Lugamun Grammar

LUGAMUN GRAMMAR
Introduction · Phonology and spelling · Word order · Noun phrases · Pronouns · Verb phrases · Adverbs · Questions · Numbers · Comparisons · Prepositions · Conjunctions · Dependent clauses · Emphasizing parts of a clause · Reduplication · Word formation · Expressions · Capitalization and proper names

Introduction

Principles

Lugamun is a highly analytic language, just like Mandarin (Standard Chinese). Words rarely change for purely grammatical purposes, instead the grammar mostly relies on word order and small words – often called particles – to clarify meaning and context.

While the goal of being highly analytic generally takes precedence, Lugamun also tends to be a fairly “average” language. Those structures and solutions that are most typical among the world’s languages are generally preferred. Explanations of why the grammar looks as it does will often refer to WALS, the World Atlas of Language Structures. References that start with “WALS” refer to a specific chapter number (e.g. “WALS 77” refers to chapter 77). If no additional information is given, this means that the most widespread solution described in that chapter has been adopted.

In cases where it provides additional useful information, we also consult APiCS, the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures – a similar knowledge source covering only pidgins and creoles. References that start with “APiCS” refer to a chapter in that source.

Typographic conventions

English words and phrases cited as examples or translations are enclosed in ‘half quotation marks’.

Words and phrases in Lugamun are written in bold, often followed by a translation enclosed in ‘half quotation marks’. Words from other languages are written in italics, possibly followed by a translation as well.

Phonetic symbols use the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and are enclosed between /slashes/.

XXX Add an updated version of Lugamun: 400 words and big progress with the grammar as a short summary document between this chapter and the next (“Lugamun in a Nutshell”).

LUGAMUN GRAMMAR
Introduction · Phonology and spelling · Word order · Noun phrases · Pronouns · Verb phrases · Adverbs · Questions · Numbers · Comparisons · Prepositions · Conjunctions · Dependent clauses · Emphasizing parts of a clause · Reduplication · Word formation · Expressions · Capitalization and proper names

Phonology and spelling

An auxiliary language should have a phonology that’s fairly average – it shouldn’t have more sounds that the average language (though it may have less) and it should only have the vowels and consonants that are most common among the world’s language, arranged in syllables that aren’t more complex than what’s average among the world’s languages.

Its spelling should use the globally most widespread writing system (the Latin script) and the spellings used for each sound should be easy to recognize for a large number of people as well as easy to type.

Lugamun’s phonology and spelling were developed on these principles. They are based on information found in WALS and PHOIBLE, a repository of the phonemes (sounds) that can be found in the world’s languages.

Vowels and diphthongs

According to WALS, the average number of vowels used by the world’s languages is slightly below six (WALS 2 – read: WALS, chapter 2). If we round this down, it means that our language should have no more than five vowels – which is also by far the most frequent size of the vowel inventory among the world’s languages (ibid.). We allow the five vowels that occur in at least 60 percent of the world’s languages, according to PHOIBLE:

a /a/ as in Spanish or Italian casa, and like or similar to the a in ‘father’ and for many (especially British) speakers in ‘bat’ (open central or front unrounded vowel).
e /e/ as Spanish bebé, French fée, or the e in ‘hey’ – but without the following i-like sound (mid or close-mid front unrounded vowel).
i /i/ as in ‘free’ or Spanish tipo (close front unrounded vowel).
o /o/ as in Spanish como or French sot, and like or similar to the o in ‘tore’ (mid or close-mid back rounded vowel).
u /u/ as in ‘boot’ or Spanish una (close back rounded vowel).

The vowels may be considered as arranged in the following chart:

	Front	Back
Close	i	u
Mid	e	o
Open	a

Notes:

No other vowel occurs in more than 37 percent of the world’s languages, making this a very clear choice.
This vowel system corresponds to several typical features as described by WALS: There are no contrastive nasal vowels and no front rounded vowels (WALS 10–11). Tone is not a distinctive feature of words (WALS 13).
Though derived independently, this vowel system also corresponds well to the phonetics of typical creole languages as analyzed by APiCS, the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures: there are no tone distinctions (APiCS 120), no nasal vowels (122), and no schwa (123).

Diphthongs are two vowels that are pronounced jointly as part of the single syllable. The first vowel is pronounced as usual, followed immediately by the second vowel, which is pronounced quickly and without stress. Neither WALS nor PHOIBLE has clear information on diphthongs, but another database called LAPSyD does. Following this database, we accept three diphthongs into our phonology:

ai /ai̯/ – similar to the vowel in ‘price’
au /au̯/ – similar to ‘mouth’
oi /oi̯/ – similar to ‘choice’

In cases where a combination of vowels looks like one of these diphthongs, but should actually be read as two separate vowels that belong to different syllables, an apostrophe is inserted between the two letters to make the intended pronunciation clear: o’i represents two syllables, while oi represents just one.

Notes:

To see diphthong frequencies, follow the LAPSyD link given above, then select “Aggregate Vowel inventory” instead of “Show Language list” and click “show visualization”. To sort the results, click on the “count” column in the “Diphthongs” table. Four diphthongs occur in at least twelve of the investigated languages. The rarest of these – /ei̯/ – is formed of vowels that are directly next to each other in the vowel chart given above. In the case of such related vowels the risk is higher that people will clearly articulate just one half of the diphthong (reducing /ei̯/ to /e/), therefore we don’t admit this diphthong, but we accept the other three.
The use of the apostrophe as a vowel separator is inspired by pinyin.
Some linguists distinguish between “falling diphthongs” – as described here – and “rising diphthongs” which are sequences of an approximant (or semivowel) followed by a vowel. The latter will be covered below.

Consonants

According to WALS, the median number of consonants among the world’s language is 21, while the average (rounded down) is 22 (WALS 1). We should admit no more than that to keep our language fairly easy to pronounce for most people. We allow most of the consonants that occur in at least 25 percent of the world’s languages, according to PHOIBLE – with some restrictions motivated below. This results in a core set of 18 consonants:

b /b/ as in ‘bus’ (voiced bilabial plosive).
c /t̠ʃ/ as in ‘child’ (voiceless palato-alveolar sibilant affricate).
d /d/ as in ‘dog’ (voiced alveolar or dental plosive).
f /f/ as in ‘fish’ (voiceless labiodental fricative).
g /g/ as in ‘get’ (voiced velar plosive).
h /h/ as in ‘high’ (voiceless glottal fricative). May also be pronounced /x/ as in Scottish English ‘loch’ or German Buch (voiceless velar fricative).
j /d̠ʒ/ as in ‘jump’ (voiced palato-alveolar sibilant affricate).
k /k/ as in ‘kiss’ (voiceless velar plosive).
l /l/ as in ‘leg’ (alveolar or dental lateral approximant).
m /m/ as in ‘mad’ (bilabial nasal).
n /n/ as in ‘nine’ (alveolar or dental nasal).
p /p/ as in ‘pick’ (voiceless bilabial plosive).
r /ɾ/ as in Spanish caro (voiced alveolar tap or flap). May also be pronounced /r/ as in Spanish perro (voiced alveolar or postalveolar trill, “rolled R”) or /ɹ–ɻ/ as in English ‘red’ (voiced alveolar, postalveolar, or retroflex approximant).
s /s/ as in ‘sit’ (voiceless alveolar sibilant). May also be pronounced /z/ as in ‘zoo’ (voiced alveolar sibilant).
t /t/ as in ‘tape’ (voiceless alveolar or dental plosive).
v /w/ as in ‘weep’ (voiced labio-velar approximant). May also be pronounced /v/ as in ‘view’ (voiced labiodental fricative).
x /ʃ/ as in ‘sheep’ (voiceless palato-alveolar sibilant).
y /j/ as in ‘you’ (voiced palatal approximant).

The voiceless plosives (k, p, t) may be pronounced with aspiration, as frequently used in certain English words such as ‘pin’, and as in Chinese 口 (kǒu), 旁 (páng), 透 (tòu). The absence or presence of aspiration does not signal a difference in meaning.

Four other consonants are optional:

Adjacent vowels that don’t form a diphthong should be pronounced clearly separate from each other, as they belong to different syllables. Optionally a glottal stop, /ʔ/ – as in the middle of ‘uh-oh’ – may be pronounced between such vowels. Either pronunciation is fine, and if you don’t know what a glottal stop is, don’t worry about it.
Before g or k, n is commonly pronounced as /ŋ/ as in ‘sing’ (velar nasal) rather than /n/ – e.g. inglis /iŋˈglis/ ‘English’. The usual pronunciation /n/ is also fine, however.
The combination ny may be pronounced as /nj/ – the sequence of the two consonants which these two letters usually represent – or as the single consonant /ɲ/, as in Spanish enseñar or Swahili nyama (voiced palatal nasal). Either pronunciation is fine.
The combination ts may be pronounced as /ts/ – the sequence of the two consonants which these two letters usually represent – or as the single consonant /t͡s/ (voiceless alveolar sibilant affricate), as in Mandarin 早 (zǎo) or Russian царь (carʹ). Either pronunciation is fine. For the purposes of hyphenation, t is still considered to end a syllable and s to start the next one, even if both are pronounced as a single sound.

The letters q, w and z are not used, except in proper names and foreign words.

The following chart shows all the non-optional consonants:

	Labial	Alveolar	Post-alv.	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Nasal	m	n
Plosive	p b	t d			k g
Fricative	f	s	ʃ (x)			h
Affricate			t̠ʃ (c) d̠ʒ (j)
Rhotic		ɾ (r)
Approximant		l		j (y)	w (v)

If the spelling differs from the IPA symbol, it is shown in parenthesis.

Notes:

/z/ and /v/ occur in 27–30% of the languages listed in PHOIBLE. But they are rarer than their voiceless equivalents /s/ and /f/, and a voicing contrast exists most typically in plosives, but not in fricatives, which include the sibilants (WALS 4). So, to avoid introducing such a voicing contrast, we don’t admit these sounds as separate phonemes. /z/ is admitted as a variant pronunciation of its voiceless equivalent.
/v/ could conceivably be considered an acceptable alternative to several other consonants. Its voiceless equivalent /f/ would be one candidate, while speakers of languages exposing the widespread phenomenon known as betacism might consider it most similar to /b/, and speakers of languages that treat /v/ and /w/ as allophones – such as Hindustani – might consider it most similar to /w/. Historically, the letter w has developed out of v. In the Classical Latin alphabet, v represented both the vowel /u/ and the semivowel /w/. Only in later times did the pronunciation of that semivowel shift to the fricative /β/ (still widespread in modern Spanish as an allophone of /b/) and in other Romance languages further to /v/. Because of the Hindustani allophony of /v/ and /w/, the historical development of /v/ in modern Romance (and related) languages out of classical /w/, and the visual similarity and joint origin of the letters v and w, we treat /v/ as a acceptable alternative of /w/. Accordingly, /v/ in the source languages typically becomes /w/ in Lugamun (written v for reasons that will be further explained below).
All additional sounds occurring in at 18 percent of the world’s languages are admitted as alternative pronunciations of the sound or sound combination to which they can be considered most similar.
As rhotic consonants vary a lot between the world’s languages and it might be hard for people to get used to new ones, we allow the three most common rhotic consonants as pronunciations of r. But which one should be the preferred pronunciation? According to the PHOIBLE data, the trill /r/ might be the most widespread pronunciation (44%), followed by the tap or flap /ɾ/ (26%). However, /r/ is probably overcounted at the cost of other rhotics because of transcribers sometimes using the simple letter /r/ instead of the IPA letters for other rhotics, which are less easy to type. Among our source languages, a tap or flap is actually somewhat more common than the trill. Japanese, Spanish, Swahili, and some widespread Arabic variety such as Egyptian and Moroccan Arabic use the alveolar tap or flap /ɾ/, while Hindustani uses the voiced retroflex flap /ɽ/. On the other hand, Standard Arabic (but not all dialects), Indonesian, Russian, and Spanish use the alveolar or postalveolar trill /r/. While this is a close call, the tap or flap seems a bit more common cross-lingustically; moreover, it is arguably easier to learn for those not used to either than the trill, and more similar to the approximant /ɹ–ɻ/, which is used in English and (by some speakers) in Mandarin Chinese. Therefore we recommend the tap or flap as standard pronunciation, while admitting the other variants as alternatives.
Aspired plosives are relatively rare – they occur only in 20 percent or less of the world’s languages – therefore they are only allowed as alternative pronunciations.
/ʔ/ and /ɲ/ are kept optional to avoid difficult-to-distinguish “minimal pairs” – words that differ only in the absence or presence of a glottal stop between vowels or in the usage of /nj/ versus /ɲ/.
The velar nasal /ŋ/ is considered an alternative pronunciation of /n/ in certain positions rather than an independent phoneme because only a minority of languages allow it at the start of syllables (WALS 9) and our rules for syllable structure – as explained below – don’t allow it at the end of syllables either. Hence no position remains where it could occur as an independent phoneme. Instead we allow the alveolar or dental nasal /n/ to become velar before the velar plosives – a combination that is common in English, Hindi, Indonesian, Mandarin, and other languages.
Without requiring further changes, our consonant inventory corresponds to several other features analyzed as most typical by WALS. There are six plosives: /p, t, k, b, d, g/ (WALS 5). The only lateral consonant is /l/ (WALS 8). There are no uvular consonants and no glottalized consonants (WALS 6–7). There are no clicks, labial-velars, pharyngeals, or ‘th’ sounds (WALS 19).

To avoid confusion between words that are pronounced, the core vocabulary will generally not include pairs of words that differ only in small details. Specifically, this means:

Pairs where one word has the voiceless affricate c and the other has its voiced equivalent j. Since we have can ‘give birth’, we won’t have jan; and since we have jenis ‘gender’, we won’t have cenis.
Pairs where one word has a vowel, while the other has the equivalent semivowel. Since we have ya ‘he, she’, we won’t have ia.
Pairs that differ only in the presence or absence of an apostrophe.

