Trukva: Conveying Meaning With Adverbials

The Name

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‘Trukva’ simply means ‘the Trukva language’ in Trukva. It is a lexicon entry with no further interpretation, but just denotes this conlang.

Ideas

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This was a short overview of the basic grammar concepts. The following sections describe the details.

Short Classification

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Trukva is a typical engelang of mine. I am fond of a few things I have always done in my engelangs so far, and this is no exception. So what I always do is:

• Only one open lexical class
• Mandatory evidentials
• Other categories optional (including number, tense, etc.)
• No articles
• Completely regular
• Some degree of surdéclinaison (especially for tense and number)

Some ideas from previous conlangs will be used as ‘modules’ in Trukva, maybe sometimes slightly changed. This includes:

• Counting/numbers from Tyl Sjok
• (Grammatical) number from Qþyng|ài (sort of)
• Tense from Qþyng|ài (sort of)
• Evidentials from Qþyng|ài (mostly)
• Scales and degree from Qþyng|ài (mostly)

Trukva's main contribution is the sentense structure briefly described above. I feel this is progress compared to the case marking system of Qþyng|ài.

A neglected topic in Trukva is the phonotactics. I could spend months on this without ever really liking the outcome. So I decided to use some off-the-shelf phonotactics and not think about it too long, in order to not distract myself from the main design goal: the new adverbial sentence structure using adverb serialisation. The phonotactics might not look like off-the-shell now, but it is really only a modification of a very simple design. I could spend many more months on this, but I won't, for this language.

Further, Lexicon design is not one of my favourites. I am never satisfied with my lexicons, and due to enormous amounts of individual work (i.e., for each word), I find it tedious. So the lexicon design will be kind of ad-hoc, although I will try to use only states and derive events by derivational suffixes. I will allow lexicalised compounds and lexicalised derivation to have some freedom of design.

Finally, grammatical aspect is not well developed and needs more work.

Consonants

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The following phonemes exist in Trukva.

	labial		alveolar		velar
	voiceless	voiced	voiceless	voiced	voiceless	voiced
stop	p		t		k
nasal		m		n
fricative	f	v	s		x
trill				r
liquid				l

Varying in context and from speaker to speaker, the following allophones exist:

	labial		alveolar		retroflex		velar		uvular		glottal
	voiceless	voiced	voiceless	voiced	voiceless	voiced	voiceless	voiced	voiceless	voiced	voiceless	voiced
stop	p	b	t	d			k	ɡ
nasal		m		n				ŋ
fricative	f	v	s		ʂ		x		χ		h
trill			r̥	r
liquid			ɬ	l

[x], [χ] and [h] are allophones of /x/. The pronunciation varies from speaker to speaker. The phoneme is written as ‘h’.

The other allophones occur in consonant clusters. For more information, see the section about sandhi.

Vowels

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The following table lists the spelling of the vowels of Trukva. It is a typical three-height vowel system.

	front	central	back
close	i		u
mid	e		o
open		a

Unaccented syllables only use a, i and u.

Sandhi

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In a string of phonemes, there are certain constraints on and changes to pronunciation. There is a general tendency for voicelessness to spread from stops, and voicedness to spread from nasals. Further, epenthetic consonants pop up. Variations are given in the following table:

pr	→ [pr] ~ [pr̥]
tr	→ [tr] ~ [tr̥]
kr	→ [kr] ~ [kr̥]
mr	→ [mbr]
nr	→ [ndr]
pl	→ [pl] ~ [pɬ]
fl	→ [fl]
ng	→ [ŋɡ]
rs	→ [rs] ~ [ʂː] ~ [ʂ]
rp	→ [rp] ~ [r̥p]
rt	→ [rt] ~ [r̥t]
rk	→ [rk] ~ [r̥k]
ls	→ [ls] ~ [lts]
lp	→ [lp] ~ [ɬp]
lt	→ [lt] ~ [ɬt]
lk	→ [lk] ~ [ɬk]
ns	→ [ns] ~ [nts]
tl	→ [tɬ]
hr	→ [χr] ~ [χr̥] ~ [hr] ~ [xr] ~ etc.
hl	→ [χl] ~ [χɬ] ~ [hl] ~ [xl] ~ etc.
rh	→ [rχ] ~ [r̥χ] ~ [rh] ~ [rx] ~ etc.
lh	→ [lχ] ~ [ɬχ] ~ [lh] ~ [lx] ~ etc.
kv	→ [kv] ~ [kɸ]

Morphemes

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There are two types of words in Trukva: those that begin with p, t, k and those that begin with l,r.

