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Adjectives!
Adjectives aren't the most brilliantly interesting of things.
But they're important.
As usual, Nrit has joyfully created a mess of affixes to add to adjectival
stems. Generally, adjectives can be seen as a sort of different flavor
of verbs, that behaves in a slightly different manner. Sometimes, stative
verbs are rendered as adjectives. The complex tenses of verbs are also
rendered with adjectives in addition to a special verb.
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The Structure of Adjectives:
An adjective inflects for case, person, and tense. The case agrees
with the case of the noun being modified, except in the case of nouns that
are the objects of postpositions of place. In this instance, the adjective
takes the oblique regardless of the noun's case. The adjective's tense
represents the tense of the modification; see below. Adjectives have
their fluid stems deriven as if they were Pattern 1 verbs.
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Tense
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Meaning
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Present
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The default
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Past
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A quality no longer had
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Future
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A quality not yet had
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Eternity
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An inherent quality
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Never
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A contradiction or impossibility
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The adjective's person corresponds to the speaker's
attitude to the quality. The first person shows that it is a personal
opinion or a metaphorical/poetic usage, the second person refers to the opinion
of another, and the third to absolute fact.
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The Inflection Of Adjectives:
The consonantal affix is shown first, followed by a slash and the vocalic
affix.
If only one affix is shown, it is the same in both.
If that affix is monosyllabic and has consonants at both ends of the syllable,
or contains no vowels, the consonantal form is suffixed to a reduplicated
final stem vowel, and the vocalic form is prefixed to that vowel.
As there is no such thing as a "weak adjective", there are no weak forms
shown.
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Nominative
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Accusative
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Genitive
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Oblique
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Present
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ni
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Cni
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Vxìi / xìi
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vì
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First
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Et. / Pa.
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Vsì / sì
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Csì
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Vstìi
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zvì
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Ne. / Ft.
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lìì
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Clìì
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Vlsìi
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vlì
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Present
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x
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CxV / nxV
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Vxis / stis
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Vvax / vVx
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Second
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Et. / Pa.
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Vs.a / s.V
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Cs.V / ns.V
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Vs.is
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Vsca / scV
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Ne. / Ft.
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Vlax / lxV
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ClVx / nlVxa
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Vs.lîs
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Vrazva / rzVva
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Present
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Vkk / kk
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CVkk / nVkk
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xîk
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Vfka / vVka
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Third
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Et. / Pa.
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sq
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CVsq / nVsq
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s.îk
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sVfk / zvVka
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Ne./ Ft.
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krV
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Crek / nrVk
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Vlxîki / lxîkV
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lVfk / lvVka
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The Creation of Complex Tenses:
A complex tense is conjugated with the auxiliary verb laua / lauara, which
has no meaning on its own and irregularly takes weak affixes in all tenses,
in addition to a verb stem inflected as an adjective in the nominative case
and the appropriate person. Passives put laua in the the passive voice,
but not the adjective, as adjectives do not have a grammatical passive.
Though laua does have a present tense, it is unnecessary to use it.
Example: If I were to say "I was about to fall",
you would use laua in the past and tlila, fall, in the future, saying "Tlilâssalìì
lauarasììh". If you said "I will have fallen", you'd put
tlila in the past and laua in the future, saying "Tlilâssasì
lauaralììh". In both cases, the verb laua is passivized
so that the personal pronoun may be omitted (Tlila requires an accusative
subject, which cannot be omitted as it's accusative, but if it's passivized
then the pronoun becomes nominative and is droppable.)
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Webpage graphics by the inestimable Jaguarwoman.
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