Tekapton

Phonotactics
The stress in Tekapton words usually falls on the last syllable.

Nouns
In Tekapton's unique grammar, every word is grammatically a noun. Some of these noun-words describe a real object (person, house, car etc.), others refer to abstract categories (beauty, good, evil), and some describe actions (seeing, running etc.) However, in the grammar there is very little difference in how these types of nouns are treated.

Each noun in a Tekapton sentence is preceded by an article. The article defines the word's case, number, and mood (yes, don't be surprised, the mood is attached to nouns, too). If there are no dependent words between the word and it's article, the article and the noun are written as one word. Otherwise, the dependent words are placed between the article and the main word. The Nominative article, i, is often dropped when it is the first word in the sentence.

For example:

Categories
Nouns in Tekapton have a category, or generalized gender. The category is determined by the first letter(s) of the word, and nouns dependent to this word have to agree to it in category.

Categories group things that are loosely related to each other by a certain criteria. For example


 * (h-) men (father, brother, son) or persons of certain profession or quality
 * women (mother, sister, daughter)
 * animals
 * insects


 * long things (hair, thread, rope, road, river)
 * thin things (finger, stick, branch, pencil, tail, horn)
 * flat things (leaf, page, plate, lake)
 * things that have a horizontal surface (table, floor, ceiling, sky, bed)


 * (g-) vertical things (building, wall, fence, tree)
 * round things (ball, eye, sun, moon)
 * things that stick out (hill, thorn, nose, ear)


 * collections (forest, book, week)
 * materials (wood, flesh, soil, metal)
 * small things (crumb, dot, particle, star)
 * food and drink
 * containers (box, bag, cup, room, boat, car)


 * (b-, p-) qualities (good, evil, wrong, right, beauty, difference, size, height, warmth, fun)


 * states (posession, ability, love, life, death)

and some others. Of course, due to historical reasons, sound changes, foreign words etc. some categories contain words that do not seem to belong there.
 * transitions (movement, becoming, change, start, finish)
 * (l-, t-) actions (sight, delivery, payment, attack, control)
 * places (place in, out, around, above, under)
 * colors
 * number (few, many, one, two, three)

Cases
There are 5 cases in Tekapton, including Nominative. Cases are formed by changing the article: For example:

Kabal kagor - The boy is in the house

Kabal kalo legor - The boy sees the house (lit.: The boy is in the view of the house)

kabal kabir - a good buy

Inessive
As you can see, English adjectives and present-tense verbs are usually translated into Tekapton using Inessive. Thus you say "in view" to translate "see", "in beauty" to translate "beautiful", and so on. Objects of an action are put into Genitive, similar to English "desctruction of a planet" ("planet" is the object of destruction here).

It might be helpful to look closer at the agreement of words in one of the above examples, e.g. "kabal kalo legor". Here "kalo" ("in view") is agreeing with "(i)kabal" ("boy") and it is therefore has article "ka-". Similarly "legor" ("of the house") is agreeing with "kalo" and therefore its genitive article "le-" starts with the first letter of the main word, "l-". One can illustrate that using color:

 k abal k a l o l egor

Finally, it is worth mentioning that the order of words can be different in these phrases. The following are good Tekapton phrases as well:

i kalo legor kabal

kabal ka legor lo

i ka legor lo kabal

You can see here how the article is written separately from the main word when dependent words are put in between.

Allative and Ablative
Similarly to Inessive, when Allative and Ablative are used with words that mean states, transitions or actions, they indicate perfective or future tense. For example:

Haz huton tes - Father is going to say something (lit.: Father is into saying of something.)

Dictionary
bir - good

bal - youth; newness

birbalo - beauty

gor - house

haz - father

kabal - boy

lo - sight, view

ton - speech