Sentence Structure

Lesson 3

Now that you can read, it's time to learn grammar. Let's assume you're familiar with the three main parts of speech: nouns, verbs, and adjectives.

The basic word order in Numo is SVO, or Subject, Verb, Object, similar to English. For an example like "The dog chases the cat," the dog is the subject, the cat is the object, and the act of chasing is the verb. So translating this into Numo we get Kanin jages felin. Notice also the lack of articles like "the" or "a" or "an". Numo simply does not use these words, and when translating they should generally be replaced with nothing.

You may have already noticed from the examples that all verbs (outside the past tense) end in -es. Indeed, not only do all Numo verbs in the nonpast end in -es, but all words that end in -es are nonpast verbs. By immediately identifying the verb you can learn to quickly and easily parse sentences, even if you don't know the meaning of every word.

Adjectives and adverbs always come after the noun or verb they modify. This is different from English, where the adjective comes first. Take an English phrase like "The quick, brown fox". In Numo one would say Wolpe kuai brun, literally "Fox quick brown". To say "Foxes run quickly", using an adverb, one would say Wolpe kores kuai, matching the English order in this case. Note also the lack of plural marking in Numo. Certain adverbs that aren't based on adjectives can appear in other places, but this will be covered in another lesson.

Practice 3

Arrange these words into a sentence that makes sense:

Rod - "Red"

Pir - "Man"

Kitab - "Book"

Cites - "Read"

Vocabulary 3

Kanin - Dog

Wolpe - Fox

Pir - Man

Kitab - Book

Rod - Red

Brun - Brown

Kuai - Fast

Jages - Chase

Kores - Run

Cites - Read