Notes on the spellings:

The above spellings are based on three criteria: avoid diacritics to be easy to type for everyone (many Latin-based languages use some diacritics, but they generally don’t agree on which ones); follow the “one sound – one letter” principle where it is reasonable to do so; and use representations that are already well-known from widely spoken languages. The vowel spellings are obvious, as the five vowel sounds correspond to the five vowel letters in the Latin alphabet in a self-evident way. Most consonant spellings are also quite obvious – in all cases where English and the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) agree on a spelling, other Latin-based languages tend to use the same spelling, which can therefore be used without requiring further discussion. The five consonants where this it not the case will be discussed next. In these cases, the resolution is to use one of the spellings that are most common among the most widely spoken languages using the Latin alphabet, but preferring single letters over sequences of two (or more) letters if both are used. The following analysis is based on those of the 25 most widely spoken languages that use the Latin alphabet (English, French, German, Hausa, Indonesian/Malay, Javanese, Portuguese, Spanish, Swahili, Turkish, Vietnamese). Additionally pinyin, the romanization of the most widely spoken language that uses another writing system, is considered as well. Since only five of our ten source languages use the Latin alphabet (English, French, Indonesian, Spanish, Swahili), we need to consider a wider basis here.
/t̠ʃ/ is written c in Hausa, Indonesian, and Javanese. English, Spanish, and Swahili use ch, but we prefer the representation that uses just one letter.
/d̠ʒ/ is written j in English, Hausa, Indonesian, Javanese, and Swahili. No two other considered languages share the same common representation, making this the obvious choice.
/k/ is written k in German, Indonesian, Javanese, pinyin, Swahili, and Turkish. In English and Vietnamese, it is usually c or k, depending on context (the sound that follows); in French, Portuguese, and Spanish it is usually c or qu, depending on context. c might be considered an alternative, but those languages that use c for /k/ use that spelling only in certain contexts, while c before front vowels such as e and i is typically pronounced /s/ or similar. This would make misreadings likely if c were used everywhere. qu would be a conceivable alternative, but it is much less common than k and uses one letter more without any obvious advantage.
/w/ is written w in English, Hausa, Indonesian, Javanese, and Swahili; w or u (after initials) in pinyin; u in Portuguese and Spanish (typically after /k/ or /g/ or in diphthongs); u or sometimes o in Vietnamese (in the same positions); ou or sometimes w in French. The most common spelling would therefore be w, closely followed by u (which, however, is needed for the vowel). But the allowed alternative pronunciation of /w/ is /v/ (most typically written v in languages using the Latin alphabet), and it would be somewhat odd to have w, but no v, considering that w is graphically “double v”, so it takes a bit more space in printing and a bit more time in handwriting than a single v would. Historically, the letters u, v, and w all have developed out of v, which used to represent both /u/ and /w/ (but not /v/) in the Classical Latin pronunciation (as noted above). To avoid the “pointless” doubling that having just w would entail, and as a nod to the Classical Latin alphabet, we therefore write /w/ as v. This can also be considered a “compromise” between w (double v) and u (visually similar to v and of the same origin, but needed for the vowel), these being the two most common representations of this sound. Finally, writing v facilitates the integration of words from European languages that have /v/ (such as eviden ‘obvious, evident’); while this sound is converted to /w/, the spelling is typically preserved.
/ʃ/ is written as sh in English, Hausa, and Swahili; as ch in French; as ch or x in Portuguese. x is also used in several other Romance languages. Standard Chinese doesn’t have /ʃ/, but pinyin uses both x and sh for quite similar sounds – x for /ɕ/, the voiceless alveolo-palatal sibilant fricative, and sh for /ʂ/, the voiceless retroflex sibilant fricative. We prefer the single letter x over the digraphs.
/j/ is y in English, Hausa, Indonesian, Javanese, Swahili, Turkish, and occasionally also in French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Vietnamese. No two other considered languages share the same common representation, making this the obvious choice.

Syllable structure and hyphenation

According to WALS the most typical and median syllable structure among the world’s languages may be called “moderately complex” (WALS 12). Except for proper names, all words in our language should correspond to this structure. This means that syllables may have the form (C)V(C), where C represents a consonant and V a vowel (which might be a diphthong). In other words, syllables consist in a vowel which is optionally followed and/or preceded by a consonant.

The form CCV(C) is also allowed, but only if the second consonant is a liquid (l or r) or a semivowel (v or y). Lugamun’s phonology is further restricted by only allowing the following pairs of consonants at the start of syllables:

bl, fl, gl, kl, pl, sl
br, dr, fr, gr, kr, pr, tr
cv, dv, gv, hv, kv, sv, tv, xv
by, cy, fy, ky, my, ny, py, xy

Note that v and y can be considered as consonantal equivalents of the vowels u and i. If you don’t know how to pronounce them or have difficulties pronouncing them in any of these clusters, just pronounce the vowel quickly and without stress, followed by the actual vowel which forms the core of the syllable.

All syllables end in either a vowel or one of the consonants l, m, n, r, s, t. Sequences or two or more consonants don’t occur at the end of syllables. If you find it difficult to pronounce any of the allowed consonants in a syllable-final position or to pronounce a cluster of three consonants that might result if a syllable ending in a consonant is followed by one that starts with two, you might add an unstressed neutral vowel (the so-called schwa /ə/, as at the start of ‘about’) or e at the end of the syllable.

Though they would be allowed by the rules listed above, the consonant combinations ry, sy, ty are avoided in Lugamun. Instead the semivowel is replaced by the corresponding vowel i in such cases (ri, si, ti), for example in nasion ‘nation’ and sosieti ‘social’. In these and other cases you may pronounce an unstressed i or u followed by another vowel as the corresponding semivowel (y or v) if you wish. Hence nasion may be pronounced as /nasiˈon/ or as /nasˈjon/, just as you prefer.

Within roots, a diphthong is never immediately followed by another vowel; in cases where this might be an option, the second part of the diphthong is instead replaced with the corresponding semivowel. For example, the Arabic numeral أَوَّل (ʾawwal) is adapted as aval /aˈwal/, not as *aual or *auval. Sequences of a diphthong followed by a vowel are, however, possible in compounds, e.g. the root dau and the suffix -isme form the compound dauisme.

Rationale:

The specific set of consonants allowed to end a syllable was chosen on the basis of our source languages. Only consonants that commonly occur in a word-final position in at least half of them were accepted, with the further requirement that at least two of the source language that allow them must be non-Indo-European. The latter restriction was motivated by the fact that Indo-European languages tend to be much more generous in the set of final consonants they accept than other languages, at least among our sources. As Japanese, Mandarin, and Swahili are particularly restrictive regarding final consonants, the practical result is that the final consonants that commonly occur in both Arabic and Indonesian are allowed in our phonology as well.
There is only one consonant allowed in two or more non-Indo-European source languages that fails the “half of all our source languages” criterion: the velar nasal /ŋ/, which in a word-final position can only be found in English, Hindi, Indonesian, and Mandarin. Since it is also rare at the beginning of syllables (WALS 9), this means that no position remains where it could occur as an independent sound. Hence we only accept it as an optional consonant into our phonology.
The consonant pairs allowed to start syllables are those that occur in this position (more frequently than as rare exceptions) in at least five of our ten source languages. Moreover, consonant pairs that occur in this position in Mandarin Chinese are also allowed even if they only occur in two or three other source languages. This adds adds six clusters ending in one of the semivowels -v and -y that would otherwise not be allowed (cv, cy, hv, tv, xv, xy). The reason for these additional admissions is that such consonant–semivowel pairs are very widespread in the Chinese vocabulary, where each core concept tends to be represented by a single syllable. Changing the semivowel to a vowel in such cases (hence dividing the single syllable into two) would make words of Chinese origin much less recognizable.
Two additional pairs that would fulfill the above criteria have, however, been excluded: dy because in rapid speech it can sound quit similar to j, and ty because it can sound similar to c. For the same reason, ty is also avoided between vowels, where it could otherwise still occur (since t is allowed to end a syllable). Likewise, sy is avoided between vowels because in rapid speech it can sound quit similar to x. The combination ry is avoided since it could be quite hard to pronounce, especially if one speaks the r as an approximant, as usual in English and Mandarin.

As in all languages using the Latin alphabet, words can be divided at syllable boundaries to better fill the line. If syllables are separated by an apostrophe, the word is simply broken after the apostrophe; otherwise a hyphen is added before the line break. The following rules are recommended for hyphenation:

Never separate the first or the last letter from the rest of the word. For example, don’t divide avan (its syllable structure is a-van); divide beria as be-ria, but not as beri-a.
If there is just one consonant between vowels, it belongs to the second syllable, e.g. du-bu, glu-hoi, na-ya.
If there are two consonants between vowels and the first of them is allowed at the end of syllables, divide between them, e.g. ar-bol, las-te, sen-to.
Otherwise the last two consonants preceding a vowel belong to the second syllable, e.g. sa-fra, in-glis.
These rules apply to words that have been incorporated into Lugamun’s phonology and spelling. Non-adapted words from other languages should be hyphenated according to the syllable structure of the language they come from instead, e.g. Wash-ing-ton, Frank-furt.

Stress

If a word has two or more syllables, one of its last three syllables carries the main stress. The stressed vowel is always the last vowel before the last consonant. If there is no such vowel, the first vowel is stressed.

Examples where the last syllable is stressed (the stressed vowel is always printed in bold):

aual, dodes, duan, hitam

Examples where the next-to-last syllable is stressed:

akai, busu, dulse, kula, situasi

Examples where the third last syllable is stressed:

furui, religia

Note: “No fixed stress” is the most common general stress rule, considerably more frequent than any placement of stress on the same syllable in all words (WALS 14). Among languages who don’t have fixed stress, a relative majority has “stress on ultimate or penultimate syllable” (WALS 15). We somewhat deviate from this pattern, by allowing the third last syllable to be occasionally stressed as well (WALS calls this “right-oriented”), since the resulting rule is easy to describe and remember and fits our vocabulary quite well.

In long words, every syllable that separated by an odd number of other syllables from the stressed one may be considered as carrying secondary (less strong) stress (WALS 17). In the following example, the vowel carrying secondary stress is printed in italics:

ramarama

Generally, word stress (also called “lexical stress”) is much less important than in English, and if you stress all syllables evenly, that’s quite acceptable as well. However, if you stress a syllable, it should be the one described here.

LUGAMUN GRAMMAR
Introduction · Phonology and spelling · Word order · Noun phrases · Pronouns · Verb phrases · Adverbs · Questions · Numbers · Comparisons · Prepositions · Conjunctions · Dependent clauses · Emphasizing parts of a clause · Reduplication · Word formation · Expressions · Capitalization and proper names

Word order

SVO order

Lugamun’s typical sentence structure can be described as subject – verb – object (SVO), just as in English. Both the subject and the object are noun phrases or pronouns, which will be described later. The verb phrase will also be described later.

Simple sentences have just a subject and a verb.

Ya nulis. – He/She is reading.

The object, if present, is usually placed after the verb.

Mi ama ti. – I love you.

Prepositional phrases are most typically placed at the end of the clause, after the object (or after the verb, if there is no object).

Mi li da buku a Tom. – I gave the book to Tom. / I gave Tom the book.

Note: Among the world’s languages, subject-object-verb (SOV) is somewhat more frequent (41%) than SVO (35%), but both are very common (WALS 81). SVO is used by eight of our ten source languages (all except for Hindi and Japanese) and by most creole languages (APiCS 1), therefore we prefer it.

The subject and object markers

Lugamun has two little words – typically called markers – that can be placed at the beginning of the subject or the object to mark them unambiguously as such. I marks the subject, while o marks the object. In sentences that use the typical SVO order, these markers are optional and usually omitted. Instead of the above example, you could also say:

I mi li da o buku a Tom.

But such usage is rare, because the sentence is clear without the i and the o.

However, the object marker must be used if you place a prepositional phrase between the verb and the object. For example, you could also say:

Mi li da a Tom o buku.

In this case, the o is required and cannot be omitted.

From time to time there may be sentences that are so long and complex that it’s not trivial to detect where the object starts. In such cases, it may be a good idea to use o to clarify this.

Alisa no miru no tem prepre o rabit gen au poket jilet au kotoke gi tu estre de it. – Alice (Alisa) had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it.

In such longish sentences, the o helps to clarify their structure, making it easier for the reader or listener to make sense of them. Using it is therefore helpful, though the sentence remains legal without it.

The markers i and o also allow varying the word order, deviating from the usual SVO order. The various verb_markers that permit unambiguously marking the beginning of the verb phrase can be useful for the same purpose. This will be discussed later.

LUGAMUN GRAMMAR
Introduction · Phonology and spelling · Word order · Noun phrases · Pronouns · Verb phrases · Adverbs · Questions · Numbers · Comparisons · Prepositions · Conjunctions · Dependent clauses · Emphasizing parts of a clause · Reduplication · Word formation · Expressions · Capitalization and proper names

Noun phrases

Noun phrases identify and describe people, things, places, concepts, and other entities. Noun phrases are made up of several parts, which occur in the following order:

determiners – head noun – modifier words – adjectives – possessive

Except for the head noun, all elements are optional.

Head nouns

The head noun identifies the entity described by the noun phrase, e.g.

arbol – tree
kat – cat
kofi – coffee
tem – time

A head noun by itself can be a complete noun phrase. Nouns looks the same regardless of whether they are used as the subject or object of a verb – case is not marked (WALS 21, 28, 49; APiCS 57). Nor do they change to express number or quantity – these are instead expressed using a quantifier (see below) or referring from the context.

Note that there are no articles – and English words ‘a/an’ and ‘the’ have no equivalent in Lugamun. Usually the context makes it clear whether the noun refers to something already known or something new.

Mi miru kat den laste . Kat li side ni sima cat. – Yesterday I saw a cat. The cat sat on a roof.

In the first sentence, since no kat was mentioned before, one can assume – if there is no additional context – that the cat is not yet known: ‘a cat’. In the second sentence, since kat is mentioned again and there is nothing to suggest otherwise, one can assume that the same cat is meant: ‘the cat’.

Though this might feel unfamiliar at first, usually no articles are needed to get the meaning across.

Should you on occasional really feel the need to make it clear that something not yet known is meant (‘a’/‘an’), you can use the determiners un ‘one’ or eni ‘any’: un kat – ‘a/one cat’.

Should you feel to need to make it clear that something is already known and identifiable, you can use a demonstrative such as ta ‘that’:

Kat li side ni sima ta cat. – The cat sat on a that roof / the roof (over there).

However, such needs will probably arrive rarer than you might think at first.

Determiners

Determiners give information about how many, how much, or which entities the phrase that follows refer to. In Lugamun, most determiners can be used with verbs as well as with nouns – but in this section we will cover their meaning before nouns. They always precede the word to which they refer.

In Lugamun, two types of determiners can be distinguished.

Quantifiers express how much or how many of some entity are meant – they are mostly about quantity, hence the name.
Selectors indicate to which individuals a phrase refers to – they select a certain individual or a subgroup of individual entities, hence the name.

Lugamun’s quantifiers are:

no – no
ol – all (the), the whole of, completely, fully
xi – indeed. This doesn’t really change the quantity, it just puts stress on the noun phrase and emphasizes that something is indeed, truly the case or that it’s really the mentioned participant who is involved in the specified act.
yo – plurality indicator that can be used if plurality is important and not already indicates in any other way – indicates that two or more individuals or items are meant: yo kat – '(the) cats’.
ingi – many, much, a lot, very
malo – few, little
xye – some (a certain, not exactly specified part or proportion of)

The first four quantifiers are also called “short quantifiers” (with just two letters), while the last three are “long quantifiers” (with three or more letters). This distinction is relevant when it comes to the order of determiners within a noun phrase.

Xi and no are also used to reply to yes/no questions – in this context they are usually translated as ‘yes’ and ‘no’. And they are used as the positive and negative form of a verb known as copula, as will be discussed later.

