I woke up this morning, to the entire herd of gnomes standing on my bed. They were debating what the best way to wake me up was. Apparantly, the choices were either poking me with a sharp stick, bouncing on my head, or releasing some sort of beast to howl at me. I was very glad to have woken up before the plot started, but they were talking in their strange language. 'erunutano walked up to me and said "Now we will start learning Nashtuku. Ready?" "I suppose," I said. "Excellent... now we'll start with a simple word, sali. It means 'to see'." He said several sentences
'ejasambali I see
'e'etijasambachali I see it
I asked what the difference between the words was. He broke them down a bit for me. "'e means the action has already finished. ja is the word for I. sali means see, but because the ja is next to it, it changes to sambali. In the second sentence, we add an 'eti, which means it. Sali becomes sachali because you've added an object. Sachali becomes sambachali because the ja is still the closest to the verb. Make sense?"
"I think so... so the closest prefix changes the shape of the verb stem, how does that work?"
"The verb changes based on the first vowel of the verb, as well as the last vowel in the closest prefix" 'erunutano grabbed a piece of paper and sketched out a quick chart...
| prefix \/ stem-> | e | A | u |
| e | e->i | a->amba | u->abu |
| a | e->ishe | a->achi | u->igu |
| u | e->uke | a->aro | u->o |
| i | e->icha | a->ina | u->uje |
| o | e-uku | a->a’i | u->uka |
