Many languages require mandatory marking of gender and number on most nominals and even require adjectives and verbs to agree with nominals on one or both of these aspects. The Novvocu approach is not to require mandatory marking on the nominal itself, but to rely on a limited semantic context to indicate number and gender.
Gender
Novvocu nouns and pronouns do not have grammatical gender, but logical gender is specified by using the free morphemes mas ("male") and ses ("female"). For instance, un hisan /shee-SAHN/ is "a horse", un mashisan /mas-shee-SAHN/ is "a stallion", and un seshisan /sehs-shee-SAHN/ is "a mare". The gender words may also be treated as adjectives: e.g., un seshisan and un sesa hisan are both acceptable and equivalent for purposes of translation. This is one of the rare cases where a compound is not idiomatic.
If a noun phrase does not semantically indicate the gender using either an adjective or the mas or ses prefix, it is assumed to be of unknown and unmarked gender.
Number
Novvocu nouns do not have any obligatory marking for number, which is usually clear from context:
van ge citab, "one book"
duos ge citab, "two books"
san ge citab, "three books"
For instance, in English, "two book" is understandable if ungrammatical. More examples:
suma citab, "all the books"
fena citab, "some of the books"
The suffix -men can be appended to indicate indefinite plurality:
citabmen, "books"
When used as an adjective, the meaning is considered emphatic:
mena citab, "two or more books"
If a noun phrase does not semantically indicate the number using either a ge particle phrase, an adjective or the -men suffix, it is assumed to be singular. You should always use as much precision in number as possible when writing Novvocu texts intended for machine translation, to ensure accuracy of translation into languages that mark plurality.
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