Kalon grammar notes

A Small Introduction to Kalon

Kalon is a heavily aggluntinating language, though not nearly polysynthetic. It's not particularly usual, but once you have a hold of the most important rules, you should do fine.

Nouns

Nouns are the most important type of word in Kalon. They inflect for tense, voice, gender, mood, and two types of cases. The first(and most important) type of case is suffixed onto the noun. It represents the actual semantic role. There are five such cases -

-n transitive agent (The _dog_ bites the man)
-a transitive patient (the dog bites the _man_)
-o intransitive agent (the _dog_ bites)
-p intransitive patient (the _man_ is bitten)
-t postprepositional case(without a preposition, is locative)

The second group of cases are more usual cases, and are prefixed onto the noun

na- Ergative (the _dog_ bites the man)
pa- Absolutive (the dog bites the _man_, the _dog_ bites)
i- Nominative (the _dog_ bit the man, the _dog_ bit)
la- Accusative (the dog bit the _man_)

The latter two are used in the past tense, the former in the present - this is the sole way of marking tense. The Ergative and Absolutive are not normally mandatory - they are used in the passive voice - if an ergative is used with a transitive patient, and an absolutive with a transitive agent, the sentence is in the passive voice.

There is a special class of words, called 'nominal auxilliaries', that mark mood, and sometimes aspect and similar features much the same way as a modal verb might. These are nouns, in the postprepositional case. They might also be used as normal nouns, however.

Verbs

Verbs are not particularly important in Kalon. They do not inflect, instead remaining the same, whatever the tense, aspect, mood, or voice.

Adjectives

Adjectives agree with the gender of nouns. They appear before the nouns. The noun genders are as follows:

-u masculine
-i feminine
-e undefined
-o neuter

Pronouns

Pronouns have no actual nucleus - instead, they are a conglomeration of affixes, marking number, relationship to speaker, relationship to addressee, person, gender, and case. The gender and case affixes are identical to those in nouns.

There are three numbers -

o- singular
pe- paucal(a small to average amount of X)
ti- plural

The relationship to speaker markers are identical to the relationship to addressee markers -

-ka- family
-nu- friend
-ho- aquaintance
-le- known
-na- not known

There are four persons -

-to- 1st person
-pi- 2nd person
-yu- Proximate 3rd person(the main character)
-no- Obviate 3rd person(secondary characters)

In the spoken language, all but the relationship markers are optional, largely used to clarify meaning. However, in the written language, pronouns are usually written out in full.

Pronouns are also placed after a noun, to mark its definiteness.

They are mandatory in relative clauses - a Kalon sentence cannot exist without a full set of arguments.

Word Order

Word Order is VSO

Other things

If two nouns are transitive actors, and there is no verb, insert 'to be'.