Lajyma is the language spoken on Budria believed to have been given to its inhabitants from the gods. There are three main dialects of this language, which are very different from one another and are considered different languages altogether. The version here is the common tongue spoken by most of the more humanoid races of Budria. Before continuing please familiarize yourself with the Pronunciation Guide.

Primary Concepts

• Each character has a meaning: Each word is made up of one or more characters which can have one or more meanings. The words will usually be made up of characters that reinforce the meaning of the word.
• Nominals: A nominal is a special type of noun that has an action use and/or can be used to describe something else. For example the word taga is a nominal that means anger or rage. It can be used as an action "to anger someone" or to describe someone as being "angry".
• No verbs!: In Lajyma, verbs are handled by their respective nominal using VTI's (verb tense identifiers) by putting a verb tense in front of the nominal. For example uda taga would be used to anger someone in the present tense.
• No adjectives?!: Like verbs, adjectives don't exist in Lajyma; at least not directly. Instead, a nominal is used and placed after the noun to describe it. For example the word for dragon (yfelo) could be described as angry with the phrase yfelo taga.
• No conjugation or Subject-Verb agreement: In Lajyma we don't conjugate our actions, and we don't need to agree with our subjects. This makes Lajyma very easy to learn due to the lack of word forms and redundant words.
• Alternate stressed syllables: In Lajyma the stress naturally falls on the next to last syllable of each word and continues through the word, alternating every other syllable. For instance if a word has 4 syllables it would have 2 stresses: the first and 3rd syllable; while a 3 syllable word would stress only the 2nd.

Basic Sentence Format
A basic sentence is constructed in the STAO* (or Subject-Tense-Action-Object) format. In the example: "Lana read a book", "Lana" is the subject, "read" is the action and "a book" is the object. In Lajyma the word order would be the same except for the past tense identifier (uma) would be used in conjunction with the action. Other sentence formats are possible as well, but for this lesson we will concentrate on this basic form. In Lesson 2 we will explore this further.

* - experienced linguists will note that this is equivalent to SVO word order

Basic Question Format
A basic question is formatted as STAOI* (Subject-Tense-Action-Object-Interrogative). A sample question in English might be "Did Lana read a book?", while in Lajyma the word order would be "Lana read a book, right?".

* - as with STAO, STAOI is equivalent to SVO word order

Simple Conversation
I'll give you a basic conversation in english then the Lajyma version of that.
Lana - Hi. What is your name?
Kara - My name is Kara.
Lana - Thank you.
Kara - You're welcome. Bye.

Very simple, although maybe unrealistically abrupt, nevertheless, here is the Lajyma version:
Lana - suro : ro qai game
Kara - y qai uda re Kara
Lana - turasa
Kara - ybo : giru

In this example we can see that colons (":") are used as punctuation to denote separate thoughts. We don't need any punctuation to end a thought, however. In the first line "suro : ro qai game" we see our first vocabulary. Note that the word "ro" is the pronoun for "you" but is also used possessively as "your". Lajyma does not have separate possessive pronouns (although later we will learn about a way to explicitly state when something is being used as a possessive). Now, we'll break these words down with the Lajyma function and meaning:
suro interjection - common greeting "hope you are well"
ro pronoun - you/your
qai nominal - name/label
game interrogative - what/which

Next is Kara's response "y qai uda re". The word "y" is a pronoun for I/my. The word "uda" here is used as a verb tense identifier showing that the nominal "re" (being) is being used as an action in the simple present tense. Each complete thought will have at least one tense identifier to show the tense of the sentence but also to clarify which noun/nominal is the subject and which is the action (Subject-Tense-Action).
y pronoun - I/my
qai nominal - name/label
uda verb tense - simple present
re noun - being

Then Lana returns with a simple thank you:
turasa interjection - thank you

To finish up this short conversation Kara closes with a simple "you're welcome" and bids farewell:
ybo interjection - you're welcome
giru interjection - good bye

One thing you might notice is that in the question "what is your name?" we didn't use an action and literaly the sentence read out "your name what" but in the response we included "uda re" to say "my name IS". Whenever a verb is ommitted in a conversational setting, it is implied that "uda re" is the action. We used both versions here to show both ways. You can say "ro qai uda re game" for what is your name, and it is more formal to do so. In a conversational setting, however, it is ok to use the implied action. Note: we could have also said "y qai Kara" for "my name is Kara".