User:Chrisgoeggel/Lala Language Sandbox

Lala, Nara, or Pokau is a Austronesian language from the central southern coast of the Papuan Peninsula in Papua New Guine. This language can be found spoken in the villages of Oloi, Diumana, Ala'ala, Tubu, Kaiau and Vanuamae. A count in 2017 showed there to be about 3000 speakers with a current language status of "developing", meaning that the language is in vigorous use, with literature in a standardized form being used by some.

People
The coastal surroundings of this land allows for vegetable farms and plenty of animals to be hunted. The wallaby is a notable animal that is hunted by this group. The coast is also utilized for fishing.

Tense
Simple present, simple past, and present continuous tenses use subject person markers. Markers such as a, o , ka , de , and e are the markers that would be put after noun to inform the listener of these three tenses.

Past continuous tense uses the subject person markers lau a'o, oni o'o , i'a' e'o , ita ka'o , lai-lai a'o, oi-oi , i'a de'o.

Remote past tense uses the marker ani.

Future tense uses the subject markers lau ba, oni bo , i'a be , ita eka , lai-lai ba , oi-oi bo , and i'a be.

Vowels
Vowels are long a, short e, short i, long o, and long u. Vowel pairs are au, ei, io, oe, oi, and ou.

Consonants
Some consonant rules are the letter h only being heard in the word hosi (meaning 'horse') and Hulaha (meaning 'Hula people'). Consonants s and t were probably originally pronounced as ts. Introduced s can be heard in the name Saka and in sisima (meaning 'ship'). Introduced t is heard in boti (meaning 'boat').

Causative prefixes
Object suffixes are often used with transitive verbs. u, mu , a , i'a , ta , lai-mai , mu'i. Because the object pronoun usually comes in order after the subject pronoun, the object suffix is sometimes dropped without making the meaning ambiguous. If the object pronoun comes first because of emphasis, the correct object suffix must be used to make the meaning clear.

The prefix va- changes the words to causative verbs and nouns. Example of this would be in the word ika. ika means look, but adding the va in the front of ika turns the word into va'ika which means show.

The prefix i- changes words to nouns. vaku means weave and ivaku means woven.

The prefix vi- does not take the object suffixes and is not used with the causative va-. Nor does the duplication of the verb root occur with vi-.

Stress
Usually falls on the second last syllable of a word. It shifts when a syllable is added to a word. In some words no apparent stress can be heard, except in combination. The stress can also be altered when the word is shouted.

Modifiers
Negative modifiers are si'a meaning "not", asi'i meaning "no", and asido'o meaning "not yet".

These words are often used to indicate speed of a action or thing.

Verbal modifiers of time are used to inform when the verb is taking place in.

Possessions
The possessions of inalienable nouns such as relatives, parts of the body, and close extensions of the body.

Plural forms
Some nouns can put into a plural form by adding an extension of said word onto the word itself. For example the word for a singular bird is manu. To word for multiple birds would be manumanu. Again this can be seen in the word vato meaning girl, while vavato means multiple girls.

There are exceptions to this rule as seen in the word ate'ate meaning woman, and the word a'ate meaning women. In this case the word was shorted to make the word woman into a plural form.

Syntax
The word order in most sentences are in a subject, object, verb structure.

Lexical similarities
According to Ethnologue the Lala langauge shares a 57% similarity to the Toura language, and a 47% with the Abadi language.