Workbook
Nouns and classifiers in Phi
A practice companion to the manual
A friend at your table asks for the book. The table holds two. English solves this morning with a pointed finger or a longer sentence; Phi solves it with the phrase itself, one word at a time: shelu, a book; serao shelu, the old one; mia serao shelu, the old one that is mine; mia ha serao shelu, this old book of mine, and now exactly one book on the table answers to the words. Everything in a Phi noun phrase stands before its noun, and every added word narrows the field, so building a reference is the same act as finding the thing.
Manual chapter 11 owns the doctrine; this pamphlet is the practice ground. The skills are assembly and honesty: putting each word in its one position, and choosing the quantity claim you can actually stand behind, from a bare noun that trusts the context to an exact count you tallied yourself.
By the end of this pamphlet, you will be able to:
- Use a bare noun confidently and hear what the context is carrying for it
- Mark an unquantified plural with
loand keep every phrase to one quantity marker - Choose among exact, approximate, and quantified counts by the claim each one makes
- Place a classifier after the complete number expression, as an option the phrase never requires
- Stack descriptors in the order that groups them, and let any adjective stand as its quality noun
- Read a noun before a noun as owner, source, kind, or association
- Say having with
phelu, and build the full phrase in canonical order
This pamphlet assumes the sentence patterns in manual chapter 10. Chapter 11 is its home ground; the numeral system and the four classifiers' full choosing drills live in the counting pamphlet, ha and ra have their own part in the pronouns pamphlet, and the Slot 2 particles that ride inside phrases belong to the three-slots pamphlet.
Narrow it word by word, until one thing stands where many stood.