Pronouns replace noun phrases and agree in case and—where relevant—animacy. Below is an overview of the pronoun types in Naucan.
Personal pronouns inflect for four cases—subjective, oblique, prepositional, and comitative. They also distinguish animacy in the third person.
Cases:
Subjective: subject
Oblique: direct object, indirect object, attribute (predicative)
Prepositional: object of a preposition
Comitative: “together with”
The pronoun ye is used for reflexive and reciprocal actions across all persons, regardless of number or gender. It serves expressions like "I see myself", "They respect themselves", or "We help each other". It can only refer to an animate being.
As a form of respectful address, the noun marek (“the lord” or “sir”) is commonly used instead of the second person pronoun gi ("you"). For instance, instead of saying "Dokēma gi?" (“Do you speak?”), one might say "Dokēma marek?" when speaking politely to a stranger or elder.
Traditionally, plural pronouns in Naucan were expressed periphrastically, combining a singular pronoun with a word like ur ("several")—for example, na ur (“we”) or gi ur (“you [plural]”). However, in modern usage, dedicated plural pronoun forms have increasingly become common, as shown in the table below.
Possessive pronouns in Naucan function like adjectives, agreeing with the noun they modify in case and animacy. They replace or accompany possessive constructions and take the same three cases as adjectives and nouns.
When multiple adjectives are present, the possessive always appears last. It is not necessary to use the conjunction a ("and") to link a possessive to other adjectives.
kin naray a zophe → "my thin and old cat"
kin zophe nathe → "my old cat"
Demonstratives dem (“this”) and kem (“that”) in Naucan can function as either pronouns or adjectives. As adjectives, they follow the noun they modify and agree in subjective, oblique, and prepositional.
The demonstrative dem signals entities close to the speaker (“this/these”) and kem those farther away (“that/those”).
Interrogative pronouns ask about things, people, places, times, manner, and quantity. They inflect for subjective, oblique, and prepositional cases, except kak, that is invariable.
zēn “who/which” and tore “how many” can be pronouns or adjectives.
zēnzat “what/wich thing” and zēnkhor “who” they can be expressed like this or periphrastically: zat zēn, khor zēn.
They begin the sentence. If they refer to a noun, they can be written after it, ignoring the usual order of noun + modifiers.
For example:
Zēnkē abōrkē yuntuzit gi? → “Which apple did you eat?”
Relative pronouns introduce relative clauses that provide additional information about a noun or pronoun in the main clause (the antecedent).
In Naucan, relative pronouns share their forms with the corresponding interrogative pronouns and follow a key rule:
The case of a relative pronoun depends on its role within the relative clause.
For example:
Ya miran zēn gaddizit. → “Of the woman who fell.”
Here, zēn is subjective because the relative pronoun is the subject of the subordinate clause, even though its antecedent (mira, “woman”) appears in a prepositional phrase.
Relative pronouns always function as pronouns, never as adjectives.
Prepositional forms are grammatically possible:
Gōtam na guphāk no zēnēn gi nokanzit. → “I know the cave in which you entered.”
In Naucan, indefinite pronouns can be expressed in two ways:
– through periphrastic constructions, combining generic nouns such as khor (“person”) or zat (“thing”) with quantifiers like wan (“some”) or rawan (“none”);
– or through synthetic forms, in which the components are agglutinated into a single word (e.g., wankhor “someone”, rawanzat “nothing”).
Both strategies are common and interchangeable in many contexts.
These indefinite expressions inflect and agree like regular noun phrases. Their grammatical case (subjective, oblique, prepositional) depends on their function in the sentence.