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)
‘a big house’
But for superlative elative:
‘the biggest house’
Postnomial:
‘this house’
Noun + Relative clause:
‘the book that I read’
Possessee + Possessor
‘washing machine’
Auxiliary + Verb;
‘I will go’
Preposition + Noun:
‘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.