Snat Sajem Tan/Introduction to Describers and Genitive

So far, you have only learned about two parts of speech: nouns and pronouns. In this lesson, you will learn about describers. Describers are a part of speech in Sajem Tan whose function is to describe words. They are like English adjectives and adverbs. You will also learn about the genitive case, which functions like the English -'s, indicating possession.

Describers
Describers can be used in two ways: to describe a noun (corresponding to adjectives in English), and to describe a verb or another describer (corresponding to adverbs in English). Luckily, you never have to do anything special to describers. The only rule is that they go right in front of the noun, verb, or adjective that they describe.

Here are some examples of describers with nouns:




 * dût||žnicön
 * large||dog
 * colspan=2|"large dog"
 * }
 * colspan=2|"large dog"
 * }




 * gažyn||decek
 * green||chicken
 * colspan=2|"green chicken"
 * }
 * colspan=2|"green chicken"
 * }

And here are some describers describing other describers:




 * xüm||van
 * very||weird
 * colspan=2|"very weird"
 * }
 * colspan=2|"very weird"
 * }

Describer-forming suffixes
You can easily turn nouns, verbs, and so on into describers with one of the following methods.

The suffix -mêt
One of the ways to form describers out of nouns is to use the suffix -mêt, which means "a plenitude of" or "full of". It is used when you want to express that something has For example, if you take the word gamyk and add -mêt, you produce the word gamykmêt, which means "full of trees" (or "plenty of trees", when used as a noun).

The suffix -xêt
Another suffix you can use is -xêt, which is kind of the opposite of the above: -xêt means "none of" or "lacking in". So gamykxêt translates into "lacking in trees" or "treeless". This suffix is also used to denote possession, which you will learn in a future lesson.

Tûn _so
The word tûn means "the quality of" and -so means "_-haver", "that which has", "_-having-one (and this suffix is also used in possession). So, this construction turns, for example, tücelit "that which affects you in a good way" into tûn tücelitso, "having the quality of a tree", "tree-like". It is used when you want to describe a quality something has. So if we were to say, tûn tücelitso lnöxem, it would mean "a song that affects someone in a good way; a beneficial song, a pleasing song". However, the same effect can be achieved by simply using the word as a describer: tücelit lnöxem'''.