Írtakhoara Reference Grammar

Phonology — Consonants — Vowels — Syllabification — Stress

Morphology — Nominal Morphology · Cases · Class One · Class Two · Class Three · Class Four — Verbal Morphology · Infinitive · Indicative

Lexicon

Phonology

Consonants

Vowels

Phonotactics

Syllabification

Stress

Morphology

Nominal Morphology

Cases

There are five cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and abessive.

• The nominative is used for the subject of a sentence
• The genitive is used for possession and composition
• The dative is used for the indirect object and with certain postpositions, mainly ones that do not express movement, but also for postpositions indicating movement within
• The accusative is used for the direct object and with certain postpostionts, namely ones that imply movement towards something
• The abessive is used to mean ‘without’ and with certain postpositions indicating movement away from something

Unlike the other cases, the abessive does not distinguish between singular and plural.

Class One

Class Two

Class Three

Class Four

Verbal Morphology

Verbs come in several different forms, with different rules for conjugation:

• The infinitive, which does not conjugate
• Indicative forms, which conjugate by tense, aspect, person, and number
• Negative forms, which conjugate by tense, person, and number
• Subjunctive and optative forms, which conjugate by person and number
• Participles, which decline as adjectives

Particles are also used to express further gradation in both tense and aspect.

Infinitive

The citation form of a verb is the infinitive, which in almost all cases ends in -ul or -ol. The base form most often precedes another verb, and is also the basis for forming the participle. The stem is formed by removing this ending and is used as the basis for conjugation, with a different pattern based on whether it is applied to an u or o verb.

Indicative

There are three tenses: past, present, and future. Both aspects, the imperfective and the perfective, can be used in any tense. The negative form of the verb can also be conjugated in any of the tenses. The conjugation pattern is largely fusional.

Syntax

Numbers

Morphology

Cardinal numbers are declined as regular adjectives, except they always take third class endings, regardless of the class of the noun they are modifying: kalthí ra ta ‘in one basket’, not *kala ra ta. For larger numbers expressed with multiple words, only the final word is declined: sokh ashoris gyiseya bebatu ‘I gave her 20 gyise’ versus sokh ashor ko inyas gyiseya bebatu ‘I gave her 25 gyise’. The base forms of the cardinals other than one are used in arithmetic, when counting, or if the number is treated as a noun. However, when treated as an adjective, the nominative plural ending -(i)n must be used: anlo ‘a three’, e.g. a playing card or the value on a die, versus anlon taru ‘three cats’. Ash has an irregular genitive plural: athas, not *ashthas. This pattern holds for all larger numbers ending in ash, including orkash ‘twelve’, genitive plural orkathas.

Ordinal numbers follow similar rules in terms of declension as cardinals do. They are also treated as third class nouns or adjectives. 1 through 4 have suppletive forms, with all others being formed by adding -to to the stem of the cardinal number. However, larger numbers ending in any number from 1 to 4 will use the standard form of the ordinal: kalto, ashto, anloto, lukïto; thus kleyra ‘first’ but ashor ko kalto ‘twenty-first’.

There are suppletive forms for ½, ⅓, and ¼. In these particular cases, either kal bor ‘one half’, kal lían ‘one third’, and kal keyna ‘one fourth’ or bor ‘a half’, lían ‘a third’, and keyna ‘a quarter’ are acceptable. All other fractions use the ordinal for the denominator and the cardinal for the numerator, which is required even when the numerator is one: kal inyato ‘one fifth’ but not *inyato when referring to a fraction. A denominator which is a number ending in 2, 3, or 4 will use the ordinal form of that number, not bor, lían, or keyna: kal ashor ko anloto 'one twenty-third’. The numerator of a fraction never declines. To say a fraction of a noun, the noun takes the genitive case while the denominator of the fraction takes a case based on its use in the sentence: shyanrakho bor nesone ‘half of the seagulls are sleeping’, kal inyatothí shaninga díbatu ‘I ate a fifth of the buns’. In certain cases a fraction is treated as an adjective modifying a noun, in which case the noun declines based on its use in the sentence and the denominator of the fraction takes a case to match. If the numerator is plural, the plural form of the ordinal is used for the denominator: kal pelto ‘one seventh’ but khan pelton ‘six sevenths’.

Cardinals

11 through 19 are formed using the construction or ko + units; that is, ten and one, ten and two, etc. However, they are treated as single words, and the -o in ko is dropped when the following unit begins with a vowel or liquid: orkanlo and orklukï, rather than *orkoanlo and *orkolukï. Multiples of 10 are formed by appending the suffix -or to the numbers from 2 to 9, dropping any final vowels except for in 80 and 90: gíor and odíor, not *gor and *odor. All numbers between two multiples of ten are formed by [multiple of ten] ko [units]: lukor ko inya ‘forty-five’, pelor ko gí ‘seventy-eight’, and so forth.

To form numbers greater than 100, the same pattern is used, taking into account that ko will only appear once in each number, as near to the end as possible, thus latha ko orkodí ‘119’ and latha ko ashor ‘120’ but latha ashor ko kal ‘121’. 200 through 900 are formed using the same pattern as 20 through 90, except using the suffix -latha instead of -or, with the same rules for any other number in between. For multiples of larger numbers, they are no longer treated as single words: pel senbí ‘7 thousand’, ashor nyasïr ‘20 million’.

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