Kamakawi grammar notes

The romanization is very close to X-SAMPA. The only differences are that an apostrophe ' is a glottal stop [?], and a y is a palatal glide [j]. Just some general stuff: Kamakawi VSO, with prepositions, no cases, and the adjective follows the noun. More specific information will be given below, and you can also get info from my website: http://dedalvs.free.fr/kamakawi/main.html.

Just a couple quick notes. First, Kamakawi uses a switch-reference system not unlike Hittite. Luckily, there are only two of the markers used here, and they're the two easiest to understand. Basically, the first word of any clause will be a marker which will indicate whether the subject of the sentence is the same as that of the previous sentence, or whether it is different/new. So, of course, the very first marker will always indicate a new subject. The new subject marker is /a/. After the first sentence is through with, and you go on to the next sentence, though, there are two possibilities. If the second sentence begins with /a/, this means that there is a new and different subject from the first sentence. If the sentence begins with /e/, this means that the subject of the second sentence is the same as the subject of the first. If this is the case, the subject will not be specified (in this way, Kamakawi is a kind of pro-drop language).

A second note is about the word order. Kamakawi is VSO, but specifically, it'll be: (1) Subject marker; (2) verb; (3) subject NP; (4) predicate marker or other preposition; (5) object NP (either of the verb or the preposition; (6) other PP's; (7) adverbs. Since there is a lot of zero derivation in Kamakawi, and since adjectives follow the nouns they modify, and since adverbs come sentence finally, it can look, on paper, like a final adverb is actually an adjective modifying the last NP. When spoken, there would be no confusion, since the phrase-level intonation would differ, but in writing, I'll simply say: Be aware of this.

A final note is that there is an obligatory predicate marker /i/ in Kamakawi. It precedes all nominal predicates, unless replaced by another preposition (this happens in one sentence above). When the subject is dropped, the predicate appears before the very first NP. What this means is that while a normal Kamakawi sentence (with a transitive verb) looks like: "A verb X i Y"--a sentence with the same subject marker will look like "E verb i Y". A final note, when a verb has multiple direct objects, the predicate marker /i/ must precede each object.

That should be all the necessary notes that can't be handled by the wordlist to follow. A word of caution: There is one relative clause above. It shouldn't be tough to figure out, but if you're having trouble with it (or identifying it), I have a section on relative clauses on my website at: http://dedalvs.free.fr/kamakawi/rclauses.html.