SUBJECT: | OBJECT: | OBLIQUE: | |||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
NEUTER: | ·(r)a | ·(r)a | ·(r)on | ||
EPICENE: | · | ·(r)a | ·(r)a | ||
The (r) is omitted after a consonant. Thus it's: |
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strong horse: | rasek·a kéntha | rasek·a kéntha | rasek·on kéntha·don | ||
strong king: | rasek ji | rasek·a ji·da | rasek·a ji·da | ||
The lone irregular adjective, lo (see IIIa) drops its vowel before adding case endings: |
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some horses: | l·a kéntha | l·a kéntha | l·on kéntha·don | ||
some kings: | lo ji | l·a ji·da | l·a ji·da |
In English adjectives like “strong” usually have equivalent adverbs like “strongly”, but this is not true for rasek. It is possible to use a plain adjective adverbially – rasek desen·ap is “I spoke strongly” – but this gives much the same impression as English “they played good” for “they played well”. The concept is more formally conveyed by means of a so‐called participial construction (IXd): desen·ap en rasek.
Nonetheless, many specialised adverbs do exist independent of the adjectives; they form a heterogeneous collection ranging from ¿ fatemaf ? “how much?” to puete “even”. None of them ever take any affixes or require any extra kind of agreement; if they're dependent on a verb they tend to be put in immediately preceding position, but if they're qualifying an adjective they usually follow it (e.g. rasek beit, “too strong”), and if they modify the entire sentence (as tioan “perhaps” often does) they may be at the very beginning or end.
There is no direct equivalent of the common English preposition “of”. However, the idea of “X's Y” can be conveyed simply by putting the two words together in a possessive construction: the “owner” noun, followed by the “possession” noun. The first noun doesn't take any “genitive case” mark equivalent to the English “'s” – it's only the second noun that inflects. See VIc: if the “owner” is neuter it takes a pronoun‐suffix ·es, but the epicene‐gender equivalent is zero. Thus:
Possessive phrases can be the basis of further possessivisation, and each noun can be accompanied by its own adjectives:
Be careful, though – apparent possessive phrases may turn out to be subject and object pairs before a verb, or even complete descriptive sentences with an omitted linking verb (see VIIIc):
There is no verb meaning “have”, either, though there are common verbs meaning “belong to” and “lack (not have)”: