THE BASICS
When words get technical...
There are going to be words throughout blog posts that cover very technical things when it comes to languages. This might include me mentioning noun cases such as Nominative, Accusative, and Dative or individuals words like when I say that TaÃno is highly agglutinative. Once you learn the definitions and concepts behind these terms, everything will make sense again.
​
To start us off, let's start with the concept of noun cases. This is the idea that the form of a verb changes based on its purpose or position in a sentence. The most basic noun cases include:
Nominative (NOM) = the subject of a sentence; what we are talking about.
Accusative (ACC) = the thing that is being affected by the subject; the object of a sentence
Dative (DAT) = the thing that is being given something
Locative (LOC) = the place where the action is taking place; these are usually created by adding postpositions.
Ablative (ABL) = the thing that something is given from; these are usually creating using postpositions.
​
Most other cases are created by attaching affixes to words. This severely helps when trying to learn TaÃno because you can now focus on learning the affixes that you attach to a word. Moving on, the next major concept to learn while studying TaÃno are postpositions. The following is a small list of commonly used postpositions:
from = wariya
in = roku
soon = ikoñe -ka
to = uni
for = mun
​
Note: Some nuances to keep in mind include the the use of gua and wa. These are literally the same and are only dfferent across scholars. I will try to use wa as much as possible since it is mostly to have been the case for the original Taino language. Thank you!