Those that start with p, t, k are called substantives. This is explained in another section.

The group of words starting with l, r is called special suffixes.

For substantives, the initial consonant mutates depending on how the word is used in a sentence. Trukva distinguishes three mutation grades for all substantives: ‘verbal grade’, ‘nominal grade’ and ‘suffix grade’. They are marked by the initial consonant of the morpheme: ‘stop mutation’, ‘fricative mutation’, and ‘nasal mutation’, resp.

Verbial Grade	Nominal Grade	Suffix Grade	Lexical Suffix
Stop Mutation	Fricative Mutation	Nasal Mutation
p	f	m
t	s	n
k	h	v
			r
			l

As an example, pitsa ~ fitsa ~ mitsa means ‘pizza’. Which form is used will be explained in the section about syntax.

As you can see, some initials exist only in suffixes. Such lexicon entries cannot be used as verbals or nominals.

There were some questions as to why k mutates into v when the other stops become a nasal. Well, the imaginative conhistory would be that it originally was a nasal, but then changed. Maybe like this: ŋ > ɣ > ɣʷ > w > v. Finnish is a language that has some k→v mutations, namely when k between u undergoes consonant gradation, e.g. pukua→puvun (genitive case). And Kisuahili has kideo→video, although neither of the two prefixes ki- and vi- is likely to be derived from the other.

Anyway, in the lexicon, the verbal grade will be listed, except for suffix-only morpheme, which will be listed in suffix grade.

Each morpheme in Trukva has the following phonological structure:

	Initial Part		Remaining Part(s) [Repeatable]
	Consonant	Vowel	Consonant(s)	Vowel
Verbial Grade/ Stop Mutation	p t k pr tr kr pl kl	a e i o u	mb nd ng ps ts ks sp st sk hp ht hk ns kv	a i u
Nominal Grade/ Fricative Mutation	f s h fr sr hr fl hl
Suffix Grade/ Nasal Mutation	m n v mr nr vr ml vl
Lexical Suffix Normal Scope	l ls lv r rs rv	a i u
Lexical Suffix Morpheme Scope	ln lp lt lk rn rp rt rk

The initial mutation is used in Trukva as the single means to mark syntactic roles and parts of speech. There are no other affixes for this, nor are there any particles for this – the three grades suffice under all circumstances.

Some suffixes modify only the morpheme they are attached to. Only lexical suffixes can do that, all other modification has ‘broad scope’, modifying the whole structure they are attached to. Such suffixes can be identified by their initial consonant cluster, as show in the above table.

All suffixes and non-stressed syllable use only three vowels: a, i or u.

Words

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Morphemes in verbal grade start words.

Morphemes in nominal grade act like enclitics and thus attach to whatever is in front of them. Typically, this is a verbal, but the clitic nature can be seen when a verbal is modified by a relative clause: the nominal then attaches to the final evidence/mood marker.

Morphemes in suffix grade act like, well, suffixes. They attach to the word that they are modifying.

Stress

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Only mutable morphemes are stressed, lexical suffixes are not. Stress falls onto the first syllable of a stressed morpheme. In multimorphemic words, the last stressed morpheme has primary stress, all preceding ones have secondary stress.

Phonetically, stress is lengthening of the vowel by about 30%, a slightly raised base frequency, and somewhat more tensely pronounced vowels and consonants, e.g., stressed vowels are slightly more off center: unstressed /a i u/ are pronounced [ɐ ɪ ʊ] (/e o/ are never unstressed) while stressed /a e i o u/ are [a e i o u].

Phonetic Distance

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In some cateogories of suffixes, morphemes are constructed in such a way that they are

1. quite different in order to not get mixed up easily,
2. easy to derive, for example by traversing tables in a regular way.

