Lesson 1.4 · Getting started

Stems and markers

A stem carries the meaning; the markers after it carry the grammar.

This is the one idea the whole language rests on. Learn it now and every later lesson is just filling in a blank.

Every word starts with its stem

The stem is the word itself — its meaning, with no grammar attached. It is what you would look up in a dictionary, and it never changes and never moves. It is always the first thing you see:

Grammar is added to the end

Everything grammatical — who is doing it, when, how many — is a small marker added after the stem. Never in front, never in the middle. So the front of a word is always the word itself, and you can look anything up on sight:

agapan — "love", as the thing something is being done to. Change one marker and you change one fact; nothing else in the word moves.

The markers never blur together

Two markers side by side stay two markers. Nothing merges, nothing is dropped, no letter goes missing at the join. What you see is exactly what is there:

luame — "I was loosing". Four pieces, four facts, in that order, every time.

The two shapes to expect

Nouns take up to four pieces and verbs up to five, always in this order. Don't memorise this — it is a map of the lessons ahead, and you will learn one box at a time:

Part 2 does the noun, one box per lesson. Part 4 onwards does the verb.