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Vittorio vb Bertola
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Piemonteis: Basic syntax

The grammar, the morphology and the syntax of the Piemonteis language are not very different from the languages most similar to it, Italian and French; words have a gender, either male or female, and a number, either singular or plural, but no cases; verbs are conjugated; etc. In any case, for all the details you would better browse the website linked at the end of the guide, which has a full and traditional description of the grammar. Here, I would just like to hint at some peculiarities that are usually difficult to non native speakers.

The first regards articles and prepositions, and their composed forms: Piemonteis has several forms that mostly differ just for the writing. Let's start from articles: the male singular article ("the" for male singular words) is usually ël, but it becomes if the following word starts with a double consonant or with s plus a diphthong, and l' if the following word starts with a vowel. Moreover, the form ël can be shortened in 'l if the previous word ends with a vowel. The female singular article is simpler; it is la, becoming l' if the following word starts with a vowel. The plurals follow the same scheme, becoming ij, , j' and 'j for the male gender, and le or j' for the female.

Other particles follow the same scheme, such as the undetermined male article un ("a"/"an") (it becomes , n', 'n) and its female una (n'); the preposition ëd ("of") (, d', 'd); or the reflessive pronoun ës ("self") (, s', 's). Moreover, some prepositions - the aforementioned ëd, and su ("on") - form articled prepositions along the same scheme (dël, dlë and dl' for the male singular, dla and dl' for the female singular and so on).

Other more interesting peculiarities are related to the use of the language; for example, people from Turin, in whatever language they speak, will tend not to use the remote past tense of the verb ("I did") but rather the past present ("I have done"), because in Piemonteis the remote past is disused since centuries ago.

Always about verbs, the verb esse ("to be") has an interesting third person singular conjugation, the famous a l'é, where that l' has no actual meaning and is fully part of the conjugation, with a euphonic function. The same particle appears in front of all the third person singular forms starting with vowel (a l'era, a l'era stait), while other forms use j' (i j'era... fino a a j'ero alla terza plurale). In the verb avej ("to have"), the euphonic particle is always l' and is present everywhere, including in forms starting with h: the present tense thus is i l'hai, it l'has, a l'ha, i l'oma, i l'eve, a l'han. There is no euphonic particle in other verbs, except in the forms of "to be" or "to have" used as auxiliaries.

Another interesting note is that Piemonteis does not have absolute superlatives (as per the typical Piemonteis saying esageroma nen!, "let's not exaggerate!"); you rather use adverbs such as bin ("very") or pròpi ("really") (A l'é bin fòl!) or metaphorical comparisons such as brut coma la neuit ("ugly as the night").

And then, there is the most famous peculiarity of all: the scary verbal pronoun!

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