Root reuse across grammatical categories
1 min read · 91 words
## Root reuse across grammatical categories
NLS deliberately reuses the same root for closely related concepts belonging to different grammatical categories (e.g. bado = "on" both as a preposition and as an adverb; morb = "behind" as an adverb and "rear" as a noun; brod/*broduk* = "must"/"duty" as a verb/noun). This reduces memory load: a word's grammatical category is disambiguated by its position in the sentence and by the suffixes/prefixes applied to it (e.g. a final -u always signals an adjective), not by having a separate root for every category.