Chíetoaı namako – Bonus lesson

Toaq with Ease was supposed to have 50 lessons, but only 14 have been written by the author.

In anticipation of the community writing more lessons, or entirely new learning materials, this dialogue-free lesson will serve as an overview of essential Toaq features not covered in the previous lessons.

Sentence structure

You can actually leave da or móq off the end of a sentence. If there are question words, the meaning is as if you said móq, and otherwise it’s as if you said da.

In addition, you can prepend ꝡa (in the falling tone) to a declarative sentence or hí-question without changing its meaning. This offers another way to indicate boundaries between sentences, so you don’t have to say da all the time.

These sentences all mean the same thing:

Aojaı súq hí raı móq?
Aojaı súq hí raı?
Ꝡa aojaı súq hí raı móq?
Ꝡa aojaı súq hí raı?

Events

Toaq makes a distinction between propositions (statements which are merely true or false in some context) and events (“instances” of some fact being true in a world, at a particular place and time).

A sentence like Joaı déo kúne claims the existence of some “seeking-event”, in which the child and the dog are participants. Toaq lets us refer to the underlying fact using ꝡä, as you have learned. But there is another word, ë, for referring to an event:

ë joaı déo kúne “(to be) an event of the child seeking the dog”

Just like a verb, we can either change its tone to the rising tone to make a noun…

Kaqsı jí é joaı déo kúne. I look at the event(s) of the child seeking the dog.

or we can put a determiner like sá in front.

Kaqsı jí sá ë joaı déo kúne. I look at some event(s) of the child seeking the dog.

These sentences are more correct than Kaqsı jí ꝡä… in that we can’t really “look at” a fact, but we can look at an event, which inhabits space and time.

Pronouns

The word hó is actually specifically an “anaphoric” pronoun: it refers to an animate party mentioned earlier in the text. We didn’t learn the more generic third-person personal pronouns: nháo (he/she/they, singular) and nhána (they, plural).

What’s left?

Toaq’s grammar is not very big, and this course has already covered most of the essentials. However, we didn’t learn about certain common constructs, like adjectives, adverbs, or serial verbs. The wiki has an overview of the grammar that touches on these concepts. They are described in full in the reference grammar.

You can round out your vocabulary by reading the cheat sheet or browsing Toadua. Or you can come talk to us on Discord. If you made it this far, I’m sure you can form more sentences than you think! Laojaı íme, ꝡä choaqfa súq íme da. Toaq-heart