Ngezhey Grammar

Word order

Word order is head inital, SVO, and Analytic. Ngezhey sentences are essentially noun phrases, with the implied meaning of "there is/are". For example, "lyl" (dragon), as a sentence means "There are dragons.". This could mean there are literally dragons, dragons exist in some imaginary world, or that dragons exist in some other context.

Ngezhey has very strict word order, which is what this article will go into detail about. Ngezhey sentences (like those in many languages) are made up of many words describing each other. In Ngezhey, unlike most other languages, the contexts in which one word describes another are very precise and very similar for all parts of speech. Three different ways to interpret the rules of Ngezhey word order are described below.

Each part of speech can only describe certain other parts of speech. For example, adjectives can only describe nouns. Each word describes the first word behind it that it can. "oh"s can be placed before a word to change which word it describes.

Each "oh" causes the word to modify one word further back.

Each word describes the word before it except "un" (much) which describes the word 2 behind it ("gac"). Therefore, the sentence means: "the water on the table is much" or "there is a lot of water on the table."

If you had to use an "oh" for every single word that wasn’t modified, you would need way too many "oh"s, so some words are skipped without needing an "oh". These cases sometimes result in no "oh"s being necessary.

Words are skipped if: 1. they are not the correct part of speech; 2. they are not described (even indirectly) by the word that comes before the "oh"s; 3. they are a preposition that already has a noun (because prepositions can only have one noun describing them);

1. Not the correct part of speech:
   gac   9u laz oh ex
water on table  bad

   The word "ex" (bad) describes "gac" because it can not describes '9u" (on), because it is a preposition.Therefore, the sentence means "the water on the table is bad." Without the "oh", the sentence would mean "There is water on the bad table."

2. Not described:
   gac   guf    ex oh un
water there  bad   much

   The word "un" (much) describes the word "gac" (water) because the word "guf" (there) is not even indirectly described by "ex" (bad), which was the last word in the sentence. A word is not "indirecty described" by another unless it is described by the Word x indirectly describes word y if the word that word x describes describes word y, etc.

3. Prepositions can only have one noun:
   gac   9u laz   gac   ex
water on table water bad

   Here, the word gac doesn’t describe anything because "9u" (on), the only word it could describe, is already taken by "laz" (table).

Everything written so far should be enough to explain how words fit together in Ngezhey. However, more explanations may be interesting or aident.

Another way of looking at this is as words followed by a pair of parentheses contianing everything that describes them. In this case, opening parentheses follow each regular word, and "oh" acts as closing parentheses.

Wrtten with opening parentheses after each regular words and closing parentheses in place of "oh"s, you get:

An extra parentheses was added at the end because that can be impled and doesn’t need to be stated. Each word is followed with parentheses containing a list of all the words that describe them. If you had to write or speak all of the closing parentheses as "oh"s, it would take forever, so the same three cases we saw above can be applied now.

1. A closing parentheses is implied if otherwise it would result in a word describing a part of speech it is not able to describe (like a noun describing an adjective). For example:
   gac   9u laz oh ex
water on table  bad
   with parentheses:
   gac(   9u( laz()  ) ex() ))
water( on( table()) bad()))

   You will see that there was another parentheses added between "laz" and "ex" because otherwise, you would have 9u(laz() ex), which is an adjective describing a preposition, which is against the rules and doesn't make sense.

2. This rule is already taken care of by the fact that you have to add closing paretheses as you add words, and ones that you have already added for other words count when adding a new one. In the sentence we used above:
   ac   guf    ex oh un
water there bad   much with paretheses added:
   gac(  gœf()   ex()  un)
water(there() bad() much)

   The closing parentheses between "guf" and "ex" were added due to rule 1 and because they are there, you don’t have to add an "oh" to prevent "un" from describing "guf".

3. You also have to add parentheses in order to prevent two nouns from being in the same preposition’s parentheses. Here is the example we used before:
   gac   9u laz   gac   ex
water on table water bad
   with parentheses:
   gac(   9u( laz()  ))  gac(  ex)
water( on( table() )) water(bad)

   There was an extra closing parentheses between "laz" and "gac" because otherwise, you would have "9u( laz() gac())", ie. a preposition described by two nouns.

The third and final way of viewing this is as a sentence diagram. In this interpretation, each word is connected to the word it describes by a line. When there is more than one word describing the same other word, they are each added from top to bottom. Lines that connect words to what they describe always go left firt and sometimes then up. When diagramming sentences, each "oh" means the next word is connected to one word back.

gac┳━9u━laz oh oh 
   ┗━━━━━━━━━━━━━━un
water┳━on━table
     ┗━━━━━━━━━━much

"un" (much) describes the word "gac" (water) instead of "laz" or "9u" because there are two "oh"s before it.

Just as we had rules that let us leave out some "oh"s in the other interpretations, we have the same ones here.

1. When counting back to make a word describe the correct thing, skip over words that are not the correct part of speech.
   For example:
   

    gac  9u laz  oh ex
   water on table   bad
   		

   As a diagram:

   gac┳9u━laz oh
      ┗━━━━━━━━━━ex
   water┳on━table
        ┗━━━━━━━━━bad
   		

   In this example, the word "ex" (bad) skips over "laz" (table) because it has 1 "oh" before it. It skips over "9u" (on) because adjectives can not describe prepositions. Therefore, it ends up describing "gac" (water).

2. The second rule means that we skip over any words that have a connection line below them. Since lines always go left and then up, it would not be possible to describe words that already have a line below them.

   In the sentence we used above:
   

   gac   guf    ex oh un
   water there bad   much
   		

   As a diagram:

   gac┳guf
      ┣━━━━ex oh
      ┗━━━━━━━━━━━un
   water┳there
        ┣━━━━━━bad 
        ┗━━━━━━━━━━much
   		

   The word "un" (much) here describes "gac" (water). The "oh" prevents the word from describing "ex" bad, and there is a line below "guf" (there), so it can not describe that. Since lines go left and then up, you can see that it is not possible to connect "un" to "guf". (Such a line would have to go up and then left and would look completely out of place.) Another way of looking at it is to say that a new word can only connect to a word that is in the chain that connects the first word to the last word. In this case, that chain would include just "gac" and "ey" because they are directly connected.

3. The third rule just means that prepositions are skipped for nouns if they already have a noun connected to them.

   Here is the example we used before:
   

   gac   9u laz   gac   ex
   water on table water bad
   		

   here is the diagram:

   gac━━━9u━laz     gac━━━ex
   water━on━table   water━bad
   		

   Here, the word "gac" doesn’t describe anything because, as we can see, "9u" already has "laz" connected to it, and there is only 'room' for one noun.