Speaker 1
That by itself is not that much
Speaker 2
but the main thing is if you were going to prove a relationship, you would have to have evidence for it. Anyway, let's move on from that. I didn't mean for that to be extended too long. Let's actually get into the meat of talking
Speaker 1
about Ainu itself. Ainu, I'll start with simple things. Ainu nouns as in Japanese once again basically do not have any kind of changes. The noun that we refer to person and some animals can take a plural suffix which is utar which is basically the word utar which means people and that's something we will notice as I describe. Ainu is that a lot of Ainu's morphology is very transparent. It was as if Ainu is mostly on the first stage of grammaticalizing stuff. So plenty of... A good nature. Postposition. Plenty. Yeah, lots of acclutination and a lot of the stuff that is used morphologically still has a meaning as a plain noun or something else. So it's quite... It's very
Speaker 2
transparent. Which is very useful for conlangers because it can help you see ideas for where things can come from, where grammatical morphinges can come from in terms of electoral items. Exactly.
Speaker 1
Exactly. So nouns, like I said, apart from that they basically do not change. They don't have gender, at least not as a grammatical category. The three core rules are not marked. They are basically marked by word order and agreement on the verb partial. I'll get back to that when I talk about the verb. So basically subject, object and indirect objects, whatever that can mean in the depending on the verb. They are all marked simply by word order and agreement on the verb. Other oblique rules are marked by postpositions. Bit like Japanese again, but different postpositions. For instance, there is a... What was it? Yeah, kusu, which means basically because of. You have a committative tura, an instrumental which is ari. So instrumentancy by means committative is just with a person. But most important are the locative postpositions which are somewhat more used than the other ones. Now the main ones are ta, which means which is basically location and movement to and goal. So two are at un, which is more movement towards towards. So two are towards and why, which means from. Interesting part about those is that you can't add them directly to most nouns. Only a very small subset of the nouns, which are usually called positional nouns, can take those postpositions directly. For other nouns, you need to put some position in between. Usually a word like or which means place. Only thing that nouns do have, which is interesting, is that they have quite a lot of those nouns have a special possessive form, which is formed by adding an H and followed by a copy of the last vowel or just a copy of last vowel when it's a noun which ends as a consonant. And then you just put on one of the verbal affixes for person to talk about that who's owning this. When you're using a noun, you just put it in
Speaker 2
front. It's marking the possessed noun, right?
Speaker 1
Yes, it's marking the possess noun and the possessor is unmarked, it's just put in front. But all nouns do that and it's mostly for, how you call that, inalienable possession. So when you're talking about family ties or about parts of body, things like that. For inalienable possession, the I know are very simple. They simply use a relative subclose with a verb to have, which is called. And as in Japanese, once again, similarity with Japanese relative subclose of form, but simply putting a close in front of a noun without anything. You don't have to change the verb, you don't have to put a relative pronoun anywhere, just put the sentence before the