XXX Translate samples showing how these quantifiers can be used:

for ingi: Many children came. We don’t have much time! They have a lot of money.
for malo: Few people understand this correctly. We have little time to do it.
for no: No man is an island
for ol: All my friends hate her. All visitors must register in advance. We were all alone.
for xye: Some pupils didn’t show up.

Numbers such as un ‘one’, do ‘two’, tri ‘three’ can be considered quantifiers when placed before a noun – they will be covered in a later chapter.

Ol can be followed by a number to express ‘all of the given quantity’, e.g. ol do ‘both’, ol tri ‘all three’.

XXX Trans: All three restaurants in this street are excellent.

Lugamun’s selectors are:

si – this, these. This refers to things or persons that are nearby (physically or conceptually).
ta – that, those. This refers to those that are farther away.
ke – what. Used in questions to asks about which individual is meant.
eni – any, whichever. This expresses that it does not matter to which specific individual one refers.
aru – (a) certain, some. This refers an individual know to exist, but about which otherwise nothing in particular is known or considered worth mentioning.
kada – every, each, either. This is quite similar to ol, but focused on each individual separately rather than all of them together.
otra – other, another
sama – same

The last two selectors (otra and sama) are also called “identity selectors”, while the other ones may be called “general selectors”. This is relevant when it comes to the order of determiners within a noun phrase.

XXX Translate samples:

avan ta – that cloud
si do ruma – these two houses
for ke: ?
for eni: Press any key to continue. Choose whichever dish you like.
for aru: Some people don’t know how lucky they are.
for kada: Each candidate has three attempts. I carefully listened to every word.
for otra: ?
for sama: ?

Since eni and aru refer to subgroups rather than expressing quantities, they can be combined with the quantifiers malo, xye, ingi, yo as well as with numbers. In such combinations, they are usually placed after yo (which, if present, always opens the noun phrase) but before other quantifiers.

XXX Translate samples:

eni do: ‘Price, quality, speed – choose any two.’
eni malo: ‘Any few people could have done a better job.’ (Any group of a few people…)
aru tri: ‘Certain three people didn’t keep return on time.’ (A mother might reproachfully say this to her three children.)
yo aru: ‘The company sells certain products that its customers don’t want to miss.’

XXX Order – usually at most one element of each group is present:

specific/short quantifiers: no, ol, xi, yo
general selectors: si, ta, ke, eni, aru, kada
broad/long quantifiers (malo, xye, ingi) + numbers
identity selectors: otra, sama

A long quantifier may be followed by a (rounded) number, e.g. malo mil – ‘a few thousand’.

XXX Explain better and more consistently how selectors are used “adverbially” (but without being considered adverbs in our terminology).

Note that especially ingi is also used as an intensifier before other words (verbs, adjectives or adverbs), hence combinations such as malo ingi ‘very few, very little’ or ingi ingi ‘very many, a very high number of’ may occur.

Other quantifiers may likewise be used before verbs and other words, e.g. xye ‘somewhat’.

(XXX Probably don’t allow/encourage this, as it could be confusing – Other deviations might be read with a de between them:

eni si – any of these
malo si – few of these)

Note: We place determiners before the noun because they are placed there by the clear majority of our source languages. Quantifiers such as ‘all’ and ‘many’ are placed before the noun by all source languages except for Swahili. Question particles such as ‘which’, selectors such as ‘this’, and similarity selectors such as '(an)other’ are placed before the noun by all source languages except for Indonesian and Swahili. The ordering of the determiners themselves follows the typical ordering used by our source languages.

Except for no and yo, all quantifiers can also be used standalone as pronouns, i.e. in place of a full noun phrase. In such cases the context makes it clear whether they refer to persons or to things.

XXX Translate examples:

‘We had invited many people, and all came.’
‘The boy has many toys, but few are his favorites.’
‘I asked three people for the right answer, and each gave a different one.’

no alone should not be used as pronoun, since it is also used to negate verbs which could easily lead to misreadings. Instead the combination no eni can be used standalone for ‘none, not any’.

XXX Trans: ‘We had invited many people, but none came.’

no can also be used in the combination no de ‘none of’ without risks of misunderstandings:

XXX Trans: ‘She liked none of her gifts’

Like most quantifiers, selectors can also be used standalone (as pronouns):

Ti li miru ta? – Did you see that?

Determiners can be used in front of arbitrary nouns. Among the nouns they are most commonly used with are jen ‘human being, person’.

no jen – no one, nobody, anyone, anybody (in negated sentences)
malo jen – (a) few people
xye jen – some people, several people
ingi jen – many people
ol jen – everyone, everybody
yo jen – (the) people (in general)
eni jen – anyone, anybody (in positive sentences)
aru jen – someone, somebody
kada jen – each one, each person

They are also frequently combined with xos ‘thing’ (WALS 115; APiCS 102):

no xos – nothing, anything (in negated sentences)
malo xos – (a) few things
xye xos – some things, several things
ingi xos – many things
ol xos – everything
yo xos – things
eni xos – anything (in positive sentences)
aru xos – something
kada xos – each thing

Note that when the subject or object of a clause is negated, the verb is negated as well – eni is not used in negated sentences:

Mi no li miru no jen. – I didn’t see anyone.

Note that the absence of quantifiers does not mean that just one entity is meant. kat may mean ‘a/the cat’ or '(the) cats’, depending on context. If you want to unambiguously express the idea of just one cat, say un kat; if you want to express that there are two or more, say yo kat (or use another suitable quantifier).

Note: Among the world’s languages, the use of a plural suffix is most common, while a separate plural word is the second most common choice (WALS 33). Among creole languages, a plural word either preceding or following the noun is the most frequent option (more frequent than a plural suffix); plural words preceding the noun are more common than those following it (APiCS 23). Due to the analytic nature of our language, we prefer to use a plural word which can be analyzed a quantifier and is therefore placed before the noun. Hence we follow the typical example of creoles in this regard. We follow various of our Asian source languages (Mandarin, Indonesian, Japanese) in making the use of a plural marker optional. Among creole languages, plural marking is also most typically variable – plural markers is sometimes omitted, especially if the plurality is expressed in some other way (APiCS 22). In other languages, this is the second most common option after an obligatory plural (WALS 34).

Generic expressions referring to a whole class of entities in general are typically expressed without a quantifier (APiCS 30) – though it’s not wrong to use yo or ol if you prefer that and fear that misunderstandings might otherwise result).

Generic noun phrases are typically expressed using a noun phrase without a plural marker:

XXX Trans: Elephants are stronger than us.

The plural marker yo may also be used to express the associative plural “X and associates/family/company/companions etc.” (WALS 36; APiCS 24):

yo Tina – Tina and her family/friends/associates
yo Molina – the Molinas/the Molina family

XXX Explain how determiners are used before other words (verbs, adjectives, adverbs etc.) and give some examples.

Modifier words

Nouns and verbs can be placed after a noun, modifying the meaning of the main noun. Often such combinations have a more or less idiomatic meaning that’s listed in the dictionary, e.g. kaus sora ‘rainbow’ (literally: bow sky).

Even if not explicitly listed, the named of animal species and similar groups can be used as such modifier words in expressions such as kulin kat ‘cat food’ or haki jen ‘human right(s)'. In such cases, the modifying term (kat, jen) may be regarded as a noun or as an adjective – it doesn’t really matter.

If one regards them as nouns, the group of main noun and modifier noun can be regarded as having an omitted preposition between them, most often de ‘of’ or a ‘to, for’.

haki jen = haki de jen – right(s) of human(s) = human right(s)
kulin kat = kulin a kat – food for cat(s) = cat food
kaus sora = kaus ni sora – bow in the sky = rainbow

If the modifier is a verb, the main word and the modifier can be considered as having the selector ke ‘who’ between them.

jen safiri = jen ke safiri – person who travels = traveler

More on modifier words can be found in the section on spaced_nouns.

Adjectives

Adjectives give further details about the noun they follow.

man hau – a good man

Note: Adjectives follow nouns because that’s the globally most common ordering (WALS 87).

Several adjectives can follow the same noun. The most specific adjective is usually placed first.

ona inglis daki – an intelligent English woman

In this case, ‘English’ is considered more specific than ‘intelligent’, since there are many different nationalities, while intelligence is a general property that’s more or less strongly present in every person.

On the other hand, adjectives such as sola ‘only, sole’ are quite nonspecific – they don’t tell you much about the noun to which they refer as such, but rather about its position in the world. Such adjectives are usually placed near the end of the noun phrase, after more specific adjectives.

Ya xi [doctor] hau sola ni [town]. – She’s the only good doctor in town.

When two adjectives are considered similarly specific, a comma or a conjunction such as va ‘and’ is placed between them.

ona inda va daki – a beautiful and intelligent woman

If there are three or more such adjectives in a row, va is usually only used between the last two of them, while a comma is used otherwise.

ona inda, daki va tari – a beautiful, intelligent, and rich woman

Note that each adjective refers to the nearest noun to the left of it. This is still the case if a noun phrase is attached to another noun phrase using a preposition such as de ‘of’.

[lover] grande de buku – a great lover of books / a great book lover
[lover] de buku grande – a lover of great books

Ya xi mama de si tri [child wonderful]. – She is the mother of these three wonderful children.
Ya xi mama [wonderful] de si tri [child]. – She is the wonderful mother of these three children.

XXX The following is likely obsolete – better find another (new?) particle to use here.

While adjectives typically follow nouns, they can also be used after the impersonal pronoun yan '(the) one’. This pronoun replaces a noun known from the context:

Mi yau yan hara. – I want the green one.
Yan gran xyende hau. – The big one looks good.
Tina [drive car] lal, [while] mi [drive] yan blu. – Tina drives a red car, while I drive a blue one.

Note: Most languages allow adjectives to be used without noun and without any marking (WALS 61). This works well in languages with articles, such as Spanish (Quiero el verde – ‘I want the green one’), but without articles it could be ambiguous and hard to understand. The next most frequent option is to have such adjectives marked by a preceding word, which therefore seems preferable.

Possessive noun phrases

There are two kinds of possessives: possessive noun phrases and possessive pronouns. The latter will be explained below. Possessive noun phrases are introduced by the proposition de ‘of’, which is follow by the possession. The whole phrase is added after the noun phrase that specifies the “possession”.

ruma de man – the man’s house

“Possession” here is meant in a very wide sense that simply expresses a relationship of belonging.

mama de ona – the woman’s mother

LUGAMUN GRAMMAR
Introduction · Phonology and spelling · Word order · Noun phrases · Pronouns · Verb phrases · Adverbs · Questions · Numbers · Comparisons · Prepositions · Conjunctions · Dependent clauses · Emphasizing parts of a clause · Reduplication · Word formation · Expressions · Capitalization and proper names

Pronouns

Personal pronouns

Lugamun uses the following personal pronouns.

Singular	Plural
mi – I, me	nas – we, us
ti – you (sg.)	tum – you (pl.)
ya – he, she, him, her	le – they, them
it – it	le – they, them
on – one, you (impersonal, generic)

These pronouns are used both as subjects and as objects. Just as with nouns, one can use the optional subject and object markers to make a distinction, placing i before a pronoun used as subject and o before one used as object. But if a clause uses the usual SVO order, this is never necessary.

In the third person singular, it is only used for inanimate things (objects of any kind, ideas and concepts) and for plants, while ya is used for animals, people, and other intelligent beings (such as aliens or intelligent robots in science-fiction). In the plural, no such distinction is made (just as in English).

On is used as a generic pronoun that can refer to any person or persons. In English, it is often translated as ‘one’ or a generic ‘you’ that doesn’t particularly refer to the person spoken to. It may also be translated using the passive voice.

On xvo lugamun si ples. – One speaks Lugamun here. / Lugamun spoken here.
On no ba debe [judge] bina tu jixi yo [fact]. – One / You shouldn’t judge without knowing the facts.

Note: The reasons for choosing this particular set of pronouns were as follows:

Personal pronouns express both person and number as part of their stem, i.e. the plural is not formed by adding a plural suffix to the singular form (WALS 35). No distinction is made between inclusive and exclusive ‘we’ (WALS 39; APiCS 15). Gender is not distinguished in personal pronouns (WALS 44; APiCS 13). No politeness distinction is made in second-person pronouns (‘you’ vs. ‘thee’) (WALS 45; APiCS 18). Pronouns looks the same regardless of whether they are used as subject or object – case is not marked (WALS 99).
WALS doesn’t state how many language distinguish singular from plural ‘you’ and was instead resolved using a polysemy check. Since only 9 of 27 languages (33.3%) use the same word for both concepts, Lugamun uses different words as well.
In the third person singular, it would be possible to use the same word for all of ‘he’, ‘she’, and ‘it’. However, most of our source languages have several distinct pronouns here: English, written Mandarin, and Russian have a male/female/non-human distinction (he, she, it); Arabic, French, and Spanish have a male/female distinction; Hindi and Japanese have a near/far distinction (similar to ‘this’ and ‘that’). Only Indonesian has no such distinctions. (Swahili doesn’t use third-person pronouns for inanimate objects.) A male/female distinction can often be awkward, since it makes gender-neutral expressions unnecessarily hard and overlooks those that don’t fit into either gender. A distinction between animate (person or animal) and inanimate (thing) is more useful, hence we choose to preserve and express the latter.

Possessive pronouns

The possessive forms of pronouns express that something belongs in some way to the entity specified by the pronoun. In Lugamun they are formed by adding -s if the base pronoun ends in a vowel, -i if it ends in a consonant. This results in the following set of possessive pronouns:

Singular	Plural
mis – my, mine	nasi – our, ours
tis – your, yours (sg.)	tumi – your, yours (pl.)
yas – his, her	les – their, theirs
iti – its	les – their, theirs
oni – one’s, your (impersonal, generic)

Possessive pronouns are always placed before the noun to which they refer.

mis mama – my mother
yas kat – her/his cat
les ruma – their house

Instead of these separate possessive forms, one can also use the base form preceded by the preposition de or followed by the postposition ki, though this is less common.

mama de mi / mi ki mama – my mother

Possessive pronouns can also be used standalone, without a subsequent noun. This is the case when they are used as complement of the preceding noun:

Si buku (xi) tis. – This book is yours.
Ta kuni ga ban mis! – That country will become mine!

In such cases, the noun and the possessive pronoun are connected through the_copula xi or another verb that can take a complement. Note that xi itself can be omitted in such cases, i.e. Si buku xi tis and Si buku tis are both fine.

Alternatively, standalone possessive pronoun can also refer back to the last recently used noun, sparing the need to explicitly repeat that noun.

Ti ha tis kamar, va mi ha mis. – You have your room and I have mine [= my room].

XXX Explain that possessive pronouns can be (and typically are) omitted when the context makes the situation of possession reasonably clear. This is especially the case when referring to one’s own relatives, body parts, cloths and similar things one wears on one’s body, e.g. ‘her sister, my teeth, his cloak’ etc. Likewise they may be used once but are subsequently omitted in cases such as ‘my car’.

