Blog Post · A clarification and a minor change and a major change
A clarification and a minor change and a major change ^
Posted On Wednesday 8 June 2011 by Murray Colpman (Muzer)
A clarification about modals: The one way in which they do not act like adverbs is that they can only be applied to things that act as verbs - so, verbs, prepositions and conjuctions.
And a minor change - because of this distinction, we've decided to make modals use a different postfix to adverbs to more easily distinguish them. So, the new modal postfix is -amo, rather than -ah.
And a major change - they can no longer be used as nouns, eg in an "as" clause, so this is no longer valid:
*peveas ceveand musisen carun eataht setuh ei
Instead you must say:
ceveand musisenamo eataht setuh ei carunamo eataht setuh ei
This is because "-ah" for a verb is just the short form of an "as" construct, and "-ah" for a noun or another "-ah" word is just the short for of an "iq" construct. "-amo" isn't short for any construct, we've decided, and wouldn't make much sense to lump it with adverbs.