SYNTAX

Modifiers precede nouns; noun phrases precede verbs, but adverbs and subordinate clauses follow them.
There are no adpositions. Instead, constructions not covered by the main cases are handled via a specific noun combination:

• p̓mu-c̓ ƛ̓al-ir
• tent-GEN inside-COM (i.e. with the inside of the tent)
• "in the tent"

Subordinate and coordinate clauses are generally not visibly connected to other clauses, but are merely concatenated. Context and verbal aspect affixes should take care of meaning.

Naksult̓ does not have apostrophes.

NOMINALS

Nouns are primarily subdivided into two classes, animate (na) and inanimate (ni), which restrict the affixes they can take and decide on which affixes adjectives agreeing with them take.
Within the lexicon, nouns are listed as bare stems (i.e. without any affixes), their class and the nominative singular and plural affixes.
If a noun ends in a vowel, an initial vowel of the suffix overwrites it.
Animate adjectives take -a/-ac̓ declension if they end in a consonant, -q/-r declension otherwise. Inanimate adjectives get -u/-us or -ŋ/-us with the same distribution.

There is a total of seven cases in Naksult̓. Of these, merely the Derivative (DER) requires an explanation: it is used instead of the Nominative when the subject is not acting with volition, e.g. in a sentence like "I like you".

Singular inflections:

Plural inflections:

There is one adjective in the text, -ñ-, which behaves quite differently from the others: Instead of preceding the noun like a normal adjective, it is infixed between the noun and its case ending. While this causes a great deal of chaos in the ending system, you happen to have gotten one of the combinations that produce a predictable result, so be happy (I'm also happy because this means I don't need to write out even more tables).

There is a great amount of variety in pronouns, which is completely irrelevant for you. The endings for animate pronouns are -q/-qa.

##VERBS

Verbs inflect for aspect and depending on verb class some other things. While there is a total of 11 aspects, I'm only going to list those that occur in the text, which are Gnomic (factual statements), Momentane (action happening at the temporal deictic center) and Continuous (ongoing action happening at and continuing through the temporal deictic center). For each of these aspects, there are three different suffixes: Ego-Inclusive, Experienced and Non-Firsthand. Ego-Inclusive means that the speaker participate(d/s) in the action; experienced that he or she has first-hand experience with the action.

These suffixes can cause Gradation (+G), which is explained in the section on morphophonological processes.

The parenthesized i only surfaces after fricatives.

The verb classes determine the position and meaning of other affixes:

Only the stem and aspect slots must be filled. The other slots are only filled if there's something fitting to put in, so to speak. The only affix occuring is -a-, which can occupy object and instrument slots and shows agreement with an animate instrument/object. This affix causes a process called dysfix: the last vowel of the previous morpheme is deleted; this happens before any other morphophonological processes can apply.

MORPHOPHONOLOGY

The vowels e and o never surface as such. On the surface, only three vowels, /a i u/ exist. These two underlying vowels assimilate in height to the next vowel - if the next vowel is high, e becomes /i/ and o becomes /u/. Otherwise, they are both realized as /a/.

Some suffixes cause an effect called gradation. This is essentially an underlying element c̓ which merges with the last consonant(s) of the previous morpheme. Here are the rules for gradation that could possibly occur in the text:

• V -> Vc̓
• n -> tn
• q -> q̓