Litish 101 is no longer updated, please refer to the High Litish page on the kingdom website!
Et tu, Brutē?
Grammatical gender in Litish may be the same as natural gender or personality gender (if a table is sentient, well?).
In Litish, most words can change gender. Some words, like man and woman, have base forms that aren't neuter, but others, like dog and cat do.
You've seen the three third-person singular pronouns, fell, elle and italy, for the three genders masculine, feminine and neuter. You may also have seen unt, un and une, the indefinite articles. Here you may learn some definite articles and suffixes.
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The Neuter Gender - Lo Vlendora Cantatsis
The 'The's for the neuter gender are the generalised The's, Lu and Ly.
Most words' base forms may be in the neuter gender. To make non-base-words neuter, add a c. If the word ends with a consonant, add an o before the c.
[adam (m.) ---> adamoc (n.)]
What that means? Whooo knows. A human, maybe? This/These suffix(es) may not be used very much, but maybe may emphasise a change, maybe including a change in topic- imagine there are many people in a room, and you refer to the men first, then all the people in the room? You could just use fellene- people. Although that may seem kinda similar to the pronouns Fell and Felle, which are masculine. SigH.
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The Masculine Gender - Lo Vlendora Unlicitis
The 'The's for the masculine gender are Thor and Thouse. Thor is for singulars, Thouse is for plurals.
The man, the men ---> Thor adam, thouse adame
To change neuter nouns into masculine nouns, add a 'u' to the word.
[ruffles (n.) ---> rufflesu (m.)]
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The Feminine Gender - Lo Vlendora Acënya
The 'The's for the feminine gender are Thee and They, Thee is for singulars, They is for plurals.
The woman, the women ---> Thee eve, they evenne
To change neuter nouns into feminine nouns, add an 'a' to the word.
[ruffles (n.) ---> rufflesa (f.)]
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If you use rufflesu and rufflesa, that might save people the trouble of asking you what gender your dog is.
(Mine is a rufflesu.)
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Abstract 'The'
You may have noticed my use of 'Lo' for the gender section headers. That's the 'The' for abstract nouns, like love, happiness, trouble, worry. Its plural form is Loii.
The gender, the genders ---> Lo vlendora, loii vlendorae
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Hierarchy
Now, you may wonder. Are male dogs rufflesulla (dog-m.-pl.) or ruffleseu (dog-pl.-m.)? Well, generally, the gender suffix is closer to the noun, there are many masculine dogs, not masculine many dogs. If they happen to all have changed into masculine dogs AFTER they convened- fIne. But generally use the former, maybe even in those situations.
You may've heard about the nominative case in the third lesson (Introduction). Here we may introduce the first inflected grammatical case you'll learn! The vocative is used for calling people, seen in the Latin phrase 'Et tu, Brute?' from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Similarly, Julius would become Julie.
The vocative in Litish may be simpler than Latin. And if we changed endings to e, we may have problems with Sophie and Sofia. Instead, we have something kinda like English. Add an O in front! O Dylan!
But unlike English, this appears as a prefix.
[Hi Dylan! - Sav-sav ODylan!]
You can also choose to decapitalise the first letter of the name- Odylan or odylan- or have oDylan. You could also add an apostrophe or hyphen to any of those. O'Dylan!
In front of vowels, to prevent diphthongs and triphthongs, add an apostrophe (though this may make the O shorter, with the short tone ag. You could also add a hyphen. O-Ayla!
This may be a verb form used for making requests, giving orders or commands, et cetera. Like 'Dylan, eat!' vs 'Dylan eats'.
Yep- Mood, not Tense. Grammatical mood is a grammatical feature that indicates modality (incl. likelihood, ability, capacity, permission, request, order, obligation, suggestion, advice). Think of English's modal verbs (can, will, may). The previous 'tenses' you may have learnt were in the Indicative mood, used to express statements, facts or positive beliefs.
To make a verb imperative, you kinda do the same as the vocative, but for verbs. Take the base form of the verb- I may use eldib as an example (again) and add an O in front, but with a hyphen or an apostrophe for vowel-initial words, like eldib.
[Dylan eats. ---> Dylan eldib.]
[Dylan! Eat! ---> O-Dylan! O-eldib!]
You may think, isn't this a bit repetitive? Well, maybe. If you want to say 'Dylan! Eat!' you could leave out the O- in front of Dylan, but maybe don't leave the one in front of eldib out. Having both may extra-emphasise.
Before consonants, a hyphen isn't needed, nor an apostrophe, letting us have...
Oven! - Come!
Heh.
Well, are you around the midpoint of the first unit? Good job! Congratulations! Congrats! Sutolata!