Rationale: Seven of our ten source languages have separate possessive forms of the pronouns (all except for Chinese, Japanese, and Swahili), therefore Lugamun uses such separate forms as well. And seven source languages place the possessive pronoun before the noun (all except for Arabic, Indonesian, and Swahili), therefore Lugamun uses the same placement.

The reflexive pronouns “sin” and “sini”

In the first and second person (with mi, nas, ti, tum, and their possessive forms), the regular pronouns are also used to refer back to the subject.

Mi miru mi ni mis mira – I see myself in my mirror.
Tum ga laki tumi yo hain ta ples. – You will find your possessions over there.

In such cases, it’s always clear who the person(s) in question are, so the normal pronouns can be used without any risk of confusion.

However, the third person (ya, it, le, on) is used for a much wider set of people and things – for anybody and anything that’s not ‘me’, ‘we’ or ‘you’. Therefore in such cases it’s useful to know whether an object or a possessive phrase refers back to the subject or to another third person. To make this contrast, Lugamun uses sin ‘him-/her-/it-/oneself, themselves’ in the object and in prepositional phrases to express that they are identical to the subject. For example:

Alisa sun to rabit xvo a sin, “Oi no!” – Alice hears the rabbit say to itself, “Oh dear!”

Here the rabbit talks to itself (sin). On the other hand, if a different pronoun such as ya is used, this indicates that the rabbit talks to someone else:

Alisa sun to rabit xvo a ya, “Oi no!” – Alice hears the rabbit say to her, “Oh dear!”

In this case, the rabbit talks not to itself, but to someone else. Only the context can reveal to whom. In the example sentence it seems likely that it’s talking to Alice, since she’s the least recently mentioned person matching the pronoun ya.

Sini is the possessive form of sin, used in the third person to express that something belongs to the subject:

Man nomu sini bir. – The man drinks his beer. (his own beer)

If another third-person possessive pronoun (yas, iti, les, or oni) is used instead, this indicates that something belong to another third person, not to the subject themselves. For example:

Ona li kaixu side ni byen man va toma yas bir. – The women sat down next to the man and took his beer.

Here yas indicates that the beer doesn’t belong to the subject (ona – the woman), but to someone else – in this case, logically to the man.

Note: Don’t confuse the pronoun sin with the adverb sam, which in English is likewise often translated as '-self’, but serves a different purpose.

Rationale: We use separate reflexive pronouns only in the third person, because here they allow a useful distinction (between the subject and other third persons). According to WALS (chapter 47), reflexive pronouns (sin in Lugamun) and intensifiers (sam in Lugamun) are identical in a small majority of languages. But using different words for these functions is nearly as common, and since we use the reflexive pronoun only in the third person while the intensifier can be used with any person, it would be confusing to use the same word. Therefore we prefer to use separate words for clarity.

LUGAMUN GRAMMAR
Introduction · Phonology and spelling · Word order · Noun phrases · Pronouns · Verb phrases · Adverbs · Questions · Numbers · Comparisons · Prepositions · Conjunctions · Dependent clauses · Emphasizing parts of a clause · Reduplication · Word formation · Expressions · Capitalization and proper names

Verb phrases

Verb markers

Verb phrases often include a verb marker. These markers are short words that may be placed before the verb in order to give more details about how it is to be understood.

Tense (time) markers

Lugamun has two verb markers indicating the time (formally: tense) when an action takes place: li marks the past, while ga marks the future.

Ya li mai ruma. – He/She bought a house. (sometime in the past)
Le ga go a Paris. – They will go to Paris. (sometime in the future)

No tense marker is used for actions taking place in the present (at this moment).

Ona soma buku. – The woman reads / is reading a book.

However, the absence of a tense marker does not necessarily indicate that the present tense is intended. If the context suggests another time, the tense markers may likewise be omitted. For example, adverbs and time expression can explain more precisely when an act takes place. In such cases, there is no need to include a tense marker as well, hence it is usually omitted.

Safirja baru tiba. – A/The traveler has just arrived.
Ya kvai lai. – He/She is about to come. / He/She will come soon.
Ya nyen laste mai ruma. – Last year he/she bought a house.
Le den tali go a Paris. – Tomorrow they will go to Paris.
Ona si tem soma buku. – The woman is now reading a book.

If you want, you can include the matching tense marker in such cases too – that’s not wrong, just a bit verbose. Adverbs expressing time are most typically placed between subject and verb phrase, which means that the tense marker will be placed after them, as in the first example that follows. But you can also place time adverbs elsewhere in the clause, e.g. at its end, as in the second example.

Ya kvai ga lai. – He/She is about to come. / He/She will come soon.
Ya li mai ruma nyen laste. – Last year he/she bought a house.

Adverbs and time expressions are not the only way to express context. When describing a past event, it’s often clear that one is talking about the past, hence in such cases it’s fine to omit the li. Novels and other narratives frequently omit it as well – maybe li is used once, to establish the past context, but in further sentences it is omitted. When no tense marker is used for the main course of events described, li and ga can instead be used in a relative rather than an absolute manner. Hence li might refer to acts that happened earlier than the main events, while ga refers to acts taking place later.

XXX Update this, since na is now again the (optional and relatively rarely used) present-tense verb marker.

Mood markers

Two other verb markers express what’s called by linguists the mood of a verb – the speaker’s attitude towards the indicated act.

Ba indicates that the speaker is unsure about the indicated action or regards it as something that is not real or at least not certain. Linguists may call it the “irrealis mood”; in English, it is often translated as ‘would’. It can be used to express possibilities, hypothetical situations, desires, fears, and opinions. It can also be used to make polite requests.

Mi yau to ya ba lai. – I wish he/she would come.
Mi ba go, se mi ha tem. – I would go if I had the time.
Ti ba abri vindo ka? – Would/Could you open the window?

Note that in clauses introduced with se ‘if’, ba is usually omitted, as explained in the section on that conjunction.

As an alternative to ba, adverbs such as rubama ‘perhaps, maybe’ may be used to express the speaker’s attitude.

Ya rubama den tali lai. – Perhaps he/she will come tomorrow. (I do not really know whether they will come, but I consider it possible)

Li ba, the combination of the past tense marker li with ba, is used for things that can no longer become true, also known as “counterfactuals”. It often corresponds to ‘would have’ in English.

Ya li ba xi sikaja hau. – He/She would have been a good teacher. (but for whatever reasons they chose another profession, and now it’s too late)

In clauses introduced with se, the ba marker is again usually considered implied, meaning that only li is used.

Se [taxi] li tiba ni tem, nas no li ba [miss] tara. – If the taxi had arrived on time, we would not have missed our flight.

Du is used to mark commands and requests. Linguists may call it the “imperative” and “hortative” mood.

Most typically it is directed at one or several persons one speaks with. In such cases the subject pronoun (ti or tum) is usually omitted, just as in English.

Du nulis! – Write! (talking to one or several persons)
Du fa safi tis kamar! – Clean up your room! (talking to a single person, as the possessive pronoun makes clear)
Du fa safi tumi kamar! – Clean up your room! (talking to several persons)

But it’s not wrong to include the pronoun, if you want to – occasionally it may be useful to make it clearer whether just one person or rather a group of persons is the intended recipient.

Ti du fa safi yas kamar! – Clean up her/his room! (explicitly talking to a single person)
Tum du fa safi yas kamar! – Clean up her/his room! (explicitly talking to several persons)

When addressing another group of persons, a pronoun or noun phrase identifying them must be used in the usual way. Most typically that’s the case when addressing a group that includes the speaker themselves.

Nas du nomu! – Let’s drink!

Except for the combination li ba, combinations of tense with mood markers are rare. But should you ever feel the need for such a combation, put the tense marker first (just as with li ba).

The progressive aspect

Sai indicates an action in progress. Linguistics calls this the progressive aspect; in English it is usually translated as ‘be …-ing’.

Ya li sai soma – She/He was reading.
Mi sai kula. – I’m eating / I’m in the middle of eating.

Note that the progressive aspect is used much rarer than in English. In English, it is commonly used with certain verbs at least in the present tense, while in Lugamun you use it only if you really want to stress that an action is in progress – but not when describing it as simply taking place.

Nas kula. – We are eating. (usually a statement such as this is sufficient and there is no need for sai)

Sai is placed after any tense and mood markers that may be used with the same verb.

XXX There is no habitual aspect (English has one, but only in the past: ‘used to (do something)'), but an adverb such as ?? ‘usually’ may be used to express actions occurring habitually.

The passive voice

Bi is used to form the passive voice. It is placed after any other markers used with the same verb.

Nas ga bi kula! – We will be eaten!

The agent responsible for an action expressed in the passive can be specified using the preposition be ‘by’.

Xvan li kamu kat. – The dog bit the cat.
Kat li bi kamu be xvan. – The cat was bitten by the dog.

The infinitive

The verb marker tu introduces the infinitive. It is used between verbs to connect them to verbs chains.

Mi yau tu xvo. – I want to speak.
Ti ama tu nulis. – You love to write.

It it also used to refer to activity in general – in such cases it often corresponds to the English gerund (“-ing” form).

Tu dansa xi [fun]. – Dancing is fun.
Mi ama tu kula. – I like eating / I like to eat.

Occasionally the infinitive may be used together with other verb markers. In this case, it is placed before them.

tu bi … – to be shot
tu li bi … – having been shot
Ya deklara ingi tu li ama ya. – She/He declared to have loved her/him very much.

In the most typical case, the subject of the first verb implicitly applies to any chained verbs as well.

Mi yau tu nulis buku. – I want to write a book.

But one can also use the infinitive if the first verb clearly indicates that some other person or group is addressed.

Mi minta tu xvo lugamun. – I request that one speaks Lugamun.

It’s also possible to explicitly express the subject of the chained verb, by adding a noun phrase or pronoun before the tu.

Le no ga permit ya tu fa it. – They won’t permit her to do it.
Yo sikaja minta yo baca tu xvo ruski. – The teachers request the children to speak Russian.

Such chained verbs with a subject are equivalent to subordinate clauses introduced by to. Instead of the above, one could equally well say:

Le no ga permit to ya fa it. – They won’t permit that she does it.
Yo sikaja minta to yo baca xvo ruski. – The teachers request that the children speak Russian.

Outside of verb chains, verbs used with tu never have an explicitly expressed subject. But regardless of where they are used, they can have an object.

Tu dansa tango no asan. – Dancing tango is not easy.
Mi yau tu dansa tango gen ti. – I want to dance tango with you.
Mi yau ti tu dansa tango gen mi. – I want you to dance tango with me.
Mi yau Tina tu nulis buku. – I want Tina to write a book.

Verbs preceded by tu can be considered as hybrids between regular verbs and nouns. On the one hand, they can be used as subject of a clause, just like any other noun. On the other hand, when used after another verb, they are not considered as object, but rather as part of a verb chain. Hence they are never preceded by o.

Mi yau tu aprende tu dansa (o) tango. – I want to learn to dance (the) tango. / I want to learn to tango dancing.

Auxiliary verbs

Auxiliary verbs are verbs that are always followed by another verb in a verb chain, rather than by a noun or pronoun used as object, or by nothing at all. Since a verb is known to follow, it’s not necessary to use the infinitive marker tu between the auxiliary and the following verb. It’s not wrong to use tu there either, but since it’s not needed, that particle is typically omitted.

Lugamun has only two nonderived auxiliary verbs:

bisa – can, may, be able to
debe – must, have to

Bisa is used in both senses of ‘be able’ and ‘have permission’, since most widespread languages use the same word for these concepts. If desired one can alternatively use more precise expressions.

XXX Give some examples.

Additionally, the suffix -u (or occasionally -t) can be used to turn a normal verb into an auxiliary one. The usual rules of word formation apply, which means that for verbs ending in a vowel, its final vowel is in most cases replaced by u. Only if the final vowel is the sole vowel in the verb, it is preserved, so that the auxiliary form of fa is fau (with a diphthong). This too follows the general rules.

This suffix can be quite convenient since it removes the need to put tu between two chained verbs.

Mi amu nulis. – I love to write.

It is especially useful in fixed expressions made up of two verbs, such as kaixu cvan ‘put on, don’ (begin to wear). Such expressions could be quite heavy if an additional tu was needed as well, hence they are commonly used with this suffix and are usually listed only in this form in the dictionary. Nevertheless, the tu form is always possible as well, so if you prefer saying kaixi tu cvan, you certainly can.

If a verbs ends in a standalone -u (which is not part of a diphthong), then -u cannot be added to it, since the resulting auxiliary version would be identical to the original verb. In such cases, one can use the alternative suffix -t (if one doesn’t want to use the full tu marker). For example, the auxiliary version of kontinu ‘continue, go on’ is kontinut. (As a memory guide: both -u and -t are derived from tu, through shortening.)

Auxiliaries formed using the -u/-t suffix are never re-used as nouns, since there is no need to do so – the original form of the word is used instead (e.g. kaixi).

XXX Mention that adverbs, other verb markers, and determiners may still interrupt verb chains and give some examples.

The copula

The copula xi – translated as a form of ‘be’ in this context – connects a noun phrase with an adjective or noun phrase that describes it. If a adjective follows, it can be and often is omitted, but if a noun phrase or a prepositional phrase follows, it should always be used. Note that an adjective or noun phrase that follows xi is considered a complement rather than an object, therefore it never takes the object marker o.

So if an adjective follows, xi is typically omitted:

Ti (xi) ingi dulse. – You’re really sweet.
Uma (xi) bai. – The horse is white.
Ya (xi) mardi den laste . – Yesterday he/she was ill.

Note that, if a a time expression (or another expression including a noun or a preposition) is placed after the subject, xi should always be used, to prevent possible confusion:

Ya den laste xi mardi. – Yesterday he/she was ill.

Xi it always used before a noun or preposition:

Ya xi baba hau. – He’s a good father.
Ta ona xi [actor] maxuhur. – That woman is a famous actress.
Le xi ni ruma. – They’re at home / They’re in the house.
Mi xi de Barat. – I’m from India. (I was born there or usually live there)

The negated form of the copula is just no – xi is never used in this case.

Ta no sehati. – That’s not healthy.
Ya no man hau. – He’s not a good man.

When a noun is followed by several adjectives and no verb, one can consider the last adjective as descriptive complement.

Uma gran lela. – The big horse is tired.

For maximum clarity, it may be better to use the copula in such cases.

Uma gran xi lela.

Rationale: That the copula is required before noun phrases and locative phrases, but (typically) omitted before adjectives, follows the typical patterns in the majority of all languages (WALS 120) and specifically in creoles (APiCS 73–75).

Other verbs with a complement

XXX Maybe call these “copulas” as well and use a term such as “standard copula” when referring to xi?

