High Eolic word of the day: taya

taya (quantifier): nobody, no thing, nothing.

ta ca ngúrnucám máru-taya-l
NEG I see.POT.TRANS it.GEN-nothing-ACC
“I could not see anything”

taya belongs to the class of ‘numeral-like quantifiers’, which exhibit syntactic behavior identical to that of proper cardinal numerals (such as mbár ‘one’); that is, it acts as a modifier within a noun word by following an undefined nominal in the genitive, as in the example above. Moreover, it requires double negation: any clause it occurs in must be negated with the clause-level negative particle ta.

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