Achieving (2) is easy: I will just state a rule:

For each syllable of a morpheme, find that syllable in the corresponding syllable table (in the appendix). Then move one step down and one step right, with wrap-around, in that table. This is how you find the next syllable. For polysyllabic morphemes, do this in parallel for all syllables (probably in different table, though).

OK, that's easy. Be aware that this is a rule with exceptions: sometimes for frequently used morphemes, I decided to go for another, usually shorter, alternative.

Now for making the morphemes easy to distinguish. By the table traversal rule above, we achieve that both consonant and vowel change in each step. We will order the vowels in such a way that single steps change much.

To measure contrast of vowels, the vowels are classified in three dimensions: height (0..2), frontedness (0..2) and roundedness (0..1):

Vowel	Height	Frontedness	Roundedness
a	0	1	0
e	1	2	0
i	2	2	0
o	1	0	1
u	2	0	1

The distance of two phonemes is the sum of the absolute difference in each dimension, i.e. a=(0,1,0) and u=(2,0,1), so the distance is 2+1+1=4. It was tried to find an order this difference is large in each step. For vowels, the order is: a, u, e, o, i.

For the consonants, no particular order was created, because we also need large differences for large numbers of morphemes in the same category. For the quick change, the vowels are used.

The starting point of a morpheme category is chosen by random. The order within the category is the one by which the morphemes are listed in their respective table in the grammar sections.

One Open Lexical Class

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Trukva has only one open lexical class, words of which are called substantives. In contrast to that, English has three: verbs, nouns, advectives. Many languages have only verbs and nouns, so that English adjectives end up being either verbs or nouns in such a language.

Some natlangs, like Nootka, have been claimed to have only one open lexical class, but I am not aware that a majority of the linguist community could be convinced yet that it is really true.

Yet, this is a conlang, and I am fond of having only one open lexical class, so Trukva is among those conlangs that have this property.

What does it mean? It basically means that all but a small number of words in the lexicon can function both as the predicate or an argument in an adverbial. I.e., each one can be the first or the second word of an adverbial. In English categories: each one can be either an intransitive predicate (a verb), or an object (a noun). The lexicon does not restrict words to be used as either.

Of course, the world consists of natural nouns (i.e., objects) and of natural verbs (i.e., actions), but this does not mean these need to map to different categories in the grammar. You can coerce them in English from one to the other category, too, usually by appending suffixes, e.g. ‘to eat’ is verb but ‘the eating’ is a noun. Some English words can work as noun and verb without any change, e.g. ‘party’. In Trukva this is basically the case for each word in the lexicon (except a finite number of special words, i.e, particles, which have special grammatical functions).

For example, the word pongi means ‘tool’. It denotes a class of objects. It can be used nominally to refer to such an object, or it can be used verbally to mean ‘to be a tool’ or ‘to be the tool’, the latter of which you would probably translate as ‘using’ or in a serial verb construction simply as ‘with’. Examples:

These three sentences translate pongi differently in English, but in Trukva, it is always the same thing, the closest translation being ‘being a tool’. In Trukva, it is the same word with the same meaning. Only the relation to other words in the sentence is different, so you may analyse that there are two parts of speech in Trukva, but there is only one open lexical, which can be used freely as both parts of speech.

One typical pair of translations in English for the same word in Trukva is a past perfect participle, e.g. ‘ingested’, and the object of the same verb, e.g. ‘food’. This is the same concept in Trukva: ‘ingested’ is a short translation of a more precise ‘being ingested’. And that's what ‘food’ is. The ‘used’ and ‘tool’ pair in English is of the same kind.

Lexical Aspect

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In order to design a lexicon full of words of only one class, one might simply rephrase verbs into nouns (‘to eat’ → ‘eating’) or the other way around (‘the shoe’ → ‘being a shoe’).

Many conlangs, including Trukva, have a more restricted lexicon design. The Trukva lexicon will only contain states. To do this, the notion of state will be very broad. States will include properties (‘blue’) and objects (‘shoe’). It will also allow continuous movement/change to be lexical (i.e. ‘being fast’).

As an example, the translation of ‘to eat’ is based on ‘the state of being satisfied wrt. food’. This is an adjective in English, and you could also call it ‘full (wrt. food)’.

To explain exactly what Trukva views as states, we need to look closer at inherent aspect of verbs. This lexical aspect can be used to classify verbs.