Several other verbs are likewise commonly followed by a complement: an adjective or noun that complements their meaning. Such complements immediately follow the verb, and they may be followed by an object or a prepositional phrase. While the object marker o is usually optional, after a complement it must be used, since otherwise there might be some confusion about where the complement ends and the object starts. If a verb with a complement also takes an object, the complement refers to the object, otherwise it refers to the subject. These include, but aren’t limited to:

ban – become
fa – do, make
sente – feel, sense
xyende – seem, look (like), appear

Examples:

Mi ga ban (president). – I will become president.
Le ga fa (president) o mi.– They will make me president.
Mi si den sente glupi glupi. – I feel very stupid today.
On li pentoda lal o ruma. – They have painted the house red.

Determiners referring to the complement are placed before it, as usual. Adverbs referring to the verb phrase are usually placed at the end of the verb phrase, i.e., after the complement.

Ya ban ingi lal ku suden. – He/She suddenly became very red.

Subjectless verbs

When used without a subject, ha means ‘there is, there are’.

Ha ona ni dor. – There is a woman at the door.

Generally a subjectless verb is used in cases there where is no actual entity that could be used as subject. English typically uses a generic ‘it’ in such cases.

Xyende to ya no lai si den. – It seems he/she won’t come today.
Xi sedi to nas no bisa go ta ples. – It’s sad we can’t do there.

Often, subject xi followed by a verb or adjective refers to the weather.

Xi garam garam si den. – It’s very hot today.
Xi ren den tali. – It’ll rain tomorrow.

While xi between a subject and an adjective is often omitted, when there is no subject, it’s better to include it for clarity.

Rationale: There is no info on this in WALS, but according to APiCS, most pidgins and creoles don’t use an “expletive” subject (i.e. a subject that doesn’t really refer to anything) in existential verb constructions corresponding to English ‘there is’. We follow this usage, choosing a widely used pattern to express ‘there is/are’. For consistency, we treat other expressions where the subject would be expletive the same way.

Negation

The negation particle no ‘not’ is usually placed before the verb.

If the subject or object is a negated pronoun (such as no jen ‘no one, nobody’ or no xos ‘nothing’) or if the clause includes a negated adverbial phrase (such as no ples ‘nowhere’ or no tem ‘never’), the verb is negated as well. In contrast to English, such a “double negative” doesn’t cancel itself out, but rather affirms the negative expression. This is known as emphatic negation.

Alisa no ha no xos gi tu fa. – Alice had nothing to do.
“Mi no tem no li miru it”, man xvo. – “I’ve never seen it,” the man said.

XXX Explain that quantifiers and selectors, including no, are placed after verb markers.

Mi no li miru ya. – I didn’t see him/her.

XXX Explain how negation works in verb chains and with auxiliaries: debe no ‘must not’ vs. no debe ‘doesn’t have to’.

Order of elements in verb phrases

A complete verb phrase, with just a single verb but including everything else that can potentially occur in a verb phrase, will have the following order:

determiners – verb markers – verb – complement – adverbs

The whole verb phrase may be preceded by a time expression, but such expressions are not considered a part of the verb phrase itself. Complements may themselves be preceded by determiners referring to them, but this is not shown here, to stop things from getting too complicated.

In verb chains, the whole sequence as described above may in principle be repeated two or more times – except that only the last verb of a chain may have a complement. Each verb in the chain, except for the last one, must be an auxiliary verb, or the marker tu must be placed between it and the subsequent verb. The final verb must not be an auxiliary verb.

Markers before a verb tend to occur in the following order:

The infinitive marker tu
The tense markers li and ga
The mood markers ba and du
The progressive aspect marker sai
The passive voice marker bi

Each verb is preceded by at most one marker of each kind – it would not make sense to use both tense or both mood markers before the same verb.

LUGAMUN GRAMMAR
Introduction · Phonology and spelling · Word order · Noun phrases · Pronouns · Verb phrases · Adverbs · Questions · Numbers · Comparisons · Prepositions · Conjunctions · Dependent clauses · Emphasizing parts of a clause · Reduplication · Word formation · Expressions · Capitalization and proper names

Adverbs

Adverbs are similar to adjectives, but while the latter modify a noun, adverbs modify a verb (phrase) or another word, such as an adjective, a numeral, or another adverb. Lugamun has two basic kinds of adverbs: plain adverbs and ku-adverbs. Both types are placed after the word they modify.

Note: This placement is for consistency with how adjectives are placed in Lugamun.

Ku-adverbs are easily recognizable by having the particle ku in front of them. Plain adverbs, on the other hand, have no specific marker in front of them. XXX Adapt this, since there are also adverbs derived through reduplication, such as gengen.

Plain adverbs

Plain adverb these words are only used as adverbs, they cannot modify nouns. (XXX Improve this wording since pia can also modify noun (phrases), see the examples.) They include:

baru – just, recently (refers to the recent past)
hata – even
kasi – almost
kixa – then, soon after, next
kvai – soon, be about to (refers to the near future)
mo – already
pia – also, too
rubama – perhaps, maybe (expresses that something is possible, but not certain)
sam – -self, -selves, own (used for emphasis)
takriban – approximately, about, roughly
tena – again, another time, once more
vapas – back
yexo – still, yet

Plain adverbs are typically placed at the end of the phrase they modify. This sometimes allows expressing nuances that are difficult to clearly express in English.

Mi pia xvo inglis. – I too speak English. (not just you)
Mi xvo inglis pia. – I speak English too. (not just Lugamun)
Mi nulis pia inglis. – I also write English. (I don’t just speak it)

In verb chains, adverbs are placed after the verb which they modify, which may not always be the last verb in the chain.

Mi amal tu miru kvai ya. – I hope to see her/him soon.

XXX Add another example where it’s not the last verb.

Adverbs and adverbial expressions referring to the verb (and hence the whole clause) may also be placed elsewhere in the clause, as long as they are placed between rather than within phrases and provided they are unlikely to be misunderstood as referring to the preceding phrase rather than to the verb. Such free placement is especially common with adverbs describing the time when an event took place. Note that anything placed at the beginning of the clause will always be considered as somewhat emphasized compared to neutral placement.

The following two sentences are relatively common ways of expressing the underlying notion.

Safirja (li) finu cvan kvai (yas) manto. – Soon the traveler took off his cloak. (this is the most typical and most neutral way of expressing this)
Kvai safirja (li) finu cvan (yas) manto. – (same meaning, but with a slightly stronger emphasis on the “soonishness” of the act)

The following alternatives are also possible, but much rarer.

Safirja kvai (li) finu cvan (yas) manto.
Safirja (li) finu cvan (yas) manto kvai.

The meaning of plain adverbs can be found in dictionaries, just as with any other words. A few of them deserve special discussion, though. These are covered in the subsections that follow.

rubama

Rubama also has a derived alternative, ku mumkin. Both have the same meaning, though rubama may be a bit more common. While they are adverbs in Lugamun, in English they are sometimes translated using the auxiliary verb ‘may’ or ‘might’.

Rubama le lai den tali. – Maybe they will come tomorrow. / They may come tomorrow.
Rubama it li era ku sola. – Maybe it was just a mistake. / It might have just been a mistake.

Rubama and ku mumkin express a possibility according to someone’s knowledge about the world – they express that the speaker is unsure about whether or not something is true or will become true. In linguistics and philosophy, this is known as epistemic possibility.

Don’t confuse this with ability (somebody is able to do something) or permission (somebody has the right to something). To express these in Lugamun, one typically uses the auxiliary verb bisa ‘can, may, be able to’

Ya bisa main [tennis] ku hau hau. – She can play tennis really well. / She is really good at tennis.
Mi bisa go [party] ka? – Can I go to the party? / May I go to the party?

Rationale: In expressing situational possibility (ability and permission) with a verbal construction (the auxiliary bisa), Lugamun follows WALS (ch. 74). That it doesn’t use verbal constructions or affixes, but rather some other kind of markers (namely, in our case, adverbs) to express epistemic possibility likewise follows WALS (ch. 75). That these two kinds of possibility are expressed in different ways without overlap is likewise most typical according to WALS (ch. 76).

sam

Sam is an intensifier, stressing the fact that the indicated person (or thing) will handle the indicated activity in person or that (maybe surprisingly) they themselves are meant rather than anyone else.

Mi sam ga fa it. – I’ll do it myself.
[President] sam li [visit] nas! – The president herself/himself has paid us a visit!
Nas li miru maraji sam! – We have seen the king himself!

Don’t confuse sam with the reflexive pronoun sin. Both are typically translated as '-self’ in English, but while sam adds emphasis, sin simply refers back to the subject, indicating that subject and object (for example) are the same.

When sam is added after a possessive pronoun or combined with a possessive noun phrase (sam de … or … ki sam), it stresses the importance of the possessive relationship, also indicating that it is exclusive rather than shared. In such cases, it is typically translated as ‘own’.

Mi yau mis sam ruma! – I want my own house! (I don’t want to share a house.)
Ta xi [car] sam de mis [boss]. / Ta xi mis [boss] ki sam [car]. – That’s my boss’s own car.

Ku-adverbs

Most adverbs are derived from adjectives by placing the marker ku between the adjective and the word or expression it modifies.

Ya nulis ku hau. – She/He writes well.
ona daki ku [amazing] – an amazingly intelligent woman

Any adjective can be turned into an adjective in such a manner, if it makes sense to do so.

Ku-adverbs can be modified by determiners, which are placed before the ku.

Ya nulis ingi ku hau. – She/He writes very well.

(You could also express this using reduplication, saying: Ya nulis ku hau hau.)

They can also be modified by other adverbs, which are placed after the adverb to which they refer.

Ya li tenda ku daki ku [amazing]. – He/She acted amazingly intelligently. / He/She acted in an amazingly intelligent way.

Adverbial phrases

Some ideas that might be represented as adverbs in other languages are expressed using prepositional phrases instead. These include kom ta ‘such, like that’.

LUGAMUN GRAMMAR
Introduction · Phonology and spelling · Word order · Noun phrases · Pronouns · Verb phrases · Adverbs · Questions · Numbers · Comparisons · Prepositions · Conjunctions · Dependent clauses · Emphasizing parts of a clause · Reduplication · Word formation · Expressions · Capitalization and proper names

Questions

Yes-no questions

Yes-no questions (also called “polar questions”) are formed by adding the particle ka at the end of the correspond statements.

Ya ga lai. – He/She will come.
Ya ga lai ka? – Will he/she come?

Ti no li fa it. – You didn’t do it.
Ti no li fa it ka? – Didn’t you do it?

The answer to such question typically consists in, or starts with, either xi, which means ‘yes’ in this context, or with no ‘no’ – hence the name.

As in English and many other languages, the pitch of one’s voice often rises at the end of questions. However, this is not required, and a rising pitch alone is never sufficient to turn a statement into a question – instead, ka or one of the question words covered below is used for this purpose.

Asking about alternatives

Ka is also used when asking about alternatives, which are typically specified as a list, using au ‘or’ between the last two elements.

Ti yau kofi au cai ka? – Do you want coffee or tea?

In such cases, the answer frequently specifies one of the alternatives.

Kofi, ku jenti. – Coffee, please.

Content questions

Content questions (also called “open questions” or, in English, “wh-questions”) ask for some specific information. In Lugamun, such questions typically include one of the following question words:

ke – what, who, whom
ke jen – who, whom
ke ples – where
ke tem – when
ke xos – what
por ke – why
kam – how much, how many, how (degree)
kes – whose
kese – how

(XXX Complete list.)

These question words are usually placed in the position where the corresponding word would occur in non-question sentences. In contrast to English, they are not moved to the front of the sentence (WALS 93; APiCS 12). XXX Maybe revise this to allow either placement? (If the object is fronted, the may mean that o is then required – or maybe leave it optional in this case too.)

Ti li miru ke jen? – Whom did you see?
Mi li miru Tina. – I saw Tina.

Ke by itself is mostly used to ask about things (‘what?’), but it can also be used to ask about people (‘who, whom?’) if the context is clear.

Ke (jen) ga [volunteer]? – Who’ll volunteer?

In this example, jen can be omitted, since only people volunteer. But if you want to ask ‘Who’ll fix this?’, you should better say Ke jen ga [fix/repair] si?, since Ke ga [fix/repair] si? would likely be understood as ‘What’ll fix this?’

The expression ke xos ‘what’ can be used if you want to be very explicit about asking about a thing (or things) rather than about a person. But it’s rarely needed, since ke alone is generally fine.

Kam is used to ask about quantities.

Kam kulin [remain]? – How much food is left?
Kam jen li lai? – How many people came?
Ti [practice] kam? – How much do you practice?
Ti [practice] kam kai? – How often do you practice?

Kes is used to ask about a possessive relationship (in a very wide sense).

Si xi kes ruma? – Whose house is this?
Tina xi kes nubet? – Tina is whose daughter? / Whose daughter is Tina?

XXX Examples for kese ‘how’ (in what manner, in what state, in which way):

… – How did you find me?
… – She showed her friend how to do it.
… – I remember well how I first met her/him. (used as conjunction)

Note: kes is derived from ke using the -s suffix that’s also used to form the possessive forms of pronouns ending in a vowel, such as mis from mi. Kese, on the other hand, is an independent root that just happens to start with the same syllable (not totally by accident, since all fundamental question words start with k).

XXX Explain how to express ‘which’ (ke de le, if needed).

Embedded questions

Questions can be embedded within other clauses. Content questions are embedded without any changes (except by adjusting pronouns as needed).

Nas no xvo yexo a unotra nas xi ke jen. – We haven’t yet told each other who we are.

In the case of questions ending in ka, that final particle is dropped and the embedded question is instead introduced with se ‘if, whether’.

Mi konside se tum bisa fa it. – I wonder whether you can do it.
Ya li ven mi se mi yau kofi au cai. – He/She asked me whether I wanted coffee or tea.

LUGAMUN GRAMMAR
Introduction · Phonology and spelling · Word order · Noun phrases · Pronouns · Verb phrases · Adverbs · Questions · Numbers · Comparisons · Prepositions · Conjunctions · Dependent clauses · Emphasizing parts of a clause · Reduplication · Word formation · Expressions · Capitalization and proper names

Numbers

Numbers below 1000

The following words form the core of the number system:

siro – zero
un – one
aval – first
do – two
tri – three
katre – four
tano – five
sis – six
set – seven
at – eight
tisa – nine
des – ten
sento – hundred
mil – thousand

Other numbers are formed as follows:

des un – 11
des do – 12
des tisa – 19
dodes – 20
dodes katre – 24
trides – 30
katredes tano – 45
atdes tisa – 89
sento dodes tri – 123
sento katredes – 140
dosento – 200
trisento trides tri – 333
katresento sis – 406
tanosento setdes – 570
tisasento tanodes tri – 953

One can see that numbers are read from left to right; if a small numeral from do ‘2’ to tisa ‘9’ is followed by the larger numeral des ‘10’ or sento ‘100’, both these numerals are multiplied. Un is not used as multiplier since there is no need to do so (it would not change the value of the number). No space is used between the parts of a numeral formed in this way.

