Grammar Sketch

A brief introduction to Tanacross grammatical structure — how words are built, how nouns are possessed, and how verbs encode participants, tense, and aspect.

Introduction

The grammatical structure of Tanacross differs in many important ways from English. One fundamental difference has to do with the structure of words. In English, verbs incorporate little information about the subject of a sentence. By contrast, all Tanacross verbs incorporate information about the subject — verbs can thus stand alone as a complete sentence without any additional words. For example, the single Tanacross word nantneg'iił requires five words to express in English: "I will see you again."

Words are built from smaller building blocks called morphemes, consisting of a root and possibly one or more prefixes. The root carries the basic meaning of the word. In order to form a word, a number of prefixes must typically be added.

Types of Words

Nouns

Many Tanacross words refer to things or ideas. Dendîig 'moose', tthee 'rock', and k'oth 'clouds' are nouns — usually fairly straightforward to translate, though languages differ in how they categorize things.

For example, English 'uncle' covers both 'mother's brother' and 'father's brother', but Tanacross uses completely different words for each. Conversely, Tanacross has one word, dlaat, corresponding to both 'algae' and 'moss'. Similarly, nûun is often translated as 'animal' but actually refers only to mammals and cannot be used for insects the way English 'animal' can.

Tanacross differs from English in that nouns are not obligatorily marked for plural. A noun may refer to one or more than one thing depending on context. When a speaker wishes to explicitly indicate plurality, the plural marker iin can be used, but this is generally reserved for people and animals. For most things, whether one or more is involved is indicated by number marking on the verb.

Noun Possession

Possession in Tanacross is indicated by a possessive prefix, a glottal stop suffix, or both. Words for family relationships and most parts of the body must always be possessed and have no unpossessed form. In the dictionary, such words are generally given in the "my ___" form.

For 'my', use s- when the following sound is ts', ts, dz, s, or ṡ — otherwise use sh-. Thus shnąą 'my mother' but stsųų 'my grandmother'. For 'his, hers, its', use m- before vowels and wu- before consonants.

For example, the dictionary entry for 'arm' is shgǎan' ('my arm'). The full possessed paradigm is:

For nouns that do not have to be possessed, a glottal stop is added to the stem to form the possessed word, accompanied by potential changes: the final sound changes from voiceless to voiced, certain initial fricatives become semi-voiced, and the tone may shift.

Verbs

Verbs are words that express actions, events, or conditions. Every Tanacross verb contains information about who or what is involved, as well as the viewpoint of the action. As a result, verbs can express complete thoughts that take several English words — for example, ihtsax alone means "I am crying." Even highly complex events can sometimes be expressed in a single word: shuk'aał was translated by several speakers as "she or he looks mean at me and then closes their eyes and turns their head away."

Participants

Nearly all verbs need one or more participants. The participant that performs an action is the subject; an additional participant impacted by the action is the object. In Tanacross, subjects and objects are always expressed differently, and every Tanacross verb must contain information identifying the subject and, if needed, the object.

Person and Number

Tanacross verbs encode the person (first, second, or third) and number (singular or plural) of the subject through prefixes. When the participant is first or second person, no separate word is required — a verb prefix suffices.

ihtsax — "I am crying"    ts'etsax — "we are crying"

These two words share the stem tsax meaning 'to cry' — but unlike English 'cry', tsax cannot stand alone as a word in Tanacross.

Time and Aspect

Tanacross encodes both tense (when something happens relative to the moment of speaking) and aspect (whether an action is viewed as completed, ongoing, just starting, etc.).

In the dictionary, the viewpoint given is normally the ongoing (imperfective) form. For actions typically referred to as completed — such as actions that take very little time, like "grab" — the completed form is given.

Paradigms

Words sometimes have different forms depending on context. In the dictionary, paradigms of many verbs with just one participant (subject) are given in a table listing the word for each of the six primary subjects. Paradigms are labeled as imperfective, perfective, or future.

Classificatory Verbs

An important set of verbs have stems that refer to the object of the verb rather than the action itself, varying depending on the number and type of thing involved. These are called classificatory verbs, and they are used for many common actions such as 'pick up', 'put down', 'carry', 'give', and 'is there'. There are eight object categories in Tanacross:

To illustrate, here are some examples involving "a stick" (dechenh):

dechenh ntl'ádihta̧a̧ — "I gave you a stick"

dechenh dinihta̧a̧ — "I brought a stick"

dechenh deeta̧a̧ — "A stick is lying there"

dechenh dinihdlah — "I brought sticks" (plural — different verb form)

Word Order

In Tanacross the verb is very often the last word of a sentence — a significant difference from English, where other words frequently follow the verb.

John tehsháatl — "John jumped"

John Mary neh'ęh — "John sees Mary"

Teddh uudâh ghihtéy — "I slept all night"

In sentences where both subject and object are identified, the subject comes before the object:

John dendîig neh'ęh — "John sees the moose"

Dendîig John neh'ęh — "The moose sees John"

In Tanacross, adjectives — words that supply more specific information about a noun — come after the noun, unlike in English:

shax ts'éhłeg — "one house"

shax chox — "big house"