Affixes & Cores

Note that it is very common to add degree affixes to cases, e.g. to an essive case to clarify that 'as' is meant instead of 'like' or to change an instrumental 'with' into a 'without' (dito for comitative)

Genitive is an interesting case, because it can serve several purposes. It not only shows possession, but quite generic modification. The personal pronouns, when deriving words, also get a genitive meaning. But be careful when translation actions + possession like 'my running' etc., because genitive cannot generally be used for agentive or patientive genitive, i.e., specifying an actor. You can use a normal clause for this. Some words *do* get agentive or patientive meaning, but it depends on what the stem means in zero valence. Check the lexicon. E.g. 'eat' + '1p' = 'my food' but 'want' + '1p' = 'my will' (both unambiguously so).

Please also note that in many cases, ablative is used instead of what corresponds to a genitive in other languages. E.g. 'my book', if I own it, is translated as 'I.GEN book'. But if I wrote it, Qþyn|gài uses ablative to express the origin: 'I.ABL book'. This 'notional ablative' is also called 'initiative'.

Spatial relations are divided into sub-categories. Some of these categories are marked at the head, some at the dependent.

• The direction/state type is handled by temporalspatial cases on the head: (in the house (locative), into the house (allative), out of the house (ablative), through the house (perlative), (a)round in the house (circumjective))

• Touching/non-touching (picture on the wall vs. chair at the wall).

• Precise/vague direction (from the house (general), from at the house (precise), from the direction of the house (vague))

• Viewpoint: speaker vs. location

• Relative point at the given place (in, at, over, under...). This is handled either by a genitive construction ('under the table' = 'the table's under'.locative), or by composition ('under the table' = 'table-under'.locative).

• Second direction point: 'down from the house.'

• Position of speaker wrt. scene: German: 'Er stürzte hinein.' vs. 'Er stürzte herein.'

The topic may be viewed as the context the sentence is interpreted and understood in. It has a vague relationship to the predicate, so it is no argument, but rather an adjunct. The topic in Qþyn|gài is quite similar to that of Japanese, Korean, or Chinese in that it is easily suppliable in a sentence (without paraphrastical gymnastics). A good, but rather awkward English translation would be 'with respect to _' or 'regarding _' or the like.

The focus on the other hand, is that part of the sentence that is stressed. It is the most important piece of information in the sentence, the one that is emphasised. Qþyn|gài uses a suffix to mark the focus. It can be applied to any morpheme in a clause, including affixes.

Qþyn|gài is not a clean topic-prominent language like Japanese or Korean, however. Giving the topic is purely optional and in fact, much less frequent than in Japanese and Korean. Usually, arguments to a predicate are prefered. When a topic is given, however, subsequent empty argument slots or pronouns typically refer to the topic, unless marked to refer to agent or patient.

Note that there is no indicative mood, since the set of evidentials can be said to express indicative mood.

The root !–!k– together with degree vowels forms grammatical number suffixes in Qþyn|gài.

You might want to compare this to the general degree affixes. One difference is the scoping: numbers use broad scope by default, while degrees use narrow scope.

The following coarse-grained number affixes exist (sorry for the piglatin number names...):

The following fine-grained number affixes exist:

The following vague number affixes exist:

The following counting number affixes exist:

Number endings may be applied more than once. All but the outermost amount are automatically understood as a collective amount even without the collective ending. (Note that the collective can be applied several times, too.) The outermost ending is understood to be distributive. To get a plain collective, use number + unspecified degree as outermost affix.

Moreover, number endings may be modified with degree endings, e.g. to form a number meaning 'unexpectedly many'. This meaning cannot be derived from to number endings, because a number ending on a number ending results in a collective meaning for the first. X.many.unexpected-amount would mean 'unexpectedly many groups/flocks/herds/swarms of many X each'.

There are digit words for the numbers 0 to 16. They use the following roots:

Further, the number stems use the following degree vowels.

The number stems are as follows.

The numbers are suffixed to a stem 'x' to derive a stem meaning 'n (times, pieces of) x'. The system is borrowed from Tyl Sjok. Thus, the number format is basically: number = exponent base digit*, where exponent is another number.

Additionally to these short numbers, sums of such terms (with decreasing exponent) can be used, just like in Tyl Sjok, usually to replace many (e.g. more than three) zero digits in a row or to simply stress the exponent is long numbers. This sum of terms must be taked to be coordination, and indeed ks–hhú is used, which is otherwise used as a clitic with the meaning 'and'. (So numbers are exception from the rule that no coordination can take place inside words in Qþyn|gài).

As in Tyl Sjok, numbers may be expressed natively in any base from 2 to 16. Base 10 seems to be most widely used among mortals, while computer scientics and other nerds often use 2, 8 and 16.

It is not yet investigated whether Qþyn|gài allows generic unit words to be used additional to words for numeric bases, like Tyl Sjok does. Linguists are still studying the language on this matter.

Suffixed numbers in Qþyn|gài are always introduced by a grammatical number marker. For normal counting, a grammatical number marker is used, which is modified by the number. By default, the 'known' number !–n!gài is used, but to stress that individual entities/events are counted, number '1' (!–!kái) is also feasible. Accordingly, counting pairs works by using number '2' (!–!kíu) and triplets can be counted by using number '3' (!–!kùi). Others numbers are possible and have their regular meaning.

Freestanding numbers use the stem 'number' with the suffixed number without the number marker (otherwise, we'd get the meaning 'n numbers'). This is also one option when answering questions for quantity in short, like 'how many days do you stay?' 'number five.' The more common way, however, would be to repeat the head-word from the question, and modify it with a counter. In the previous example, the answer would correspond to 'five days'.