Ao (Chungli) grammar: nouns, cases and the verb chain

Noun morphology

Gender runs on animacy

Ao classifies nouns by natural class rather than by arbitrary grammatical gender. Inanimate nouns take no gender marking whatsoever. Animates do, and the markers differ for humans and for animals:

Plural: -tem

The plural marker -tem attaches at the end of the whole noun phrase, not to the noun itself. If a numeral greater than one is already present, -tem can be dropped as redundant: plural marking is optional once the count is explicit.

Word order inside the noun phrase

Head noun first, then modifiers. Adjectives and quantifiers both follow:

The particle ji (and its variant ci) functions as a definite article, attaching to the noun: oshiji "the language".

Case and postpositions

The accusative (the direct object) has no marker at all. It simply sits before the verb. The nominative, by contrast, is marked, but only in a specific condition: the subject takes -i (or -y after the vowel a) when the predicate is a transitive verb.

This pattern is visible everywhere once you know to look for it. Ao newspaper headlines use it constantly with proper nouns: US-i Taiwan yariba "the US helping Taiwan", China-i amokmeren "China threatens", Rio-i tanga states CM ajungshir "Rio urges other states' chief ministers".

The postpositions you will meet first

Notice senpungu: sen "money" plus pungu "five", compounded, with the numeral following the noun as all modifiers do.

The verb chain

Ao verbs are agglutinative (a stem plus an ordered series of suffixes), and they show no concordance. There is no marking for person, number or gender anywhere in the verb. The same form serves for "I go", "she goes" and "they go".

Tense

That the past is the unmarked form is the single most counter-intuitive fact about Ao for an English speaker. A bare verb stem is a completed action, and you add morphology to move away from the past, not towards it.

Aspect: building longer chains

Aspect markers sit between the stem and the tense marker, which is how Ao expresses things English needs auxiliary verbs for.

In everyday writing the same -tsü ending appears both where English says "will …" and where it says "to …" (inyaktsü, from inyak "work", is one of the commonest words in the Ao press). Word order separates them: a "to …" form comes before the main verb, while the future closes the clause.

The copula

ali is the verb "to be / to live / to exist", and liasü is its past form: "was, were". It carries a lot of the load in descriptive sentences, since Ao adjectives frequently need a copula to predicate them.

Negation: two prefixes

Ao negates with prefixes, not with a separate word. Which prefix depends on the mood of the clause:

The prefix vowel assimilates to the following vowel of the verb root. This is why the negative of metet is memetet rather than mametet: the a of ma- has been pulled towards the e of the stem. The same process gives mangatet "not understand" from angatet, mejembi "not speak" from jembi, and memeimer "not love" from meimer.

Comparatives

Comparison uses the postposition tangungi "than" on the standard of comparison, with the adjective taking a suffix:

The order is: subject, standard + tangungi, then the compared adjective. Because the standard precedes the adjective, an Ao comparative reads to an English speaker as though it has been assembled backwards.

The system in one table

Practice

Work through the annotated passage in the Ao language guide, then try composing your own sentences with NagaChat, which will correct you and explain why.

Ao has far less digital text than the languages most translation tools are built on, and that shortage is the main constraint on translation quality. If you speak Ao, adding phrases is the highest-leverage thing you can do for it.