If one considers a sequence of letters without whitespace between them as a “word”, then numbers above 10 have one word for each digit that isn’t 0. Number words are placed in the same order as the digits, so sento or its multiples (if present) are always followed by des or its multiples (if present) and finally a number word from un to tisa (unless the last digit is 0).

Siro ‘0’ is only used by itself, if the whole number is 0. Otherwise, if any digit in a number is 0, it is simply not mentioned in the number word.

Numbers up to a million

For numbers from 1000 onward, mil ‘1000’ is used as additional multiplier. It too can be preceded by a smaller numeral from do ‘2’ to tisasento tisades tisa ‘999’ with which it is multiplied. Un is again not used as multiplier, since there is still no need to do so. Since the multipliers of mil may themselves include spaces, they are always separated from mil by another space. The part after the mil (if any), looks just like a smaller number.

mil – 1000
mil des – 1010
mil tisades tisa – 1099
mil sissento – 1600
mil tisasento setdes tano – 1975
do mil – 2000
des mil – 10,000
tanodes mil – 50,000
atdes tisa mil – 89,000
sento mil – 100,000
katresento mil – 400,000
setsento des mil – 710,000
atsento katredes do mil sissento sisdes tri – 842,663

Larger numbers

Additional words used for expressing larger numbers include:

milyon – million (10⁶)
gigalyon – billion (10⁹)
teralyon – trillion (10¹²)
…

While milyon is similar to the words used in English and many other languages, larger powers of 1000 are formed by combining the corresponding SI prefix with the suffix -(a)lyon. This leads to forms that are recognizable for anyone familiar with these prefixes and that avoid the long vs. short scale issue that would otherwise inevitably plague an international auxlang. Most French-, Spanish-, or German-speaking countries (and others) use the “long scale”, which means that the word billion/billón/Billion in these languages corresponds to the English word ‘trillion’ (10¹²) rather than to English ‘billion’ (10⁹) – since modern English and Arabic, as well as some other languages, use the “short scale” instead. And for larger numerals, the difference in meaning gets even bigger. Regardless of which convention an auxlang would follow, it would be confusing for those used to the other scale. Usage of words derived from the SI prefixes avoids this potential pitfall.

Larger numbers are formed exactly in the same way as those involving mil, except that one or more of the words used for powers of 1000 are used as well – if several of these words are used in the same number, they are always sorted from largest to smallest.

milyon – 1,000,000
sis milyon – 6,000,000
trides milyon – 30,000,000
sento milyon – 100,000,000
atsento milyon – 800,000,000
setsento sisdes tri milyon tanosento mil – 763,500,000
tisasento atdes milyon trisento des do mil setsento un – 980,312,701
gigalyon – 1,000,000,000
do gigalyon katresento milyon – 2,400,000,000
tisasento setdes gigalyon tanosento des – 970,000,000,510

Cardinal and ordinal numbers

TODO Expand this section.

Cardinal numbers are placed before nouns:

sis kofi – six coffees
tanodes uma – fifty horses

Ordinal numbers are placed after nouns:

kaus sora do – the/a second rainbow
abe des do – the twelfth bird

Aval is an alternative to un which is only used as ordinal (after nouns):

monte aval / monte un – the first mountain

Aval is only used standalone, never as a part of combined numbers:

uma des un – the eleventh horse

Rationale: That ordinal numerals from ‘two’ upward are derived from cardinal numerals while a separate independent form is used for ‘first’, is the most typical pattern according to WALS (ch. 53). To keep things simple and regular we also allow using un as ordinal, but we add aval as independent synonym.

TODO Also explain how fractions are formed (-i suffix), how numbers with a fractional part are expressed (likely using the dot as decimal separator), and how large numerals can be grouped (preferably uses spaces between groups of three?).

LUGAMUN GRAMMAR
Introduction · Phonology and spelling · Word order · Noun phrases · Pronouns · Verb phrases · Adverbs · Questions · Numbers · Comparisons · Prepositions · Conjunctions · Dependent clauses · Emphasizing parts of a clause · Reduplication · Word formation · Expressions · Capitalization and proper names

Comparisons

mas, ol mas

To express that something has a certain property to a higher degree than something else, place the quantifier mas ‘more’ before an adjective or adverb. The compared entity is introduced using the preposition cem ‘than, as’.

Ya (xi) mas kavi cem (yas) makika. – She is stronger than her brother.
Bal makika lari mas ku sari cem ya. – But the brother runs faster than she.

Determiners such as mas are placed before the adverb marker ku (just as they are placed before verb markers).

Mas can also be used before nouns:

Mas jen li lai cem nas (li) [expect]. – More people came than we had expected.

To express the superlative – a higher degree than everything else – ol mas ‘most’ is used. This can be considered an abbreviation of mas … cem ol otra ‘more than all others’.

Ya (xi) ol mas kavi. – She is the strongest.

men, ol men

The opposite of mas is men ‘less, fewer’.

Ya (xi) men daki cem (yas) nuespos. – He’s less intelligent than his wife.
Men jen li lai cem nas (li) [expect]. – Fewer people came than we had expected.

Ol men ‘least’ is used in the same way as ol mas.

XXX Add example, including the selection preposition (de ‘of’?).

tan

For expressions of equality, tan … cem ‘as … as’ is used:

Ya (xi) tan gau cem (yas) makika. – She’s as tall as her brother.
Ya lari pia tan ku sari cem makika. – She also runs as fast as her brother.

As usual, tan can also be used before nouns:

Tan jen li lai cem nas (li) [expect]. – As many people came as we had expected.

mas ... mas, men ... men

If you want to express that two things change in correlation to each other, you repeat mas before each of them.

Mas garam, mas hau. – The hotter, the better.
Mas malo jen ga miru si, mas hau. – The fewer people will see this, the better.

Either or both instances of mas can be replaced by men as appropriate.

Men [money], men [problem/trouble]. – Less money, fewer problems.

LUGAMUN GRAMMAR
Introduction · Phonology and spelling · Word order · Noun phrases · Pronouns · Verb phrases · Adverbs · Questions · Numbers · Comparisons · Prepositions · Conjunctions · Dependent clauses · Emphasizing parts of a clause · Reduplication · Word formation · Expressions · Capitalization and proper names

Prepositions

Lugamun has the following simple prepositions:

a – to, for (target, recipient, dative/allative)
an – about, concerning, regarding, toward, towards, on
be – by (agent of a passive verb or creator of a work)
bina – without
de, ki – of, ‘s (genitive)
gen – with, along with (comitative)
gi – for (the benefit of), toward(s)
ni – in, at, on (locative/time)
por – for, due to, out of, because of, for the sake of
yon – with, by, by means of, using, via (instrumental)

The object marker o and the subject marker i are similar to prepositions, but in most cases they can be (and usually are) omitted. Prepositions, on the other hand, are never omitted.

XXX Add more explanations and some examples for each preposition.

XXX Probably de … a … is used for ranges such as ‘10 to 15 people came. / She works from 8am to 5pm. / I’m looking for a gift that costs between 15 and 30 dollars.’ If it’s clear from the context, de may be omitted.

Some words can be used both as preposition and as conjunction (linking two clauses):

kom – as, like, such as

XXX Also explain gi tu '(in order) to’.

XXX Samples for kom (conj+prep):

… – Do as I say!
… – I respect her as a teacher, but I don’t like her.
… – He acted like a wild dog.

Compound prepositions include include a noun, e.g. ni sima ‘on, on top of’. Such prepositions are follow straight by a noun phrase just like any other preposition (no need for de). This can be considered a case of apposition.

Combined ni … prepositions can be shorted to just ni if the intended meaning is clear from the context.

XXX Add explanation on how to reduce the potential ambiguity of prepositional phrases after the object. To make it clear that the prepositional phrase refers to the verb, place it before the object: Man [call] ni Amerika o ona. In such cases, o must be used before the object, since it doesn’t immediately follow the verb. To make it clear that it refers to the object, use a relative clause: Man [call] ona ke xi ni Amerika.

XXX Recommend a typical default order, possibly: subject – time expression – verb – object – indirect object (recipient) – other prepositional phrases.

XXX Quickly document all prepositions, including the temporal sense of de for ‘since’ and a for ‘until, till’.

de and ki

De and ki both express that something belongs to something else, but they take their arguments in different order. With de, the “owned” item comes before the preposition, while the “owner” (in a very wide sense of the word) comes after it. With ki, it’s the other way around.

These two phrases have the same meaning:

xvan de nubaca – the dog of the girl
nubaca ki xvan – the girl’s dog

As do these:

garaje de [car] de mis mama – the garage of the car of my mother
mis mama ki [car] ki garaje – my mother’s car’s garage

Here de is translated as ‘of’, and ki as genitive (‘s), but don’t feel obliged to do so when translating between English and Lugamun. In Lugamun, de is more frequently used than ki, and it’s perfectly fine to use it for translating the genitive – just remember to switch the order of arguments around.

When ki and de both occur in the same phrase, ki binds tighter, which means that the phrase containing it is to be understood as part of the phrase containing de, rather than the other way around.

garaje de mis mama ki [car]. – the garage of my mother’s car

As one might notice from this example, possessive pronouns such as mis bind tighter than any preposition.

LUGAMUN GRAMMAR
Introduction · Phonology and spelling · Word order · Noun phrases · Pronouns · Verb phrases · Adverbs · Questions · Numbers · Comparisons · Prepositions · Conjunctions · Dependent clauses · Emphasizing parts of a clause · Reduplication · Word formation · Expressions · Capitalization and proper names

Conjunctions

XXX Possibly rename this chapter, as subordinating conjunctions (subordinators) should be treated under dependent clauses instead.

XXX List all (coordinating) conjunctions and describe them shortly.

se

Clauses introduced with se ‘if’ describe the condition under which a hypothetical situation might be or become true. The hypothetical situation is described in the main clause. In English, the main clause is optionally introduced with ‘then’; in Lugamun, this word is simply omitted. As in English, the main clause can follow or precede the se clause.

Mi ba go, se mi ha tem. – I would go if I had the time.
Se mi ha tem, mi ba go. – If I had the time, (then) I would go.

The mood marker ba ‘would’ is often used in the main clause. In the se clause, it is typically omitted, since se already implies that one talks about a hypothetical situation.

Se ta xvan xi kat, ya ba pakar mas [mouse]. – If that dog were a cat, it would catch more mice.

If one is more confident about a hypothetical situation becoming real, on can use ga in the main clause; optionally it can also be used in the se clause, but again this is not necessary, since the clause itself implies that the situation is not (yet) real.

Mi ga go, se mi (ga) ha tem. – I will go if I have the time.

When talking about counterfactuals – hypothetical situations that lie in the past and hence no longer can become true – li ba ‘would have’ is used in the main clause. In the se clause, it is often shortened to li, since the unreality expressed by ba is already implied. But if you want to use li ba instead, that’s fine too.

Se [taxi] li (ba) tiba ni tem, nas no li ba [miss] tara. – If the taxi had arrived on time, we would not have missed our flight.

LUGAMUN GRAMMAR
Introduction · Phonology and spelling · Word order · Noun phrases · Pronouns · Verb phrases · Adverbs · Questions · Numbers · Comparisons · Prepositions · Conjunctions · Dependent clauses · Emphasizing parts of a clause · Reduplication · Word formation · Expressions · Capitalization and proper names

Dependent clauses

XXX Write a short introduction.

Relative clauses

Relative clauses (also called adjectival clauses) follow the noun to which they refer (WALS 90; APiCS 7). They are introduced using the generic relative pronoun ke ‘that, who, which, whom’. If the head noun appears as subject or object of the relative clause, this pronoun is put at the start of the clause, while the other elements follow in their usual order.

If the head noun is the object of the relative clause, the object marker o can be placed before the ke to indicate this. However, like in most other positions, the use of this marker is optional – usually there is little risk of confusion, in which case it is usually omitted. In this document, we place the marker in parentheses in such cases, indicating that it may or may not be used.

ona ke ga mai mis [bike] – the woman who will buy my bike (the woman is the subject)
banana (o) ke mi li kula – the banana that I ate (the banana is the object)

This is also known as “gap strategy” since, if the noun is the object of the relative clause, there is a “gap” in the position where the object would normally be placed (after the verb) – in other words, this position is left unfilled.

XXX Explain details and give examples. Explain that other prepositions are likewise placed before ke. Deal with ‘whose’ as subject and object.

In English and some other languages, there are relative clauses without an explicit noun phrase or pronoun to which they refer (called “free” or “fused” relative clauses). This is usually not the case in Lugamun. So, if translating such expressions into Lugamun, don’t forget to add a suitable pronoun (such as ta ‘that’, yan '(the) one’, it ‘it’, or ya ‘he, she’).

Mi [like] ta (o) ke (mi) miru. – I like what I see.
Ta (o) ke ya li fa, li (xi) ingi [irresponsible]. – What he did was very irresponsible.
Mi xi yan ke li fa it. – I’m the one who did it.
Ya bisa dansa gen yan (o) ke (ya) yau. – She can dance with whom she wants.

However, when ke is followed by a noun which qualifies it further (such as ke ples ‘where’ or ke tem ‘when’), the clause can be used stand-alone without needing an explicit antecedent to which it refers (see Referring to times and places in dependent clauses below for examples). In such cases, the noun itself can be considered an implicit antecedent – ke tem ‘when’ could also be expressed as tem ke ‘the time that’.

Subordinate clauses

Subordinate clauses are typically introduced by a type of conjunction called subordinator (or subordinating conjunction). Subordinators are always placed at the beginning of the subordinate clause (WALS 94). The object marker o is usually omitted before subordinators.

to

In Lugamun, the most frequent and general subordinator is to ‘that’. Note that while English ‘that’ can often be omitted, this is not the case with to.

The most common case is that the subordinate clause is the object of the main clause.

Mi opin to ya (xi) inda. – I think (that) he/she is beautiful.
Mi jixi to jen ga lai. – I know (that) a person will come.

Generally subordinate clauses are assumed to share the same tense as the main clause, therefore there is no need to use tense markers if this is the case.

Nas li jixi to le bisa fa it. – We knew that they could do it.

Markers are only needed when the subordinate clause takes place at another time and the content of the clause is otherwise insufficient to express this.

Mi li fikir to ya (ga) xi si ples pre si tem. – I thought that he/she would be here by now.

In this case, ga may be used because, relative to the main clause (which refers to the past), the subordinate clause refers to this future. However, it’s also fine to omit it, because si tem ‘now’ already expresses this fact.

To clauses can also be used as subject of the main clause:

To yo [student] jixi tan malo, li [shock] mi. – That the students knew so little shocked me.

Or as complements of a noun:

[Fact] to Bumi [revolve] ni seronde Sol, ba debe bi jixi a kada [student]. – The fact that the Earth revolves around the Sun should be known to every student.

Another possibility is that the word order of the main clause is changed by fronting an element. If a to clause (or any other subordinate clause) used as object is moved to the front, it must be preceded by the object marker o to be recognizable as object.