State	to know	No internal change, or at least not on human scales, or the time is not of interest and disregarded.
Activity	to walk	The process of constant state change without transition.
Accomplishment	to drown	The process preparing for a state transition.
Achievement	to realise	The event of a single state transition.
Semelfactive	to knock	The event of a double state transition, forth and back.

For Trukva grammar, it is sufficient to distinguish states, processes (activities, accomplishments) and events (achievements, semelfactives).

Further, Trukva classifies objects as states, i.e., being that object is the state. In a similar way, functions are states, i.e., being president is a state. This categorisation is simply a result of not distinguishing verbs, nouns, and adjectiv.

Lexical substantives in Trukva are usually states and sometimes processes, but never events. Allowing processes means that state change per se is not forbidden in a lexicon entry, as long as the word does not focus on the event of the state change. States and processes are not distinguished in the lexical design because there are many cases where the distinction feels very artificial to me (e.g. ‘falling’).

For the English reader, it may be noteworthy that lexical entries are underspecified wrt. whether an action is habitual (‘he eats’) or durative (‘he is eating’). This must either be inferred from context, or can be marked explicitly (and optionally) by aspectual suffixes. Nevertheless, we often gloss substantives with an ‘-ing’ ending here, simply to indicate whether the active or the passive is denoted. This ‘-ing’ gloss does not imply a progressive or continuous aspect.

Grammatical aspect in Trukva also allows the aspect of ‘general truth’ like ‘he often reads’ (habitual aspect) or ‘boys will be boys’ (gnomic aspect). These are counted as states, too, because they have no internal change (at least, it is not the focus of the proposition). As far as I know, there are no lexical entries in English that directly convey such an aspect.

Whether a process has an end or not (cf. telicity) is not important to Trukva lexicon entries, and is not implicitly marked.

Events have to be marked in Trukva, otherwise they cannot be expressed. For example, putting a lexicon entry like ‘to drown’ in the past tense: ‘He drowned’, does not focus in any way on the state transition finalising the process.

In this example, the substantive ‘drowning’ in the past tense cannot be translated as ‘he drowned’, because this English translation focuses on the resulting event. The Trukva sentence simply puts the process of drowning into the past, so the translation could be ‘he was drowning’.

Adverbs

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The basic structure of an Trukva sentence is the adverbial. Some concepts are naturally adverbial in nature so pressing them into the substantive category felt clumsy to me. For such concepts, Trukva has a closed class of lexical adverbs. These can be used as normal adverbials, but are in fact atomic lexicon entries and not pairs of two substantives.

The most notable grammatical category that is expressed by adverbs in Trukva is aspect. You could view the polarity and mood markers as lexical adverbs, too, but their restricted position at the beginning and end of a sentence resp., would indicate that they are in fact a different category of words.

No Absence

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In the Trukva lexicon, there are not entries denoting ‘lack of ...’. This is expressed with degrees.

Some lexicon entries in English may not obviously fall into this category, but at a close look, they do. For example the adjective ‘dry’ is such a lexicon entry. ‘dry’ means ‘for liquid being absent’, i.e., you need the notion of ‘liquid’ and the absence thereof to define what ‘dry’ means. Such lexicon entries do not exist in Trukva.

Scales

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Scales and the corresponding lexicon design are taken from Qþyng|ài.

Polarity

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The following polarity markers exist in Trukva.

Trukva	Gloss	Meaning
ta	true, positive	it is true that...
ku	false, negative	it is false that...
pre	either true, either false	it is either true or false that...; (Used in yes/no questions (together with interrogative mood) or in citations of questions (often to translate `whether'): `Did he tell you whether he will come?'.)

Evidence and Mood

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The following evidence and mood markers exist in Trukva.

