Tpaalha Grammar

Tpaalha Language Navigation: Home, Phonology, Grammar, Vocabulary, Orthography

Tpaalha is a fusional language. It follows nominative-accusative morphosyntactic alignment. The language is mostly head-final, with some head-initial features. The default word order is subject-object-verb (SOV). The language has postpositions, although postpositional phrases follow the nouns they modify. "True" adjectives precede the nouns they modify, however, these are few in number. Most terms that function as adjectives are instead postpositional phrases with nouns, which may indicate whether the quality described was acquired on purpose or accidentally, and follow the nouns they modify. Similarly, relative clauses follow the nouns they modify, and possessors follow their possessees.

Nouns

Nouns decline for case and number. There are two cases, nominative and partitive, and three numbers: singular, dual, and plural. The declension of nouns depend on the initial (and to some extent, final) sounds of the noun root. In particular, noun roots beginning with the velar stops k and g and/or consonant clusters differ in how they decline. Plural forms (especially plural partitive forms) often feature voicing of the initial consonant. Sound changes also sometimes affect the form of the dual stem.

Vowel-initial roots

Vowel-initial roots such as uzyih "opossum" decline in the following manner:

	Singular	Dual	Plural
Nominative	uzyih	uzyipsyi	zguzyih
Partitive	guzyih	guzyipsyi	uzguzyih

Consonant-initial roots

Roots beginning with gr such as graam "sap" decline somewhat differently:

	Singular	Dual	Plural
Nominative	graam	gransyi	zgraam
Partitive	ugraam	ugransyi	uzgraam

Roots beginning with kn such as knaan "nose" inflect in a yet again different manner:

	Singular	Dual	Plural
Nominative	knaan	knansyi	zuknaan
Partitive	uknaan	uknansyi	uzgnaan

Roots beginning with sht such as shtah "leaf" show some unique sound changes:

	Singular	Dual	Plural
Nominative	shtah	shtaksyi	zushtah
Partitive	ushtah	ushtaksyi	uzzhdah