Poswa

This page presents the language as a grammar organized by subject. See Poswa/scratchpad for chronological updates.

Poswa is a daughter language of Play known for a somewhat simpler grammar and a more extreme development of the phonology. Where Play was seen as a language fit for children, outsiders muse that Poswa is the inborn language spoken by babies all across the world.

Grammar

Poswa is simpler than the famously complex Play, but also more irregular. It could be a matter of endless debate which of the two languages is actually more difficult to learn and use.

In the speech register known as High Poswa, there are no parts of speech; everything can be analyzed as a verb; therefore, everything can also be analyzed as a noun.

Poswa has lost the ability to make compounds, instead using an extensive list of derivational suffixes. Inherited compounds from Play have become opaque, and indeed, many of the derivational affixes were once independent morphemes from the original Play compounds. Many of these derivational affixes have wide semantic scope, however, and it could be said that many words formed with them are effectively separate roots. This would give Poswa a large inventory of atomic root words.

The citation form for Poswa roots is often trisyllabic, in contrast to Play, where most roots were CVCV or shorter but compounds were frequent. With inflections, however, the effective root shape in Poswa is most commonly CVCVC- or CVCCVC-, thus behaving mostly still as a bisyllabic language.