Trukva	Gloss	Mood Category	Meaning
prahku	fact	evidential	it is an accepted fact that...
tru	perception	evidential	I saw/smelled/tasted/felt/heard/witnessed/... myself that...
kretsa	experience	evidential	I am experiencing/experience(d) myself that...
plo	hearsay	evidential	they say that..., someone told me that...
klispi	belief	evidential	It is my (religious) belief that...; From acquainted knowledged, conclusions, and debates, I am deeply convinced that...; It is like a fact to me that...
pasta	intuition, instinct, internal state	evidential	Looking inside myself, ...; Although I cannot justify it, I assume, that...
tusku	conclusion, inference, assumption	evidential	I conclude/infer/assume due to facts, knowledge, experience, perception, that...
kekvi	conditional	conditional	if ... (For use in ‘if’ clauses (apodosis), not in the dependent clause (protasis))
pronsa	presumptive	conditional	Let ε > 0; Let's assume that ..., (This is used for large scope conditionals that are given as a main clause, presuming something for several sentences.)
trimbu	interrogative	epistemic	Is it so that...? (for yes/no questions)
plunga	hypothetical	epistemic	Under different circumstances (but not in this universe/situation), ...; it might have been that... (but it is not)
kra	subjunctive	epistemic	..., that ... (for use in subordinate, dependent clauses)
pluhpu	declarative	deontic	I hereby...
klehti	suggestive	deontic	I suggest to ...
pohka	permissive	deontic	I allow that ...
tipsu	deliberative	deontic	Should I ...? (Expresses a request for instruction. Contrasts with the interrogative, but that mood queries a truth value (and is thus epistemic).)
katsi	optative	deontic	It is my wish that,...; I hope that ...
pruksa	precative	deontic	Would it please happen, that... (used for polite requests)
pra	imperative	deontic	I command that,...; Let it be true that,...

Note that there are differences compared to Qþyng|ài:

• The ‘consequential’ has been removed. Instead, the consequence after a condition must be given in some other evidence/mood.
• The ‘opinion’ evidential has been removed, because the evidentials are about giving the source of information, so instead of simply stating an opinion, the source of that opinion shall be stated instead: belief, intuition, conclusion.
• The interrogative is only for yes/no questions in Trukva, because it queries the truth of the proposition. Other questions query other things, so the proposition itself is marked normally with a another evidence/mood marker.
• The ‘irrealis’ has been renamed to ‘hypothetical’ for a more specific term.
• The ‘optative’ has been split into ‘optative’ and ‘precative’.
• The ‘subjunctive’ has been introduced for dependent clauses where the view is not the speaker's.
• The ‘presumptive’, the ‘deliberative’ and the ‘permissive’ have been added. They were missing, as there was no clean way to express.
• The ‘assumption’ evidential was removed because its usage was unclear (to the author of this conlang). Use ‘intuition’ or ‘conclusion’ instead.

These changes may be incorporated into Qþyng|ài in the future, too, because I feel it is general progress wrt. the common design goals of the two languages.

Degree

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Let us begin this section with a category that is a little different from other categories in that it comprises morpheme modifiers, instead of stem modifiers. This means that degrees always modifiy the immediately preceding morpheme, even if that is a suffix, and not the entire structure before that. Trukva marks this kind of morpheme modifying morphemes with a special initial consonant cluster.

Degrees are an essential structure in Trukva as they can be used in virtually any other substantive or suffix or even particles, if that makes sense. What degree does is to modify the amount of particularity of the preceding morpheme: imagine each morpheme expressing a particular idea. If this idea can be sensibly quantified, then degrees can be added to change the quantity. For example, a morpheme meaning ‘mountain’ could be modified to change the degree of the maintain: which is probably mainly its size.

Trukva	Gloss	Meaning
lpu	coarse-low
lti	coarse-mid
lka	coarse-high
lnista	fine-zeroest
lni	fine-zero
rpu	fine-low
lkatsi	fine-mid-low
rti	fine-mid
lputsi	fine-mid-high
rka	fine-high
rnu	fine-full
rnusta	fine-fullest
rna	opposite	This swaps around a scale and focuses on the opposite. Note that in contrast to the zero degree, this does not focus on a smaller piece of the scale, but turns around the scale. So while appending ‘zero’ and then ‘full’ degree does not make much sense, appending ‘opposite’ and then ‘full’ degree is perfectly ok. E.g. ‘up’ + ‘opposite’ is ‘down’ while ‘up’ + ‘zero’ is ‘flat on the ground’.
lnangu	expected
rkingu	surprising

Like many endings, degrees can be stacked if the result makes sense.

