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Introduction

1 min read · 149 words

- A phonemic orthography

- Tunisian shows an affirmative zero-copula in the present tense, ie. there is no "i am ...", "you are ..."...

- Tunisian is pro-drop, ie: you don't need to mention the personal pronoun (e.g: I, you, we, he, they...), unless it's for emphasis.

- Introflexive-to-fusional

- Both Head-marking and dependent-marking

- Nominative-Genitive. View Genitive case and Possessives

- Tunisian has two singular genders and a gender-free plural.

- When defining adjectived nouns, both the noun and the adjective are to define all together.

- Tunisian is near-perfectly head-initial:

- Noun + Adjective (Except in superlative, view Elative)

Daar
house
kbiire
big

‘a big house’

But for superlative elative:

Akber
big.ELA
daar
house

‘the biggest house’

  1. Postnomial:

Ed
the
daar
house
heeđi
this

‘this house’

  1. Noun + Relative clause:

El
the
kteeb
book
elli
that
qriito
read.PAST.1sg

‘the book that I read’

  1. Possessee + Possessor

makiin=et
machine=GEN
ğsiil
laundry

‘washing machine’

  1. Auxiliary + Verb;

Beeş
will
nemşi
go.PRES.1st

‘I will go’

  1. Preposition + Noun:

f
in
es
the
sandouq
box

‘in the box’

Now it's "near-perfect" because, although it's SVO and VSO by default, orders OSV and OVS are allowed. However, they aren't pure word orders since the verb needs to be mutated. View Word Order.