8. Sá chuqke nuı / A little snack

In this lesson, we’ll look at adjectives and tenses in Toaq.

Conversation

Míqte

Níchaq bï, chuq úmo sá karı noqchoı ba.

Jea jí sá nueq gı nha!

Naı tı jí ké dıem

Ánhe

ma ti súq ké diem sao?

jea súq máo sá choko nui baaa (ㅅ´ ˘ `)

Míqte

Ma pu chuq súq tú choko nuı…

Ánhe

jia chuq jí máo ké niq wo (｡･｀ω´･｡)

Vocabulary

Word Meaning
haq ▯ is food
chuqke ▯ is a snack
nueq ▯ is meat
karı ▯ is curry
sushı ▯ is sushi
choko ▯ is chocolate
nao ▯ is water
chaı ▯ is tea
Word Meaning
jea ▯ buys ▯
dıem ▯ is a shop/store
noq ▯ tastes ▯
noqgı ▯ is tasty
noqchoı ▯ is spicy
sao ▯ is big
nuı ▯ is small
nıq ▯ is new
Typing Toaq

Toaq typists are sometimes in a hurry, and not all devices make it easy to write Toaq properly. It’s common to see the letter ı written with a dot: jia instead of jıa, as in Ánhe’s texts above.

The letter ꝡ can be even trickier to type. You’ll often see v, w, y, or vy used in its place.

Tones might be omitted in a hurry, or spelled with digits — níchaq bï can become nichaq2 bi3 or just nichaq bi. There’s an article explaining various input methods on the Toaq Wiki.

Mass nouns

Toaq doesn’t treat mass nouns specially. A verb like nao “▯ is water” really means “▯ is a quantity of water”. So tú nao means “each mass of water” — for example, it might quantify over all the waters in everyone’s glasses at a dinner table.

Adjectives

In Toaq, verbs can be used as adjectives by placing them after a “noun”. When you see an article followed by two verbs, it’s a so-called adjective modifying a so-called noun.

sá karı noqchoı
some spicy curry

tú choko nuı
each small chocolate

Of course, because everything is verbs, you have a bit more freedom than in other languages.

ké kıa
the red one(s)

ké noqchoı kıa
the red spicy thing

ké kıa noqchoı
the spicy red thing

Are adjectives "intersective"?

It makes sense to point at an elephant and say “this is a small elephant”, but it’s a bit strange to call it a “small animal”, right?

The meaning of sá elu nuı (a small elephant) might not be as simple as “x is an elephant and x is small.” Rather, there’s a notion of being “small for an elephant” that this phrase captures. We say that adjectives do the same thing in Toaq.

As such, there is a slight difference between sá nuı de (a small thing that’s pretty compared to the average small thing) and sá de nuı (a pretty thing that’s small compared to the average pretty thing.)

Linguists call adjectives like small non-intersective. Other adjectives, like red, are intersective, meaning that a “red house” really is simply a house which is red.

Tenses pu, naı, jıa, mala

By default, Toaq sentences don’t express tense. You can place these words before the verb of a sentence to mark when it takes place:

Word Meaning
pu past tense
naı present tense
jıa future tense
mala existential past

The word pu expresses that something happened in a contextually limited past:

Pu tı jí Súomıgua.
I was in Finland. (e.g. at the time)

Whereas mala is unlimited, and expresses that the claim in the sentence held at some time in the unbounded past.

Mala tı jí Súomıgua.
I’ve been in Finland. (at some point in life)

The default tense

The default tense is a “vague, definite time reference.” Wait, how can it be both vague and definite?! Let’s look at an example.

Chuq jí ké sushı.
(During time t,) I eat the sushi.

It’s definite, in the sense that we constrain the existence of the eating-event to some time t that we have in mind, but it’s also vague, in that we don’t say when this time t is.

The default tense has a spoken form, too: tuom. But it’s rarely used — mostly just when doing Toaqology.

The difference between pu and mala is that pu only adds the detail that this vague, definite time t is in the past, whereas mala introduces an existential quantifier.

Pu chuq jí ké sushı.
(During time t, which is in the past,) I eat the sushi.

Mala chuq jí ké sushı.
There exists a past time t, at which I eat the sushi.