This is part of the Zevy grammar notes

We start our journey into the world of Zevy by looking into the absolute simplest form of Zevy sentence, where one object is linked to another. To kick things off, take a look (and listen) at these sentences and their translations:

(1) Uten si dit.

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/ea56c9b8-b159-4ad2-a25a-dbc8f9de73e9/uten_si_dit.m4a

I am short.

(2) Dut hi me koru.

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/daf36e8d-3236-4148-8e27-cd04403b7d72/dut_hi_me_koru.m4a

The window is in the house.

Let's colorize these examples to make it easy to see which parts of the Zevy sentence correspond to which parts of the English translation:

(1) Uten si dit.

I am short.

(2) Dut hi me koru.

The window is in the house.

From here, we can make the following observations to start us on our way:

• Zevy's word order is roughly object-verb-subject

  • This is the inverse of English, which is subject-verb-object. Consider how uten appears at the start of the Zevy sentence in example (1) but the corresponding word "short" appears at the end of the English translation, or how the same thing happens for dut and its translation "house" in example (2)

  <aside> 💡 This is a relatively rare word order. However, as we will see later on, Zevy allows many sentences to transform into a subject-object-verb word order, which as it happens is the most common word order of languages across the world

  </aside>

• Zevy does not have articles like "a" or "the"

  • In the English translation, we use context to determine which article to select. So, depending on what was said before or after, example (2) could also be translated as any of "A window is in a house", "The window is in a house", or "A window is in the house".

  <aside> 💡 You may be familiar with this from languages like Swahili or Russian which also get along just fine without any articles. And unlike Zevy's oddness in word order, this is a relatively common occurrence in languages worldwide

  </aside>

• Zevy uses postpositions **rather than prepositions

  • This is to say that whereas "in" comes before the word it modifies in English, giving us "in the house", the equivalent word me comes after the word it modifies in Zevy, giving us dut me. Coming before the word they modify is what puts the "pre" in "preposition" for words like "in", "at", and "with". Since the equivalent Zevy words come after the word they modify, the "pre" becomes "post", so they're called postpositions instead

  <aside> 💡 Other languages that use postpositions include Japanese and Hindi

  </aside>

• Zevy postpositions can be separated from the word they modify

  • We've already seen that the Zevy equivalent of "in the house" has the flipped order dut me, and we now know that this is because Zevy has postpositions, not prepositions, huzzah! But you might have noticed that the postposition can appear even further back: "X is in the house" translates as Dut hi me X, with yet another word coming in between
  • We'll keep our exploration of this simple for now. The important thing to note is that even though dut and me have been separated by an interloper, the postposition is still logically linked to the word that now comes a hop before it. The sentence should still be translated as "X is in the house" despite the fact that the word order would, literally speaking, translate to something more like "X in is the house". That would be a very strange sentence indeed

  <aside> 💡 This is not something that has analogs in other languages, and is rather an idiosyncrasy of Zevy. We'll get into this later on, but Zevy grammarians tend to refer to this as postpoisition raising, in reflection of the way the postposition moves up to a more prominent place in the tree structure of the sentence

  </aside>

• Finally, you might argue that I lied when I said that Zevy verbs don't conjugate, because here it seems that something changes between si in the first example, translated as "am", and hi in the second example, translated as "is", that seems pretty similar to, well, conjugation

  • These examples show that in this specific case, the form of "to be" differs depending on the subject. As it happens, these two words are the only case where this occurs in the entirety of the Zevy language, so perhaps we can say it only sorta counts—but we'll hear more about that later
  • The first form, si, is used whenever the subject includes the speaker, such as "I am" or "We are". Note that Zevy uses the same form of "to be" for both of those cases, unlike am vs are in English:
    • Hat si dit. Hat si deses. I am tall. We are tall.
  • The second form, hi, is used whenever the subject doesn't include the speaker, and so is the same for any of "You are", "It/she/he is", and "They are":
    • Hat hi dovund. Hat hi da. Hat hi damon. You are tall. It is tall. They are tall.
  • In technical terms, this is to say that in Zevy the form of "to be" agrees with the person of the subject, though it distinguishes only the first person from all other persons, while there is no agreement at all for the number of the subject

And that's that! Everything you need to say that X is Y in Zevy 🎉

... and here's the same text in Zevy 😂 Hopefully you can now recognize a few of the elements! **Utmu, tete dit. Ha u dit si dit. Utme, ha u da hi da.**

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Vocabulary used in this note