O to jen ga lai, mi jixi. – That a person will come, I know it. / I know that a person will come.

Note: In English, ‘that’ clauses used as object are rarely fronted in such a way, but it’s fine to do so in Lugamun.

Note that in these and similar cases, the nested clause is typically terminated by a comma (when writing) or by a short pause (when speaking) to indicate where it ends and the main clause begins (or continues). This helps to clarify the sentence structure.

When the subject is a to clause, it may also be moved to the end of the clause by using the construction ta ke .. xi – ‘that which … is’. This can be translated into English by using ‘it’ as dummy subject at the start of the sentence.

Ta ke li [shock] mi, xi to yo [student] jixi tan malo. – It shocked me that the students knew so little. / What shocked me was that the students knew so little.

While such sentences with a dummy ‘it’ are very common in English, in Lugamun it’s fine to stick with the typical SVO order instead. So, while you can front the verb if you really prefer it, in Lugamun the most natural solution may be to start with the to clause:

To yo [student] jixi tan malo, li [shock] mi. – It shocked me that the students knew so little.

Reported speech

To is also used for reported speech. In contrast to English, verb forms never change when a clause is changed from direct to reported speech. Pronouns, however, may need to be adjusted.

Ya li xvo: “Sol bria.” – He/She said: “The sun is shining.”
Ya li xvo to sol bria. – He/She said that the sun was shining.

Ben li xvo: “Mi no ga fa [job].” – Ben said: “I will not do the job.”
Ben li xvo to ya no ga fa [job]. – Ben said that he would not do the job.

se

XXX List other subordinators such as se ‘if’ and explain their usage. Likely move the existing section here, since it’s probably better to do so here than in the chapter on conjunctions?

XXX Explain that the optional ‘then’ in ‘if – then’ pairs is generally left untranslated (‘If the door is locked, (then) we need the key.’). Compare similar sentences with ‘since’ where no such word is used in English either (‘Since the door is locked, we need the key.’).

XXX Explain that, except for to clauses, most subordinate clauses may also be used like adverbs (as adverbial clauses, e.g. ‘She met him when she was in Berlin’). Adverbial clauses express when, why, where, opposition, and conditions.

Referring to times and places in dependent clauses

XXX Probably group ke tem and ke ples together with the other conjunctions introducing subordinate clauses, explaining each one in turn.

When referring to the time when something takes place, ke tem ‘when’ is used in dependent clauses.

Mi li sai maxa [along the street], ke tem [suddenly] (li) kaixu ren. – I was walking along the street when suddenly it began to rain.

Den ke tem [wall] li [come down/collapse]. – The day when the wall came down.

Ke tem is also used in questions (when asking about a time).

When the nested clause is relative – explicitly referring back to a period of time mentioned in the main clause – it’s possible to reduce ke tem to just ke, since the context makes it clear that one is referring to a time.

Den ke [wall] li [come down/collapse]. – The day the wall came down.

As usual, subordinate clauses (but not relative clauses) can be placed before the main clause.

Ke tem li kaixu ren, mi (li) sai maxa [along the street]. – When it began to rain I was walking along the street.

XXX Document ke ples, which works the same way.

LUGAMUN GRAMMAR
Introduction · Phonology and spelling · Word order · Noun phrases · Pronouns · Verb phrases · Adverbs · Questions · Numbers · Comparisons · Prepositions · Conjunctions · Dependent clauses · Emphasizing parts of a clause · Reduplication · Word formation · Expressions · Capitalization and proper names

Emphasizing parts of a clause

Sometimes one wants to put special emphasis on one part of a clause, such as its subject, object, the verb itself, or a prepositional phrase. There are several ways of doing this in Lugamun.

XXX Revise this, since now there is also a subject marker and every verb can be preceded by a verb marker, there are additional possibilities, and some of the options listed here (especially some uses of tu before verbs) are not longer needed. Explain how word order can be made completely free by using subject, object, and verb markers – but a phrase moved to the front will always be considered somewhat stressed. Explain that in fronted noun phrases it’s a good idea to include de in possessive pronouns since otherwise the pronoun could possibly be misinterpreted as subject.

XXX Example of free word order:

Gen kawines gran na lai [responsible]nes gran. – With great strength comes great responsibility.

Fronting for emphasis

In Lugamun, the subject is commonly placed at the front of the clause. Placing any other element there is one way of giving a certain emphasis to this element.

Any prepositional phrase can be moved to the front in order to emphasis. The object can likewise by moved to the front, but in this case it must be preceded by the object marker o (which is usually omitted when the object follows the verb). The fronted phrase should usually be terminated by a comma (when writing) or by a short pause (when speaking) to indicate where it ends and the subject begins.

O tofa, mi kula. – I’m eating an apple. / It’s an apple that I’m eating. (the apple is emphasized)

A Tina, mi li da buku. – I gave the book to Tina. / It’s Tina I gave the book to. (the recipient Tina is emphasized)

Gen Ben, mi li fa [discovery]. – It’s Ben I made the discovery with. / I made the discovery together with Ben. (the fact that Ben was involved is in emphasized)

Bina cien, safirja finu cvan manto. – Immediately the traveler took off his cloak. (the fact that the act took place immediately is stressed)

time_expressions and adverbs referring to the whole clause can also be fronted for emphasis.

Ku garam, sol bria. – Warmly the Sun is shining. / The Sun is shining warmly. (the warmness of the shining is emphasized)

In the case of time expressions and adverbs, the emphasis is only slight, as such a placement is relatively normal.

Den laste, mi (xi) hapi, bal si den, (mi xi) sedi. – Yesterday I was happy, but today I’m sad. (slight emphasis is put on the two dates and the change in mood they brought)

Kixa man li [arrive]. – Then a man arrived. (slight emphasis is put in the fact that this is what happened next)

Moving a prepositional phrase or another sentence element to the front can also be useful in poetry and for other stylistic reasons. But note that a certain amount of increased emphasis will always be placed on the fronted element in such cases – one cannot consider fronting an entirely “neutral” operation.

Starting a clause with “an”

Another option for emphasizing a part of a clause is to make it the topic, using an … at the beginning of the clause. In the main clause, the topic is then referred to by using a suitable pronoun.

An si tofa, mi kula it. – Concerning this apple, I’m eating it.

An Tina, mi li da buku a ya. – Concerning Tina, I gave her the book.

An Ben, mi li fa [discovery] gen ya. – Concerning Ben, I made the discovery with him.

This strategy can also be used for the subject or verb of a clause.

An mi, mi kula tofa. – Concerning me, I’m eating an apple.

An Dora, ya kula tofa. – Concerning Dora, she’s eating an apple.

In order to make the verb the topic, it needs to be converted into a verbal noun by placing tu in front of it. In the relative clause, a generic verb such as fa ‘do, make’ is used to refer back to it.

An tu kula si tofa, mi fa kvai it. – About eating this apple, I will do it soon.

XXX Maybe pronouns can be omitted if they can be inferred from the context? In this case, it would likewise be possible to leave such as “gap” in the main clauses of sentences such as these.

Using adverbs for emphasis

XXX xi can be used as well, but it’s placed before the emphasized element.

Another options for expressing emphasis is to add an emphatic adverb such as ku sahi ‘truly, really, indeed’ or ku real ‘really, actually, indeed’ after the element you want to stress.

Dora ku sahi kula tofa. – Dora, indeed, is eating an apple. (emphasis is put on Dora, maybe because this act was not expected of her)

Mi kula si tofa ku real. – I’m eating this apple, indeed. (the apple is emphasized)

Mi kula ku real si tofa. – I’m actually eating this apple. (the fact of the eating is emphasized)

Mi li da buku a Tina ku sahi. – I gave the book indeed to Tina. (the recipient Tina is emphasized)

Using relative clauses for emphasis

A further option is to use the emphasized element as subject and move what would otherwise be the main clause into a relative clause modifying this subject.

XXX Probably/Preferably remove the need to use yan or a similar dummy pronoun here.

Tofa xi it (o) ke mi kula. – An apple is what I’m eating. / It’s an apple that I’m eating.

Tina xi yan a ke mi li da buku. – Tina is the one I gave the book to. / It’s Tina I gave the book to.

Ben xi yan gen ke mi li fa [discovery]. – Ben is the one I made the discovery with. / It’s Ben I made the discovery with.

Mi xi yan ke kula tofa. – It’s me who’s eating an apple.

Tu kula tofa xi ta (o) ke mi fa. – Eating an apple is what I do. / Eating an apple is that which I do.

Rationale: This is the most typical way of focusing noun phrases in creole languages (APiCS 104). XXX Considering that’s so, maybe move this style further up and de-emphasize some of the other ways?

LUGAMUN GRAMMAR
Introduction · Phonology and spelling · Word order · Noun phrases · Pronouns · Verb phrases · Adverbs · Questions · Numbers · Comparisons · Prepositions · Conjunctions · Dependent clauses · Emphasizing parts of a clause · Reduplication · Word formation · Expressions · Capitalization and proper names

Reduplication

Reduplication means to duplicate a word in order to modify its meaning.

Reduplication for intensity and long duration

In Lugamun, adjectives and adverbs can be reduplicated in order to make them more intense – this is similar to placing ingi ‘very’’ before them.

hau – good
hau hau – very good, excellent

mali – small
mali mali – very small, tiny

This meaning also applies when adjectives are used as verbs:

Ta ruma (xi) gran gran! – That house is (really) huge!

If other verbs are reduplicated, this indicates an activity going on for a long time:

Ya li nulis nulis [until] nait van. – He/She wrote and wrote until late at night.

Rationale: According to WALS (ch. 27), most languages use reduplication for some semantic or grammatical purposes. WALS doesn’t include a detailed study of what these purposes are, but according to APiCs (ch. 26), pidgins and creole languages most typically use it for iconic functions such as intensity (making a quality stronger) or iteration (indicating that a action takes place repeatedly or for a long time). We use it for these purposes as well. Cases of reduplication changing a word class are less frequent, but this is still the second most common function. We use it for this purpose too (see the next section).

Making adverbs from prepositions

Another use of reduplication is the formation of adverbs from short prepositions. In these cases, the resulting adverb is written as a single word.

gen – (together) with
gengen – together
su – under, below
susu – down, below, downward(s)

Example:

Ona li go gen man. – The woman went with the man.
Ona va man li go gengen. – The woman and the man went together.

Reduplication is only used with short prepositions that have just a single syllable. With longer prepositions, the result of reduplication would be a bit heavy (four syllables or more). Therefore ku is used to derive adverbs from prepositions with two or more syllables (just as from adjectives).

estra – extra-, outside (prefix + preposition)
ku estra – outside, outward (adverb)

LUGAMUN GRAMMAR
Introduction · Phonology and spelling · Word order · Noun phrases · Pronouns · Verb phrases · Adverbs · Questions · Numbers · Comparisons · Prepositions · Conjunctions · Dependent clauses · Emphasizing parts of a clause · Reduplication · Word formation · Expressions · Capitalization and proper names

Word formation

Re-using words in a different word class

Each Lugamun word has one word class (also known as “part of speech” or POS) to which it fundamentally belongs. Only a handful fundamentally belong to two or more classes, e.g. kom ‘as, like, such as’ can be used both as a preposition and a conjunction. Such cases are always listed in the dictionary.

In other cases, words can change their word class according to regular rules, allowing them to be re-used in a second word class besides their original one. The instances where this is the case are documented here. Frequently such words will be listed with all relevant word classes in the dictionary as well – but even if this is not the case, they can always be re-used in the described manner.

Verbs used as nouns

Every verb can also be used as a noun meaning “the act of X” or, if the act itself and its results are quite similar to each other, “the results of doing X”.

xukur – thank (v), thanks (n)
deklara – declare, declaration (the act or process of declaring, or a document containing such a declaration)

Adjectives used as Nouns

Every adjective can also be used as a noun meaning “the/a thing that is X”:

itali – Italian (adjective: referring to Italy, its language or inhabitants / noun: the Italian language)
sikrit – secret (adj/n)

Note that when adjectives become nouns, they always refer to things, not to persons or animals. To refer to persons, one puts jen or a more specific word such as ona ‘woman’ or man ‘man’ before the adjective. ‘An Italian’ (person) is jen itali.

Nouns used as adjectives

Certain groups of nouns can be re-used without change as adjectives, with their adjectival meaning being “referring to X”. This is the case with the names of animal species or similar groups of beings.

jen – human being, person (n); human (adj)

It is also true of the adherents of a belief system, provided that a root word is used to refer to them (rather than a compound or a derived word).

muslim – Muslim (n/adj)

Languages and compass directions can likewise be used as adjectives.

hindi – Hindi (n/adj)
norte – north (n/adj), northern

Primarily a noun or an adjective?

When it comes to words used both as nouns and adjectives, one might sometimes be confused about which meaning is more fundamental. Itali is derived from Italya by adding the -i suffix, hence it’s primarily an adjective – but it can also be used as a noun identifying the language spoken in that country. Hindi is primarily a noun (the name of the language), but it can also be used as an adjective referring to that language (for example buku hindi – a Hindi book, a book written in Hindi). The difference is subtle and people might not be aware of it.

The good news is: it hardly matters. In cases where there can be doubt, the resulting meanings will usually the same, regardless of whether one considers the adjective (“referring to X”) or the noun (“thing which is X”) as the derived form.

Spaced nouns

Spaced nouns are formed by combining a head noun with a modifier word that modifies its meaning. We call them “spaced” because they contain a space character (between the two words), while compounds formed by adding a prefix or suffix do not.

Several frequently used head words in spaced nouns are documented below.

jen

Compounds of jen with a noun indicate a person that belongs to or comes from the specified entity. In English, they often correspond to a compound ending in '-er’.

jen selo – villager

If jen is followed by an adjective, this simply expresses a person who has the specified property.

jen europi – European (person)
jen ruski – Russian (person)
jen trasi – trans person, transperson

In all these cases it is possible to use a more specific word instead of jen to give more details on the type of person.

ona nederlani / nujen nederlani – Dutchwoman
man nederlani / majen nederlani – Dutchman
baca nederlani – Dutch child

Such more specific expressions will not typically be listed in the dictionary, but they can always be formed as needed.

Noun–verb compounds

Only rarely the second part of a spaced noun is a word that’s fundamentally a verb but that can also be used as a noun (like all verbs). Such compounds are best understood as the second part having its noun meaning, e.g. den can means ‘day of birth’, or ‘birthday’ for short.

Such compounds are inherently ambiguous, since in theory den can could also mean ‘the day gives birth’ – though actually, days don’t give birth, so this theoretical ambiguity is unlikely to cause confusion. But when introducing new noun–verb compounds that aren’t yet widely used (and listed in a dictionary), please make sure that they, too, are very unlikely to be misunderstood as actual noun–verb sequences. When there is any doubt, it’s usually better to insert a preposition such as de between the parts or express the intended meaning in some other way.