Number

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In Trukva, counting and grammatical number are very closely related. For small numbers, the singular is the same as saying ‘one thing’. This is similar in many natural languages (think Romance or German for example).

The absolute number suffixes are formed from the monomorphemic numbers 1, 2, 3 plus a morpheme extension. The two parts are analysed as one morpheme and thus lexically. These morpheme extensions can be analysed to mean +3, +6, +9, +12. 16 is an independent word.

Notice how the numbers are substantives so they can be used in isolation.

Trukva	Value/Gloss	Latin Name	Explanation
po	1	Singular
ti	2	Dual
ka	3	Trial
ponda	4
tinda	5
kanda	6
postu	7
tistu	8
kastu	9
poksi	10
tiksi	11
kaksi	12
pomba	13
timba	14
kamba	15
tresti	16
pru	several	Plural	The normal additive plural of a homogeneous number of entities.
tre	group	Collective	'a group/herd/flock/... of X'. Note that this denotes a single thing again, although it is commonly called a ‘collective plural’.
trahpi	similar	Similative	‘X and such’: Without further number suffixes, this is understood as a plural. But you may add a singular ending to denote ‘an X or something like that’.
kundi	fellow	Associative	‘X and his buddies/fellows/associates’: usually used on proper nouns, but not formally restricted to that. This is quite a generic suffix that may denote all kinds of fellows.
prindi	family	Familiative	‘X and his family’: usually used on proper nouns, but not formally restricted to that. This is more specialised than the associative and only refers to family members.
kensi	friend	Amicative	‘X and his friends’: usually used on proper nouns, but not formally restricted to that. This is more specialised than the associative and only refers to friends.
pengu	horde	Representative	‘the people you are a representative of’: usually used to refer to representatives of companies/(peer) groups etc., often in order to make insulting claims about the company impersonal to not upset the representative personally. In the 1st person, it denotes the same kind of distance.

Note that although all of the suffixes can be used as normal substantives (verbals or nominals), their use as a number marker is grammaticalised. It is transparent, but still fulfils a very specific grammatical function each. Furthermore, while normal derivational suffixation is head-first, the grammaticalised usage of ‘fellow’, etc., as number markers is head-last. Further, you can append all of the number suffixes to pronouns.

Appending explicit numbers to a normal plural ending will be understood as an implicit collective plural, such that ‘three several dog’ would be understood as ‘three groups of several dogs each’. Using the collective redundantly is an option, though.

More numbers can be formed by applying degree shaders.

polni po lni one fine_zero	0	Nullar
prulpu pru lpu several coarse_low	few	Paucal
prulti pru lti several coarse_mid	some	Oligal
prurnu pru rnu several fine_full	all	Omnial
Petsuvensimrulpuva Petsu kensi pru lpu ka peter friend several coarse_low three	all	~three groups, each of a few of Peter with his friends

This is just a selection of possibilities. Any degree may be used, and degree may also be applied to the other base numbers (e.g. for ‘not 3 people’ etc.).

Distribution

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Distribution suffixes are morpheme modifiers, i.e., shaders, which can modify several other types of suffixes or morphemes that contain notions of repetition or punctuality. E.g. they can be suffixed to number markers to signify distribution of multiple entities, or to aspect markers to clarify distribution of events in time.

Trukva	Gloss	Meaning
lpa regular	regular
ltu irregular	irregular
lki sequential	sequentially, one at a time
lna unison	all at once

Distributive shaders can be stacked to expressed something like ‘one at a time, regularly distributed’.

Derivation, Compounding, Suffixing

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Adding suffixes is another structure in Trukva. Suffixing is used for derivation, compounding, and possessives.

Suffixes are morphemes in suffix grade, which is marked by initial nasal mutation. There is a closed class of derivational suffixes that can only be used in suffix form, never in nominal or verbal form.

Compounding and derivation are usually head-first. In compounding, sometimes two parts form a new head together. For derivation, some suffixes may become the head of the whole structure.

Possessives are head-last, i.e., the possessed is suffixed to the pronoun. Directly, only pronouns may be prefixed to a substantive to indicate possession. Possessives with proper substantives are formed by first suffixing a pronoun to the possessor, then the possessed to the pronoun.

