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Would you want the rows in your garden to be labelled with singulars or plurals?
Singular: there's only one kind of plant there
Plural: since there's more than one plant, the label should reflect that
Don't care: as long as I can read it, the details are unimportant
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Describing Things

posted Monday, 31 March 2008

Let's talk about adjectives.

Well, OK, and adverbs.

The three roots I was playing with back in the noun posts were sofl-, tok-, and pen-.  They have a neat little table of declension for when they're nouns.  Adjectives, however, are simpler.

The citation form for an adjective is the animate singular (yes, adjectives decline), which is the root+it: soflit "windy", tokit "stony", penit "wordy".  The adjective then declines to match the gender and number of its noun, according to the following table:

 sing. plural set 
animate  -it
-idu use sing. form and back root vowel 
 inanimate -is1-iðe
use sing. form and back root vowel
 abstract -in
-ima use sing. form and back root vowel

 Adjectives decline to match their nouns in gender and number, like so: owelal fnorin "secret tent", stebol seliðe "leafy branches", abata jokis "two left feet".

Speaking of two (which isn't necessary in the above example because abeta is in the set plural), the first three numbers are declined like regular adjectives: enit, dæit, trit.  The rest of the numbers are invariant (and the basic system is duodecimal): kadra, azeg, s'es, feðen, wet, muf, tikis, slef, den.  I have not yet worked out higher numbers; that's for later.

Adverbs are vastly simpler; the default adverb has the ending -ised, so soflised "windily".  Adverbs do not decline.

There are probably going to be some special-case and irregular adjectives at some point, and I have not yet thought about comparatives and superlatives.

1: Yes, this means that the inanimate singular adjective of the root "word" is penisDeal with itWe're all grownups here.

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