswa. Also unrelated is twu "water", whose accusative is twop but which has an instrumental case in twub. Meanwhile there is also the plural suffix -by, usually Romanized as just a -b after a vowel. Thus twub can mean "urine", "using water", or "waters". However the third use is uncommon because water is seen as a mass noun, and would only make sense in a situation comparing, for example, the water quality of several different lakes.

Pronouns

Pronouns are used very rarely in Poswa. They are not fully distinct from nouns, and indeed, Poswa does not even have a word for "pronoun". The pronouns listed below are merely grouped together as a convenience for learners, as they do not behave the same as each other and are not seen as a natural grouping by Poswobs.

The major pronouns are:

Pabo

Pabo literally means "I am speaking" and serves as a first person singular pronoun. It is usually omitted in favor of markings on verbs and nouns.

For example, the sentence

Pabo pabom sadžaniep lamblebi pabos wišul, meaning "I picked off the ants (that were) on me with my toothpick"

can be replaced with the much simpler and less repetitive

Sadžaniaep lamblebi wisaži.

In the second sentence, all three words are marked for person. Sadžaniaep means "the ants on me" (accusative), lamblebi means "I picked up, I picked off", and wisaži means "with my toothpick". Thus there is no need for any pronouns. However, pronouns can still be used for emphasis, in which case the inflections on the other words are usually retained.

Baby

• Baby means "group, plurality" and serves as a first person plural pronoun.

Bum

• Bum also means "group, plurality" but carries the additional sense of that group working or behaving as an indivisible unit.