Part 4 · grammar — Chapter 11 · nouns

The words of place

Chapter 13 §5 gives you here and there (ha and ra, standing alone with nai). This section gives you everything between them: the compass, the sides, the sixteen spatial relators, and the reason Phi owns no ruler.

The compass reads the sky

East and west compose from the sun because everyone on Earth agrees where it rises; north and south are their own words because no sun-anchor is hemisphere-neutral. All four are ordinary nouns, value-neutral by design: north is not up, south is not down, and no direction outranks another. They ride inside preposition phrases like any noun:

melu lue nitho shua.
friend ABL north come.
(The friend comes from the north.)

mia wea sorae thorui thalo.
1SG TOWARD sun beginning walk.
(I walk toward the east.)

Whose left

lawe (left) and kuri (right) name sides a body lends to the scene, and the pair is built to be unmistakable in sound. Bare, they are the speaker's sides:

womu mua lawe nai.
home LOC left be.
(The house is on my left.)

A possessor re-anchors them: thia lawe is your left, keruko kuri is keruko's right. There is no absolute left in Phi, so none can be imposed; the hearer always knows whose body orients the scene.

The household of relations

Sixteen prepositions place things relative to other things, and every one works the same way: relator first, then the landmark, the whole phrase standing after the subject. The vertical:

neparu leo toremoa nai.
cloud ABOVE mountain be.
(The cloud is above the mountain.)

shumu nia kerou thuroa.
moss ON stone grow.
(The moss grows on the stone.)

lo shalu phou repha wepu.
PL fish BELOW bridge go.
(The fish pass below the bridge.)

The neighborhood: noe (behind), neo (in front of), sio (beside), thei (between two), thoa (among many), roa (around).

misheko noe tomi nulae.
cat BEHIND pot sleep.
(The cat sleeps behind the pot.)

womu thei wi shiro nai.
home BETWEEN two tree be.
(The house stands between two trees.)

lo lopia roa thero rotiku.
PL child AROUND fire dance.
(The children dance around the fire.)

And passage: muo (into), mue (out of), thue (through), phei (away from), joining the motion three you already know, kau (to, with arrival promised), lue (from), wea (toward, promising nothing).

shalu thue phialu wepu.
fish THROUGH water go.
(The fish goes through the water.)

lohau phei thero thalo.
dog AWAY fire walk.
(The dog walks away from the fire.)

Near, far, and the missing ruler

pai (near) and woe (far) complete the set, and they carry no numbers:

shelira pai silawo nai.
forest NEAR village be.
(The forest is near the village.)

toremoa woe silawo nai.
mountain FAR village be.
(The mountain is far from the village.)

How near is near? Phi will not say, because Phi has no meter, no mile, no kilogram, no liter, and never will. This is the clock refusal from chapter 14 extended to the ruler and the scale, and the reasoning is the same: a unit no body can feel exists so that things can be priced, ranked, and raced. What the language offers instead is honest gauging. masue (measure) means comparing against a shared standard, not counting units:

shia sheo pelio wetha masue.
3SG THAN arm cloth measure.
(They measure the cloth against an arm.)

Where ranking is the honest point, sheo with mo ranks openly:

toremoa sheo shiro mo raelu nai.
mountain THAN tree CMPR tall be.
(The mountain is taller than the tree.)

Journey-scale distance is counted time of travel, one noun phrase describing another:

ruela wi philo thalo nai.
path two day walk be.
(The path is a two-day walk.)

And when you need to talk about a dimension itself, the nouns exist without units: raeli (height), lonai (width), nusho (depth), each with its adjective (raelu tall, losha wide, nulo deep).

A language that will not slice the day into minutes will not slice the road into meters. The arm, the day's walk, and the sky do the measuring, and you are never without them.