Wednesday 26 May 2010

Adjectives

Adjectives in Tulvan are invariable in number, declension or gender. They follow their respective nouns and they are divided in two main groups. There are full adjectives and derived adjectives, the last type are marked by an attributive prefix i-. One will notice that sometimes an English adjective doesn't have a full adjective in Tulvan. Even though this could be fixed by the attributive making it a derived adjective, sometimes this can give an awkward expression for native Tulvans.

This is the case, for example, with such words as "good" in most common greetings. This is not expressed by an adjective in Tulvan, but by a word meaning "well-being" as a noun. Also this is the case for some more complex derived adjectives. Needless to say colors belong to the full adjectives category. So we have for example:

trum ni nari. Good night.
but actually; "well-being in the night (for you)".

Adjectives always follow their noun:

Crum nus. The old man.
Utim cip. The new tree.
Nwir cnara. The black sky.

This also applies to derived adjectives with the attributive prefix.

Crum itrum. A good man.
Roth icrum. A mannish woman.

So adjectives are quite simple, invariable and don't agree with the noun they modify.

Gud dapau crum itrum uroth itrum. A good man must look for a good woman.

5 comments:

  1. I think this is a typo:
    "Adjectives always precede their noun";
    you mean 'always succede', right?

    Funny that we both use a mix between male and female as an example: I used гυнοωc ("of the male women") to show the infix -o- to differentiate it from the normal гυнωc ("of the women").

    ReplyDelete
  2. Certainly a typo, thanks, I will correct that right away.

    Lol, that's true, we both thought of a similar example. I guess those are the first words you invent in a language and so are easy to use.

    ReplyDelete
  3. By the way thanks for the comment and it's great to see you back in action! I've been checking your last updates :)

    ReplyDelete
  4. What do you mean "back in action"? I was away only a week or so.

    And yeah, glad we can share some thoughts.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Yes, in any case, it's good to see the new updates!

    I'm glad too we can share some thoughts. Do you have an active email account we could exchange some mails?

    ReplyDelete