POPE (Mòmì) Nouns and Adjectives

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Adjectives agree with their head nouns in case, number and gender.
There are no personal pronouns, because the language does not know the notion of person.

Case

POPE (Mòmì) is an ergative language, i.e. it is based on two cases: absolutive for subjects of intransitive verbs and objects of transitive ones, ergative for subjects of transitive verbs.
Everything else (such as the former genitive, locative and instrumentative) is expressed with the help of postpositions which are added as suffixes to the noun/adjective.

The absolutive is the basic form of a noun or adjective.
In ergative case, the first letter is doubled and the appropriate ending is attached at the end:

• IL if it is a noun/adjective of the L declension and it ends in a consonant
• IJ if it is a noun/adjective of the J declension and it ends in a consonant
• L if it is a noun/adjective of the L declension and it ends in a vowel
• J if it is a noun/adjective of the J declension and it ends in a vowel

Gender

There are four genders in POPE (Mòmì): neuter, feminine, masculine and inanimate.
Masculine is used for male persons or animals, feminine for females, neuter for persons or animals when not talking explicitly about males or females, and inanimate for objects, which are neither persons nor animals.

Neuter nouns/adjectives start with a neutral vowel (A/E/O/U),
feminine ones start with a soft vowel (Ã/Ẽ/Õ/Ũ),
masculine ones start with a hard vowel (�?/É/Ó/Ú) and
inanimate nouns/adjectives can start with any letter.

Note that the diacritic is only needed on the first letter of every word, because every phoneme must belong to the same category (neutral, soft or hard).

Number

The language distinguishes between singular, dual and plural. The dual is only used for real couples, i.e. for two animate objects in a close relationship to each other (e.g. husband and wife) or for two inanimate objects of the same kind forming a pair (e.g. a pair of shoes).

This is the declension table for the L declension. The J declension is the same, except that the letter L in absolutive plural and ergative must be replaced with J.

	singular	dual	plural
neuter abs. neuter erg.	A - AA - (I)L	AKU - AAKU - (I)L	LATU - LAATU - (I)L
feminine abs. feminine erg.	Ã - ÃA - (I)L	ÃKUKU - ÃAKUKU - (I)L	L̃ATU - L̃AATU - (I)L
masculine abs. masculine erg.	�? - �?A - (I)L	�?KUKU - �?AKUKU - (I)L	L�?ATU - L�?AATU - (I)L
inanimate abs. inanimate erg.	X - XX - (I)L	KUK(U)X - KUK(U)XX - (I)L	(U)X - (U) (U)XX - (U)L

'A' stands for any characteristic (i.e. not indifferent) vowel, which must be the same in all cases, numbers and genders. 'X' stands for any letter.
Note that inanimate nouns starting and ending with a vowel don't distinguish between singular and plural.

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1. Introduction
2. Pronunciation
3. Nouns and Adjectives
4. Postpositions
5. Articles
6. Numbers
7. Verbs
8. PU (to be)
9. Word Order
10. Origin of the Name
11. Vocabulary
12. Examples

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