Grammar

The grammar of Nika is designed to be as simple as possible so that you can focus on learning new words to speak and write, instead of trying to memorize tens (or even hundreds) of rules and even more exceptions to them. The main idea behind the language is using only what is really needed to build its grammar, and nothing more. For instance, Nika has only two categories of words: nouns and verbs, and everything else is derived. Even when it comes to nouns and verbs, only the nouns belong to an open category, which means that there is a fixed set of verbs in Nika and new ones are created by using verbal nouns.

Writing System

Nika is written using Hangeul, an alphabet which uses 19 simple alphabetical symbols to write 90 syllable block characters representing all possible syllables that can be pronounced in Nika (whereas English has tens of thousands possible syllables). Using simple rules, these symbols are combined into syllable blocks that are written vertically in columns. You start from the top character in the rightmost column, read other syllable characters from top to bottom, and then you move left to the next column. To keep things simple, there are: no distinction between small and capital letters and punctuation is simplified (you drop full stops at the end of a paragraph, for instance).

As for pronunciation, Nika uses only open syllables with no consonant clusters at the beginning of syllables, which makes it very easy to pronounce for all. There are 5 vowels, 4 combinations of a vowel and semivowels y or w, and 13 consonants, which all together make the total number of 90 syllables that can be pronounced.

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Particles

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Word Classes

At the very top level, Nika classifies words into content words (or, simply, words) and functional words (called particles) that play grammatical roles. Words are further divided into verbs and nouns. Verbs in turn can be either stative verbs or action verbs. These can be compared to the adjectives and verbs of the English language, respectively. As for nouns, they can either be simple nouns or verbal nouns.

Syntax

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The work is in progress—the Creator needs to think over the Master Plan of the language very carefully— that’s why you can expect updates to take place soon but nobody knows when exactly.