Telehe grammar

Morphology
Telehe language is mostly aglutinative and synthetic (inflectional) language.

Characteristics of the Kóty language area

 * Irralis-Realis mood distinction in verbs.
 * Presence of strong borrowing of grammar and vocabulary of neighboring languages.
 * Lacking five-vowels inventory alongside Hautkar, Old-Qachkav, Ansang and Cisi.

Noun
Nouns in Telehe decline for five case Nominative, Accusative, Genitive I, Genitive II and Ablative, and five numbers Singular, Plural, Paucal, Dual and Collective, and are categorized into four genders Countable, Uncountable, Inanimate and Animate.

Gender
Nouns are divided into four genders, known as countable, uncountable, animate and inanimate.


 * 1) Countable (Burat āmbā)
 * 2) Animate (Orsočēt āmbā)
 * 3) Inanimate (Orsočēteyamu āmbā)
 * 4) Uncountable (Burateyamu āmbā)

To a certain extent, the genders follow the meanings of the words (for example, water, liquids, wind and paper are uncountable, objects, chairs, tables and cups are countable and inanimate).

General tendencies are seen throughout the gender system of Telehe that make the noun declension predictable to some extent, most countable nouns end in -r and most uncountable nouns end in -c, Telehe features a significant amount of irregularities within this system, due to the etymological word has changed in such way that it obscures the predictability of these nouns. Some examples:


 * Countable nouns refer to nouns that can be modified by a quantity and that occurs in all number forms, such as tlefer "priest", yerer "book" and brontōr "woman".
 * Uncountable nouns refer to nouns with the syntactic property that any quantity of it is treated as an undifferentiated unit, such as celec "water", sfomoc "liquid" and rūpšac "wind".

Number
Telehe has loaned a plethora of words and grammatical morphemes from its surrounding languages like Ħautkar and some Koyanic languages, including how Number is expressed in Telehe:


 * Singular is unmarked as it's the default form of the noun.
 * Plural is marked with -n(e).
 * Paucal is Loaned from Ħautkar, it is formed through reduplication of the last syllable of the word ∼CV.
 * Collective is Loaned from Ħautkar, it values an infix in to the word -u- and then adding the suffix -ar. The collective number is sometimes used to talk about a large number, general things or even a lot of beings/objects in general.
 * Dual is an innovation in the history of Telehe it is marked with the prefix or- derived from the numeral two.

Cases
Telehe as an inflected language, i.e. the endings of most of its words change depending on their function in a sentence. Telehe features the following cases Nominative, Accusative, Genitive I & II and Ablative.

As shown bellow, the declensions somewhat shows regularity in this internal system, with some degree of irregularity:


 * NOM uncountable: Vc, animate:Vs/r, inanimate:Vs/r
 * ACC uncountable: Vr/s, animate:Vč, inanimate:Vs/r
 * POSS uncountable: Vr/si, animate:Vl, inanimate:quV
 * DAT uncountable: cVt/s, animate:sV, inanimate:m/mnV
 * ABL uncountable: zb/psV/, animate:p/bV, inanimate:qu/guV̄

For the second declension nominative countable, nouns get modified, this could be seen as some sort of consonant mutation and or umlaut, but the root. . . .tlefe-s olec-te terčset-č

priest-NOM eat-3sg-CVB sweet_bread-ACC

'The priest is eating sweet bread'yaš yere-č bode-š

1SG.NOM book-ACC read-1SG

'I read the book'

Genitive
Divided into two Genitives, the genitive I is -l it means nominal dependency and possession, while the genitive II means addressee in dedications, composition, origin and apposition with the suffix -su, sometimes Genitive II assumes dative functions, depending on the phrase and the addressee.tērē-su yom

cow-GEN horn

'cow horn'

Ablative
It indicates a location, where, in, on, at and by, marked with -pu.

Adjectives

 * -yicu - from the root to be similar, it is an suffix similar to the -ly in English.

Some exceptions
Sometimes when two words connect to form a new one and these words form a long string of vowels an intrusive h is inserted between them.

Person marking
Conjugable verbs in Telehe inflect for person, there are 3 tenses, past, present and future, there many moods in telehe, one of them is irrealis and realis, others like imperative, habitual and conditional also are present in the language. Adding -ve you can obtain imperative mood, -ru forms the conditional mood and -ze for habitual mood. For the aspects, Telehe features vo- for perfective, go- for imperfective and he- for stative aspect.

Causatives
Causatives in Telehe aren’t that much exciting, they came from the verb yevesaš (to wish) that's shorted to yev-.

Negatives
Negative conjugation of the Telehe verbs are aglutinative, the negative particule -yamu glue itself with the past morphology to form the negative past form.

Converb
Converbs can be found in Telehe in one single form, -daya with the person marking going after it.