Inflections:
Ikanirae Seru has exactly one inflection: nouns and pronouns are pluralized by prefixing y- before a vowel and i- before a consonant. This is entirely regular.Pronouns, articles:
There are no articles.Third person pronouns distinguish 4 genders or animacy classes, broadly characterized as "personal/rational" |eki|, "animate non-personal" |aku|, "living inanimate" |sera| and "non-living" |roha|. It's actually messier than that, but the messiness doesn't show up in this text. There are no masculine/feminine distinctions, and animacy classes are not distinguished in first and second person pronouns.
Syntax:
Sentence-type markers:Every Ikanirae Seru sentence ends with a sentence-type marker, which takes the place of sentence-final punctuation. The two used here are |a|, which marks statements, and |e|, which is used to mark both exclamations and incomplete sentences (sentences that do not contain both a subject and a verb). This text does not contain the question marker |i|, the imperative marker |o|, or the formal statement marker |u|.
Word order:
Word order is strictly SVO. Adjectives precede nouns. Adverbs and auxiliaries precede verbs. Prepositions, not postpositions are used.
Tense:
Ikanirae Seru has three tenses, past, present and future. Past and future indicated by particles preceding the verb, and do not appear in this text. Present is unmarked.Relative clauses:
Relative clauses are introduced by |se| "that". Ikanirae Seru really doesn't like leaving out subjects or objects, so the relativized element is represented by a pronoun in the relative clause. Here are a couple examples:rao se uti koimu eki
boy that I see him
"(the) boy that I see"rao se eki koimu uti
boy that he see me
"(the) boy that sees me"Clauses introduced by |one|:
I'm not quite sure how to explain these, but I'll try, since I used one. I think they're what is known as adverbial clauses. They are usually loosely associated with the rest of the sentence, and their English equivalents often contain a verb in the present participle; for example, the English sentence "staring at the beast, I did not see my friend" could be translated as:uti ka ha koimu tiuu ro uti one uti koimukaimo ma ooko aHere, the |one| clause (staring at beast) is the cause of the main clause (not seeing friend), but this is not always the case. This example also shows how tense in |one| clauses is relative to the tense in the main clause - present tense in |one| clauses refers to the time of the main clause, past tense refers to time before that of the main clause, and future tense refers to time after that of the main clause.
I not PAST see friend of me with I stare to beast STATEMENT