Kiribati

Grammar

The grammar lessons on this link are generally correct, but some clarification will be provided in this section. https://www.trussel.com/kir/gram00.htm Sentence Structure Basic Word Order Kiribati sentence structure loosely follows the rule of Subject-Verb-Object. This is the same rough sentence structure as English. Kiribati sentence structure, however, adds another, sometimes optional, subject at the end of the sentence. Therefore making the sentence structure Subject-Verb-Object-Subject. For example, if one were to state “Maria drinks water” in English, the Kiribati sentence structure would look like “She drinks water Maria”. In cases in which the subject is known due to context, the second mention of the subject is not necessary. It should be noted that a pronoun must always be present in the basic Kiribati sentence structure. As with the case of Maria, one could say “She drinks water” but could not say “Maria drinks water” because of the excluded pronoun in the latter sentence. In some cases, the specific subject name can come before the pronoun, which would look like “Maria she drinks water”. Adjectives When attaching an adjective to a noun, plural or singular, the noun must be followed by a pronoun that indicates that the adjective is describing the noun. This pronoun could be translated into English loosely as “which is/are”. For example, the phrase “The big house” in English would be said as “the house which is big” in the Kiribati sentence structure. The phrase “which is” would be replaced by the determinant pronoun in the previous example. When making a descriptive statement about a noun, a different method is used. In this case, the adjective immediately succeeds the pronoun. For example the statement “the house is big” in English would look like “It big the house” or “the house it big” in Kiribati. Descriptive Nouns When a noun is used to describe another, the same pronoun used to describe adjectives is not required. When describing a proper noun with…