User:Elector Dark/Kti/Verbs

Since I'm not happy with the verbs either, I'ma redo them too.

Gender and Animacy
Verbs in Kti can, and often do, inflect for the gender of the object argument. There are three forms, for each gender, each having varying animacy forms, giving twelve total animacies:


 * 1) Gender
 * 2) Masculine
 * 3) Sentient
 * 4) Critter
 * 5) Dead
 * 6) Inanimate
 * 7) Feminine
 * 8) Sentient
 * 9) Critter
 * 10) Dead
 * 11) Inanimate
 * 12) Mechanoid
 * 13) Animate
 * 14) Inanimate

Conjugating for Object Gender and Animacy
The prefixes for these forms are as follows:

They are attached to the very first slot, they are prefixed to the verb root itself.

Noun Incorporation
Kti employs a simple system of noun-incorporation, incorporating nouns which relate to objects to narrow the scope down and make the object use a more general term, or sometimes, in cases of simple objects, directly incorporating the object.

Noun incorporation in Kti is strictly Verb-Noun and head-left, so that incorporatives such as "pick-pocket", "draw-knife", "chop-tree" are well-formed and behave as normal verbs. Noun incorporation in Kti decreases syntactical valency by one per incorporation, so that bitransitive verbs become monotransitive, monotransitive become intransitive.

There are certain cases where certain simple intransitive sentences can go through incorporation to become impersonal, although such demotions occur only in cases of inanimate subjects.

A good example of noun incorporation is this:

"Nukartei sarum" > "Nukartei"

Both sentences translate to "I drink water", but the first has a seperate object, unlike the second one, which incorporated said object. Both of these sentences are valid.

There are certain irregular incorporated nouns which correspond to outside nouns; also, there are certain cases where noun incorporation doesn't lower valency (tree-cut, when relating to a specific kind of tree).

When noun incorporation results in semantic expansion, no valency decreases occur. A good example:

"Nukartei kæmasarum" > "Nukartei kæmum"

The first sentence means "I drink sugar-water", while the other means "I water-drink sugar"; in this case, "water-drinking" sugar comes to mean "to drink sugar with water". Likewise, " to bread-eat butter" would mean "to eat butter with bread" in English.

Incorporated nouns are always in the nominative, and are inserted prior to the tense/person markings. If the incorporated nouns formerly forced the verb to take up a gender-animacy marking, the marking is dropped (only happens when there's nothing else to take up the marking).

Present Agreement
The verb above, "kni", is an irregular verb and doesn't follow regular patterns. The below table represents the actual situation of most nouns in the Ktarh language:

Verb Types
In Kti, there are five types of verbs (four regular + irregulars). The regular types are also called "modes" - modes are distinguished by the infinitive suffix:

The most common verb mode is the voiceless tenuis mode, followed by the voiced tenuis, voiced lenghthened and voiceless lenghthened.

Voiced mode verbs are unreceptive to infixes, while lengthened mode verbs tend to force final-syllable stress (they shift length from the last long vowel to the last vowel in the stem, or when there is no long vowel, lengthen the last vowel - there are no lengthened mode verbs without short stem vowels).