Re: Verbless language

Kio Mau hal:
>And what about the pure grammar? Sounds a fair tongue to me
>thus i'm curious.
<HUMOR TYPE="bad">It's not fair at all. In fact, it browbeats words into
submission and reserves the lion's share of attention for the lexicon.
I've tried to make it behave, but the whole system is set up to support
it. </HUMOR>

Anyway, Kiohala has a normal word order of SOV*, adverbs in the back,
extra prepositional phrases before the verb. Of course, this word order
is greatly morphable, just like any language with a plethora of cases.
It's commonly abridged to emphasize one element of the sentence. Noun
phrases consist of some or all of these elements in this order:
preposition, adjective, noun, quantifier, article or possessive, and
prepositional phrase.
*Though not really, since the verb is just a noun that has [usually] lost
its gender marker.

Right now, the only inflecting case I have made is the genitive. It's a
prefix of |j| /j/. *cackles at the knowlessmen who try to pronounce
Kiohala* More cases will be added in the fullness of time. Perhaps I'll
change o "and" to be an affix.

There are two genders, masculine and feminine. At present, they only
affect nouns and adjectives (adjectives match the noun's gender), though
I may add gender to the verbs as well. I like that idea. Perhaps I could
even have two verbs for each meaning, one masculine and one feminine. Or
I could make it like the adjective system and say that verbs used to be
adjectives.
Masculine: seqtro majy /'sE:tro mai/, plural seqtrov majenqy /'sE:trov
ma'jE:ni/ (smart king)
Feminine: seqtre wenqa /'sE:trE 'PE:na/, plural seqtrev wenqa* (smart
queen)
*Haplologized from "wenqenqa".

Oftentimes, I don't need any sort of verb because the rest of the
sentence naturally implies it. For instance, I have done away with "give"
and "have" already.

I just realized that this language is somewhat like Ebidesian in its odd
cases, though I isolate and H.S. Teoh inflects, or perhaps agglutinates.

~Chris Wright
On me slavery from language most recent my.