This is a followup to lesson 6.5 of the official Fynotek course.
Proper nouns were touched upon only briefly (as we forgot about them for a while), but in that brief overview it was mentioned that proper nouns can be modifiers. It’s a rare use case to use them this way, but here are some situations where you can do so:
- Firstly, if you want to introduce someone or something, you need to use a workaround, since you cannot use their name as a verb. One way to do this is to say that someone exists, in a <name>-y way. (e.g. fmutuejuon fuhounson. “This person exists, in an Unson-ish way.”—in other words, “This is Unson.”)
- Proper nouns as adverbs could also be used for comparison (for example, saying that someone runs similarly to someone else by saying that they run <name>-ly), but this is very uncommon, so use it carefully.
Proper Noun Marking
Either way, the examples so far have only shown proper nouns as attached modifiers. In the rare case you need to use one as a detached modifier, you’ll need to match the marking of the proper noun with the ablaut of the thing you want to modify. Remember that proper nouns are marked with suffixes, though, and not with ablaut. Here’s how you mark them:
- N marking applies a suffix of n to the proper noun (e.g. A marking would cause “lano” to become “lanoa”).
- Reduplication marking adds the last vowel of the proper noun as a suffix, as a long vowel. Here are examples:
- In “raysoa”, “a” is the last vowel, so it becomes “raysoanaa” under reduplication marking (remember to infix “n” as needed to avoid VVV sequences!).
- In “wasoo”, “o” is the last vowel, so it becomes “wasoonoo” under reduplication marking. Note that the “oo” suffix is still long, despite us reduplicating a long vowel. When using reduplication marking on proper nouns, vowel length does not matter.
Pretty simple!