Animacy

Toaq has a system of grammatical animacy.

Any noun phrase belongs to one of nine classes, each with its own word for “he/she/they/it” that refers back to the most recent noun phrase belonging to that class. (This system of anaphoric pronouns is the only place in Toaq where this animacy distinction comes up, so the classes are known varyingly as animacy classes, anaphora classes, or pronominal classes.)

Grammatical, rather than natural animacy

Toaq's animacy being "grammatical" means that it is a property of expressions, not of their referents.

If you know some Spanish, it's like "grammatical gender" in that language. La persona is feminine, even if the person you're talking about isn't necessarily female.

Toaq's pronouns work the same way: if you describe a person as sa sảo (“someone big”), the appropriate pronoun to refer to them later in the sentence is tá (“it_adj.”), because sảo is an adjective. It's not correct to use hó, because that's the pronoun for animate verbs, not animate referents.

Table of classes

Toaq animacy classes

Nr.	Class	Pronoun	Example	Meaning
Verb classes
I	Animate verbs	hó	sa pỏq	a person
II	Inanimate verbs	máq	sa jỉo	a building
III	Abstract verbs	hóq	sa sỉo	an idea
IV	Adjective verbs	tá	sa dẻ	something pretty
Syntactic classes
V	clauses	róu	dûa jí sıa rảı	that I know nothing
VI	lu phrases	kúy	lú tảo jí hóa	what I do
VII	po phrases	zé	pó sa gỉ	a good one's
Odd-one-out classes
VIII	Personal pronouns	fúy	nháo	they
IX	Demonstratives	bóu	ní	this
0	Just raı	ráı	sa rảı	something

Note the following distinction:

• Classes I through IV apply depending on the "main" verb animacy class of a determiner phrase (animate, inanimate, abstract, or unspecified).
• Classes V through VII apply when the expression has a certain grammatical form.
• Classes VIII, IX, and 0 apply to specific closed sets of verbs.

Verb animacy classes

Class I – ho

For living beings and their actions.

🧒	🐕	🏊	🗣️
deo	kune	lıaı	kuq
child	dog	swims	says

Class II – maq

For inanimate tangible things.

🥝	⛰️	📦	🔥
zeo	meı	tıaı	loe
fruit	mountain	box	flame

Class III – hoq

For abstract (intangible) concepts.

🌃	🔠	☯️	🚭
nuaq	laı	chuaq	juao
night	letter	ideology	rule

Class IV – ta

For words that could apply to many things.

💨	✨	☕	🌈
suaı	de	loq	reo
fast	beautiful	warm	colorful

Lynn’s animacy poster,
outlining the main verb animacy classes.
See image version.

Every Toaq verb belongs to some verb animacy class:

• If the verb necessarily implies animacy/sentience of its subject, it's in class I (hó).

  Examples: poq, naq, kato, che, be, deo, mıe, koı, moı, tao, fıeq, jaı…

• If the verb describes some other tangible object, it's in class II (máq).

  Examples: cea, kıoq, haq, toq, nao, hoe…

• If the verb describe an abstract concept or idea, it's in class III (hóq).

  Examples: noı, daq, dao, sıo, muı, zu…

• Other verbs are in class IV (tá).

  Examples: doq, nuı, juı, lıo, muo, raq, daı, de…

Class 0 consists of just the verb raı. This is so that we can use raı as a dummy verb whose only role is to bind ráı for later use, e.g.,

Sa rảı bı, dủa jí bû bỏ jí ráı da.

There are some things I know I don’t own.

Which is the "main" class?

How do we determine the animacy class of a DP like sa dẻ pỏq — a serial of a class-IV and a class-I word?

An unofficially proposed rule seems to boil down to: "use the first non-class-IV word's class, if possible; otherwise use class IV".

References