Phonology

Akath phonology contains six vowels and 16 consonants. It also distinguishes consonants as single or double.

Akath is meant to be mostly easy to pronounce, with few rare phonemes and avoiding very complex clusters. See Phonology for details and orthographic conventions.

Syntax

Here are some quick facts about Akath grammar.

Nouns and Noun Phrases

• SVO order.
  • Variance is possible, especially because accusative and nominative are distinguished.
• Nouns have a nominative and accusative case.
• All prepositions take the nominative case.
• Nouns distinguish singular and plural.
• No adjectives! Instead, property nouns are used.
  • The preposition sak (meaning "made of") is used for attributive properties, and the verb ukk- for predicative. Examples:
    • nakla sak mepen selmoy ("a big animal is walking"; lit. "animal made of bigness walks")
    • nakla së ukkoy mepenet. ("that animal is big"; lit. "that animal has bigness")
  • A few determiners could be considered exceptions. Examples: së (that), mockë (some/indefinite), moxlur (other)
• Nouns preceed all modifiers.
• No articles. The pronoun së ("that") is used for emphasizing determinateness.
• Akath has three genders (or noun classes): animate, inanimate concrete and inanimate abstract.
  • Inflection patterns are very similar across genders.

Verbs

• Verbs have no infinitive.
  • A nominalized form is used in places where English would have an infinitive.
  • Paraphrasing the infinitive is also more common.
• Verbs agree with subjects by gender and number.
• Three tenses: past, present and future.
  • No inflection for aspect.
• Two voices: active and passive
• Three moods: indicative, optative and quotative.
  • Quotative is used to refer what someone else said, or one's own thoughts.
    • It is always accompanied by an evidentiality particle indicating if the statement is true, false or unknown!
  • Optative indicates wishes, but also some purpose clauses.
    • Past tense with the optative retains past meaning (unlike English); i.e., wishing that something had happened in the past.
• Hypothetical, counterfactuals and conditionals are expressed by special particles; see Conditionals.