Spaced adjectives

While spaced nouns are relatively common, spaced adjectives are much rarer. They are derived from a noun/adjective combination by turning the noun into an adjective, while leaving the original adjective unmodified. Such combinations are only used if the original adjective is a compass point.

For example, from the noun phrase Korea Sude ‘South Korea’, the spaced adjective korei sude ‘South Korean’ is derived. Such spaced adjectives can in turn modify nouns just like any other adjectives, e.g. a person from South Korea is a jen korei sude.

Prefixes

If a prefix ends in a vowel and the main word starts with the same vowel, only one instance of this vowel is preserved. For example yu- (young, not yet fully grown individual) added to uma ‘horse’ results in the word yuma ‘foal’.

If the prefix ends with a vowel and the main word starts with one and the combination of these two vowels would be read as a diphthong, then the semivowel y is inserted between the two to prevent his. Sample: ko+inda becomes koyinda ‘pretty’.

XXX List and describe prefixes here and given one or two examples for each.

Suffixes

If a suffix that starts with a vowel is added to a word that ends in a vowel, the final vowel of the main word is dropped. Sample: the suffix -i appended to the word universo ‘universe’ forms the derived word universi ‘universal’.

If the formation of the compound form would lead to a repetition of the same vowel, only one instance is kept. Hence distansia ‘distance’ + -i becomes distansi ‘far, distant’ (rather than “distansii”).

As a special case, a final vowel is not removed from the main word if it’s the only vowel in the word. In such cases, main word and suffix are instead joined together as they are. If the resulting vowel combination looks like a diphthong, it is also pronounced as one. For example, fa plus the -u suffix becomes fau /fau̯/, ha+in becomes hain /hai̯n/.

Verb markers used as suffixes

The verb_markers for the three tenses (li, na, ga) and for the passive voice (bi) can be added to a verb, resulting in an adjective that means ke (marker) (verb).

matili (= ke li mati) – dead (who died)
matiga (= ke ga mati) – mortal (who will die)
ona sidena (= ona ke (na) side) – a sitting woman (= a woman who sits)
deklara nulisbi (= deklara ke bi nulis) – a written declaration (= a declaration that is/was written)
geste svagatbi – a welcome guest

Don’t forget that, according to the usual stress rules, the stress shifts to the last vowel preceding the last consonant, that is, the last vowel before the added verb marker:

matili, matiga, sidena, andikabi, karibubi

Adjectives formed by adding -na often correspond to the present participle in English, while those formed with -bi correspond to the past participle (also called passive participle).

Generally all these adjectives can be replaced by a relative clause with no real difference in meaning, but sometimes they make a convenient shortcut.

Ti miru ona sidena ta ples ka? / Ti miru ona ke side ta ples ka? – Do you see the woman (who’s) sitting over there?

Verbs used as suffixes

A few of Lugamun’s verbs are also used of suffixes. When applied to another word (usually a noun), they create a new verb with the meaning “do X (to)”. The following sections list the verbs used in this manner and give some examples of their usage.

Keep again in mind that the stress in the resulting compound is placed according to the usual rules. In some cases this means that it moves one syllable to the right compared to the original word:

formada, hatorusa, tabakusa

If the original word ends in a consonant and the suffix has just one syllable, the stress remains unchanged:

selda, tamha

da

Da added to nouns creates verbs meaning “give X to” – accordingly, they are usually used with an object.

formada – to shape, to form (give form to)
namda – to name, to give a/the name to
selda – to salt (add salt to)

Examples:

No du sugi selda kulin. – Don’t salt the food too much.
Nas debe namda xvan. – We have to name the dog.

Occasionally these verbs are used with two objects – in such cases, the recipient is usually marked using a.

Le li namda Amasonas a rika. – The named the river the Amazon.

ha

Ha added to nouns creates verbs meaning “have X” – they are typically used with an object or an adverbial expression.

namha – be called, have the name
tamha – taste (have a certain taste)

Examples:

Ta rika namha Amasonas. – That river is called the Amazon.
Si nomin tamha ku hau hau. – This drink tastes really good.

usa

Usa added to nouns creates verbs meaning “use X (on)”. Some of these verbs are typically used with an object indicating to what they are applied:

hatorusa – hammer (use a hammer on, strike with a hammer or in a hammer-like fashion)
duanusa – smoke (preserve or prepare food or similar by treating it with smoke)

Example:

Bina (fridge), le li debe duanusa (meat). – Without a fridge, they had to smoke the meat.

Others are commonly used with or without object:

tabakusa – smoke (use the tobacco in a cigarette, cigar, pipe etc., by smoking it)

Examples:

Ya sugi sugi tabakusa. – He/She smokes way too much.
Ya (like) tabakusa (cigarette electric). – He/She likes smoking electric cigarettes.

Other suffixes

aje

-aje is appended to verbs to indicate a thing that does or realizes X (where X is the base word).

serondaje – surroundings (the thing or things that surround something or someone)

i, l

-i is appended to nouns or verbs meaning related to, affected by, or characterized by X.

XXX Give some examples.

Sometimes it can also mean “applying throughout”.

XXX Give example(s).

If -i is added to a word that ends in y followed by a vowel, that y is dropped together with the vowel. For example, the adjective derived from Italya ‘Italy’ is itali ‘Italian’.

Note that this rule applies only to the -i suffix, not to other suffixes that just happen to start with i.

The alternative form -l is used with nouns that end in a single i (not a diphthong), because the resulting adjective would otherwise be identical to the base noun itself.

politi – politics, policy
politil – political

ja

-ja is appended to verbs to indicate a person who does something, whether currently, frequently, or professionally. In English, they often correspond to a compound ending in '-er’ or sometimes '-ist’.

cangeja – singer
xasija – killer
safirja – traveler
xwoja – speaker

XXX Probably allow such nouns to be used in apposition after another noun that gives more details on the person described, such as ona safirja ‘female traveler, woman traveler’, man safirja ‘male traveler’, baca safirja ‘child traveler, traveling child’ – though these specific examples could also be expressed using prefixes, as masafirja, wesafirja, yusafirja. Such more specific expressions will not typically be listed in the dictionary, but they can always be formed as needed.

XXX List and describe additional suffixes here and given one or two examples for each.

LUGAMUN GRAMMAR
Introduction · Phonology and spelling · Word order · Noun phrases · Pronouns · Verb phrases · Adverbs · Questions · Numbers · Comparisons · Prepositions · Conjunctions · Dependent clauses · Emphasizing parts of a clause · Reduplication · Word formation · Expressions · Capitalization and proper names

Expressions

Time expressions

(This may be called “adjuncts of time”; generally adjuncts give additional information on matters as such manner, time, place.)

Time expressions are noun phrases or prepositional phrases that express when something takes place. Noun phrases used as time expressions don’t need a preposition in front of them.

“Naked” time expressions (not introduced by a preposition) are most commonly placed either after the object (or after the verb, if there is no object) or between subject and verb (in front of any verb markers that the clause may contain). They can also be placed after a prepositional phrase. It is also possible to place them at the start of a clause, giving them a slight emphasis. Rarely are they placed between verb and object (but it is not wrong to do so).

Time expressions include:

den tali – tomorrow
si den – today
den laste – yesterday
si tem – now
ke tem – when
ol tem – always
no tem – never

XXX Give further examples and explain usage.

XXX Also explain prepositional time expressions such as ‘since yesterday’, ‘until next year’, ‘from Mai to December’. They are most typically placed after the object.

Place expressions

Place expressions are noun phrases or prepositional phrases that express where something takes place. They are placed in the same manner as time expressions.

Prepositional phrases expressing a location often start with the word ni ‘in, at, on’. Noun phrases used as place expressions without a preceding preposition generally have ples ‘place’ as their head noun. They include:

aru ples – somewhere
eni ples – anywhere
ke ples – where
no ples – nowhere, anywhere (in negated sentences)
ol ples – everywhere
otra ples – somewhere else, elsewhere
si ples – here
ta ples – (over) there

Before place expressions starting with ni, the copula xi is optional and often omitted.

Mi (xi) ni London. – I’m in London.

XXX Give some usage examples. Give some prepositional place expressions as examples and explain their usage too.

Expressing pain and other bodily feelings

To express that somebody has a headache or similar experiences involving a body part, one typically uses the affected body part as subject (APiCS 66).

Mis tobu bole. – I have a headache. / My head hurts.

Addressing people

san ‘Mr., Mrs., Miss’ is commonly used as a polite form of address, either in front of a person’s name or stand-alone.

XXX Give examples.

Interjections

XXX These include:

salam – hello
xukur – thank (verb), thanks (noun), thank you (interjection)

LUGAMUN GRAMMAR
Introduction · Phonology and spelling · Word order · Noun phrases · Pronouns · Verb phrases · Adverbs · Questions · Numbers · Comparisons · Prepositions · Conjunctions · Dependent clauses · Emphasizing parts of a clause · Reduplication · Word formation · Expressions · Capitalization and proper names

Capitalization and proper names

Rules for capitalization

Capitalization in Lugamun follows similar rules as in English, but is used somewhat more sparingly. The first word of each sentence is capitalized, as are proper names regardless of where they occur. The period (.), question mark (?), and exclamation mark (!) are normally considered as punctuation that ends a sentence, so the following word will be capitalized. On the other hand, comma (,), semicolon (;), and dash (–) are considered as marks that help to structure a single sentence, hence the next word is not capitalized (unless it is a proper name).

The colon (:) is normally also considered as inner-sentence punctuation, and so followed by a lower-case letter. However, if a complete sentence follows and one prefers it, one can also capitalize the word after the colon. If the sentence after a colon is enclosed in quotation marks, it is always capitalized.

Quoted speech is usually capitalized if the quoted expression is a complete sentence (or several ones), but not when quoting just a word or short expression.

Ya (li) ven: “Ti yau ke?” – He/She asked: “What do you want?”
Ben (li) minta Tina tu “banju” ya, bal ku real ya yau ku sola (money). – Be asked Tina to “help” him, but actually he just wanted money.

Some poets also capitalize the first word of each line in a poem, while most just follow the normal rules of capitalizing proper names and the first word of each sentence. Either style is fine, as long as one uses it consistently.

Section headers and the titles of books, movies, and other works are capitalized just like sentences: the first word is capitalized, while otherwise only proper names are capitalized. When referring to them in running text, they are normally written in italics or surrounded by quotation marks.

Sento nyen de [lonely]nes xi buku ol mas jixibi de Gabriel García Márquez. – One Hundred Years of Solitude is Gabriel García Márquez’s best-known book.
Ti li soma Hemingway ki “Yo komonte kom elefan bai” ka? – Did you read Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”?

Proper names

Proper names (also called proper nouns or just names) are always capitalized. These include the names of persons, companies, countries (e.g. Majarorsa ‘Hungary’, Misre ‘Egypt’), continents (e.g. Europa ‘Europe’), cities (e.g. Budapest), and other geographical entities such as rivers (e.g. Amasonas ‘Amazon’).

In contrast to English, the adjectives related to such nouns are not capitalized (e.g. majar ‘Hungarian’, misri ‘Egyptian’), nor are references to the inhabitants of countries and other geographical places (e.g. jen europi '(a) European’).

Religions and other belief systems aren’t capitalized (e.g. budisme / iman budi ‘Buddhism’, islam ‘Islam’, kristisme ‘Christianity’). The names of months (e.g. januar ‘January’) and days of the week (e.g. solden ‘Sunday’) are considered normal nouns and hence not capitalized, again in contrast to English.

The names of planets (such as [?] ‘Mars’) and other celestial bodies are considered proper names and hence capitalized. However, bumi ‘earth/Earth’, luna ‘moon’, and sol ‘sun’ are in typical usage not considered as celestial bodies, but as the place where people live and as things one can see in the sky. As such, they are written in lower case like other generic nouns.

Si den sol bria ku garam. – The sun is shining warmly today.
Tis yau du bi fa ni bumi, kom ni jana. – Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.

However, in cases where it matters that these places are indeed celestial bodies, they are generally capitalized.

[Fact] to Bumi [revolve] ni seronde Sol, ba debe bi jixi a kada [student]. – The fact that the Earth revolves around the Sun should be known to every student.
Jen [visit] aval Luna ni 1969. – Humans first visited the Moon in 1969.

Similarly, deva ‘god/God’ is written in lower case when referring to gods in general or to one of conceivably multiple deities. However, in the context of monotheistic religions, Deva is frequently treated as a proper name and hence capitalized.

Some names consist of short phrases in Lugamun. In such cases, the first word is always capitalized. Otherwise, any prepositions and conjunctions are written in lower case, while all other words are capitalized.

Yo Dola Fabi Un de Amerika – (the) United States of America

Sometimes a name is preceded by a generic term that characterizes the entity in question and which may be considered as part of the name, or as a title applied to a person. In such cases, both nouns are usually capitalized when they are used next to each other.

[President] Emmanuel Macron – President Emmanuel Macron
[University] Stanford – Stanford University
[Hotel] Ritz – Hotel Ritz

If used without the specific name, however, the generic part is usually written in lower case.

[President] Macron si den li tiba ni London. Den tali [president visit] maraji. – President Macron arrived in London today. Tomorrow the president will visit the king.

While all parts of the names of persons are normally capitalized, some name parts may be written in lower case according to the conventions of the language of origin. This is preserved in Lugamun as well. (But at the start of sentences, such words are usually capitalized just as any others.)

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe li xi nulisja doice ol mas maxuhur. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was the most famous German writer.

Table of Contents

Lugamun Grammar

Introduction

Principles

Typographic conventions

Phonology and spelling

Vowels and diphthongs

Consonants

Syllable structure and hyphenation

Stress

Word order

SVO order

The subject and object markers

Noun phrases

Head nouns

Determiners

Modifier words

Adjectives

Possessive noun phrases

Pronouns

Personal pronouns

Possessive pronouns

The reflexive pronouns “sin” and “sini”

Verb phrases

Verb markers

Tense (time) markers

Mood markers

The progressive aspect

The passive voice

The infinitive

Auxiliary verbs

The copula

Other verbs with a complement

Subjectless verbs

Negation

Order of elements in verb phrases

Adverbs

Plain adverbs

rubama

sam

Ku-adverbs

Adverbial phrases

Questions

Yes-no questions

Asking about alternatives

Content questions

Embedded questions

Numbers

Numbers below 1000

Numbers up to a million

Larger numbers

Cardinal and ordinal numbers

Comparisons

mas, ol mas

men, ol men

tan

mas ... mas, men ... men

Prepositions

de and ki

Conjunctions

se

Dependent clauses

Relative clauses

Subordinate clauses

to

Reported speech

se

Referring to times and places in dependent clauses

Emphasizing parts of a clause

Fronting for emphasis

Starting a clause with “an”

Using adverbs for emphasis

Using relative clauses for emphasis

Reduplication

Reduplication for intensity and long duration

Making adverbs from prepositions

Word formation

Re-using words in a different word class

Verbs used as nouns

Adjectives used as Nouns