The suffixing modification in Trukva is always strictly left-to-right, i.e., a suffix always modifies the whole structure it is suffixed to.

We have already seen an example for derivation, where a special derivational suffix is used.

Here is an example for compounding, where the second component is used in suffix grade (‘nasal mutation’).

Suffixing is always restrictive by default in Trukva, not descriptive, i.e., constructions like the above always mean ‘wine that is red’, and never ‘wine, which is red’. See the section about restrictiveness for information on how to change the default. Note how the nominal grade translates differently, as an adverbial:

Finally, here is an example for a possessive. If you know Semitic languages, you may notice that this is similar to construct state, since the possessed is marked (by suffix grade), instead of the possessor.

And with a proper substantive as the possessor, we get:

Restrictiveness

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All modification (suffixing, relative clauses) is restrictive by default. Consider the following sentence.

In Trukva, this sentence implicitly expresses: (1) that Peter has several sons, (2) he came with the tallest one, because the modification ‘tall’ applied to ‘offspring’ restricts the set of individuals, instead of describing the individual. (In English, the relative pronoun ‘that’ conveys a similar restrictiveness, but using it for people may be questionable.)

To convey the meaning: ‘Peter came with his son. The son is tall.’, i.e., to get the descriptive meaning, you have to use a particle to mark the modifier as non-restrictive/descriptive. The marker is a morpheme shader, so technically, it changes the modifyer's restrictiveness to ‘false’ (from the default ‘true’).

The particle can be used in relative clauses, too. It is then appended to the subordinate polarity marker:

As a side node: German also has a particle ‘ja’ that can convey the descriptive meaning. Forcing restrictive meaning is also possible, but needs some restructuring and the use of the determiner ‘derjenige’ (‘that one’).

Peter kam mit seinem Sohn, der groß ist.	restrictive/descriptive (ambiguous)
Peter kam mit seinem Sohn, der ja groß ist.	descriptive
Peter kam mit demjenigen Sohn, der groß ist.	restrictive

Further note that indeed, using both ‘demjenigen’ and ‘ja’ at the same time is ungrammatical in German.

Adverbials

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Adverbials consist of two substantives. The first one is in verbal form, the second in nominal form. The nominal is a clitic, so it fuses into one word with whatever word is in front of it. In the simplest case, this is the verbal.

Adverbials are the main building blocks of clauses.

Simple Clauses

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Simple clauses where introduced at the beginning of this document already. They always begin with a polarity marker, followed by a sequence of adverbial, which are each pairs of a verbal followed by a nominal, and finally followed by a mood marker.

The simplest clauses contain no adverbials at all. This can be translated as ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

Clause Sequences

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The simplest of all clause compositions is clause serialisation, where two clauses are simply put in a sequence without additional morphological marking. The orthography prescribes a semicolon between clauses.

Although there is no morphological marking that the clauses belong together, they usually do and cannot be uttered in isolation without making no sense. For example, conditional clauses are formed in this way.

Clause serialisation is used even if one clause is strictly a subordinate clause of the other (like in the above example), i.e., the evidence/mood marker of the first clause precedes the second clause. One could expect it to follow at the very end, but that is not so. This means that for full clauses combined using serialisation, there is no syntactic difference between a subordinate and a coordinate clause.

Coordination

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Coordination particles like ‘and’ and ‘or’ are a closed class of words that look like substantives. Just like in English, there is only one type of coordation particle for all parts of speech.

Coordination particle in Trukva can coordinate substantive (both in verbal and in nominal function), adverbials, and clauses.

When coordinating two nominals, the coordination particle will fuse with the following word (because nominals are enclitics):

When coordinating two verbals, the nominal fuses with the last of the coordinated verbals: When coordinating two clauses or two adverbials, not much interesting happens, except that coordinated clauses require a semicolon before the coordination particle:

Nominal Clauses

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Nominal clauses can replace nominals. Thus together with a verbal, they act like adverbial clauses in English.

Nominal clauses have the same structure as main clauses. The only morphological difference is that the initial polarity marker is used in nominal form (=fricative mutation).

Here, the nominal clause is paired with the verbal kromba 'word', indicating that the nominal clause expresses what was said (‘being said’ and ‘word’ are the same concept in Trukva).

Relative Clauses

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Relative clauses modify substantives. In Trukva, they are very similar to normal clauses, as they also include polarity and evidence/mood markers.

Relative clauses are externally headed, meaning that the modified head is outside of the subordinate clause, just like in English, where the relative clause follows the head. The relative clauses in Trukva begin with a polarity marker in suffix form (=nasal mutation) and are suffixed to the head they modify (again, order is like in English).

The first component after the polarity marker is different compared to a main clause: it is either a plain verbal or a plain nominal (which will be appended to the polarity marker due to its clitic nature). This single substantive is the modifying component of the modified head. By this construction, no relative pronoun is required, and in fact, Trukva has no such pronouns. Instead of a pronoun, there is a gap.

The following example shows a relative clause that modifies a nominal, and where that substantive is also the nominal in the subordinate clause.

In this example, ke 'person' is modified with a relative clause. It is the head of that clause and thus outside of the clause. Inside the relative clause, it is modified with the verbal kengilvi 'eating'.

As you can also see, in the subordinate relative clause, a different mood is used, namely the subjunctive kra. In this case, being used inside a clause with an evidential, is means the subordinate uses the same evidential. So we could have repeated the tru for the same meaning, however, using the subjunctive here is more elegant.

The following is a relative clause modifying a verbal. Here, the nominal paired with the modified verbal is suffixed to the mood marker of the relative clause.

This example is harder to translate since English does not have relative clauses modifying adjectives or verbs. The subordinate clause alone translates as ‘I like the red.’ And this red is what the wine is.

As you can see kondu 'red' is used as a verbal in the matrix clause, but as a nominal in the relative clause. Trukva poses no restrictions on whether the head of a relative clause is a verbal or nominal, neither in the matrix nor in the subordinate clause. So we can also form another sentence, where it is a verbal in both clauses.

Again, the translation is difficult. The relative clause alone is ‘The/a rose is red’, and the matrix clause is ‘(The) wine is red’, so the wine is the same red that the rose is.

Relative clauses, as all suffixing modification, are restrictive by default in Trukva. See the section about restrictiveness for information on how to change the default.

Polarity, Modality, and Evidentiality

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In Trukva, polarity, evidence and modality are marked mandatorily. Polarity is a category that is probably mandatory in every language. However, the set of polarity markers in Trukva may still raise questions, e.g. when to use pre, glossed as ‘either’.

Evidentials and mood markers, OTOH, are not set common, especially not in Indo-European languages, and especially not with such a large set of markers.

For these reasons, this section will give some ideas of how to use these categories.

Monosyllabic Morphemes

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Since there are not too many of them, this section lists all monosyllabic morphemes.

Suffixes from the same category are tried to be kept at a great distance. To achieve this, the order of vowels and consonants was

Substantives
	a	u	e	o	i
p	3p, he, she, it, they; his, her, their	water	alert; attention; caution	one
t	true	and	past	1p, me, I, we; my, our	two
k	three	false	person	present	2p, you, thou; your, thy, thine
pr	imperative	several	either		future
tr	non-future	perception	group, collective
kr	subjunctive	non-present
pl				hearsay
kl				state, time, location, spacetime configuration	dying
Suffixes (Normal Broad Scope)
	a	u	i
l	momentane		definite
ls
lv			adventive, become, changing towards _
lh	abientive, changing away from _	habitual
r	generaliser	resultative	continuous
rs	perspective		cessative
rv	durative	experiential
rh
Suffixes (Tight Morpheme Scope)
	a	u	i
ln	unison		fine zero
lp	regular	coarse low
lt		irregular	coarse mid
lk	coarse high		sequential
rn	opposite	fine full
rp		fine low
rt			fine mid
rk	fine high		descriptive
Inner Syllables (for reference)
	a	u	i
mb	mba	mbu	mbi
nd	nda	ndu	ndi
ng	nga	ngu	ngi
hp	hpa	hpu	hpi
ht	hta	htu	hti
hk	hka	hku	hki
ps	psa	psu	psi
ts	tsa	tsu	tsi
ks	ksa	ksu	ksi
sp	spa	spu	spi
st	sta	stu	sti
sk	ska	sku	ski
kv	kva	kvu	kvi
ns	nsa	nsu	nsi