V grammar

Due to scouts' lack of complete information on the Nognese lexicon, the article presents some examples using English glosses.

Word order
Nognese is fairly consistently head-initial, and the overall order of a clause is verb-subject-object (VSO). But some auxiliary verbs have what is called "split inflection", which pushes the main verb into the object position resulting in AuxSVO order; the verb and object behave together as a noun clause. English has AuxSVO as well in a few marked cases: questions ("Is anybody reading this?"), negative statements elided from a "there is" statement ("Ain't nobody reading this, OSHA"), and negative statements with "nor" ("nor does anybody care").

Before the verb
A sentence adverb may occupy the position before the verb; this happens especially in wh-questions. Otherwise, a noun phrase may move in front of the verb to mark it as a topic, but it leaves a pronoun behind: "Gus, is he [a] poli."

Noun phrases
Nouns act head-initial as well. As in Spanish, most adjectives follow the noun, except for demonstratives and cardinal numbers. Numbers precede the noun for much the same reason they follow in Japanese, namely that they act as nouns meaning a set of that size, taking the specific noun as a genitive: English "three fingers" becomes something more like "set-of-three [of] fingers". (Semitic languages work similarly: numbers greater than one precede the noun.) Likewise, determiners (articles and demonstratives) are seen as pronouns taking an appositive: "this ball" parses as "this, [a] ball"

Pronouns and cases
Nognese uses personal pronouns declined for case, which Celtic scholars call "conjugated prepositions" for some odd reason.

An means "he" and ana means "she". The third-person singular definite pronouns ending in -na are used with nouns that have feminine gender. The definite article does not inflect for number or gender; it is identical to the third-person masculine singular (-n) pronoun. Place names and family or lineage names take a definite article, but given names take an indefinite one, unlike in Greek, Portuguese, Czech (such as Ivana Trump's "The Donald"), rural Austrian German, rural French, and northern Italian.

A genitive construction where the possessed noun is definite (the noun of noun) is normally indicated by a bound genitive pronoun suffixed to the possessed noun.
 * A possessor that is indefinite or given name does not change the possessor: bobba Mirco "Mirco's ball".
 * A possessor that takes a definite article adds an -n clitic to the possessed noun.
 * A possessor that is a pronoun contracts to a clitic that carries a secondary accent: bobbassi "your ball".

The fe and la prepositions can also indicate possession. Here, fe is used for part-from-whole relationships and la for things being carried or otherwise possessed by location, similarly to alienability or inherency.
 * A preposition may help clarify complicated syntax, such as when a possessor is itself compound (cf. Toki Pona pi)
 * A preposition may help disambiguate multiple meanings analogous to those of English "body" (one's physical form, or a corpse that a forensic pathologist is examining) or "arm" (manipulator appendage, or weapon).
 * Some naming conventions use fen followed by the name of a place or clan, where fen means "from [the]": Mirco fen Gaspar.
 * The circumlocution for indefinite possessed nouns ("some/an X of Y") uses fe followed by the plural of X, literally meaning "one from Xs of Y". Compare the French use of des (lit. "of the") as the plural indefinite article.

Other meanings relate to verbal noun phrases:
 * In an inverted construction commonly seen in verbal noun phrases, fe roughly means "by": verb i patient fe agent.
 * Fen (lit. "from the") and lan (lit. "to the") are also used as conjunctions, meaning "because" and "therefore".

Relative clauses in Nognese often use resumptive pronouns because both the zero and fe relativizers end up meaning English "such that".

The wide use of the ablative fe in Nognese calls to mind the habit of children learning English to use "from" more broadly than standard: for agents (for which "by" is standard), causes ("because"), possession ("of"), and standards of comparison ("than", proving the "different from" prescriptivists right in a way).

Nouns
Nouns of masculine gender end in a consonant or o; feminine ones end in a. Some nouns denoting a part from a whole whose gender may vary, especially body parts, will take the possessor's gender if the possessor is known. Plurals are genderless; most are formed by removing the final vowel (if any) and adding i.

A consonant-final word whose penult syllable is stressed and open is syncopated when made feminine or plural, meaning the vowel is contracted out of the final syllable: -VCVC becomes -VCCa for feminine or -VCCi for plural. If this results in a consonant cluster forbidden by phonotactics, the consonants merge into a geminate, usually with the value of the second consonant in the cluster.

Another plural is formed by removing the vowel and adding ci. In the standard dialect, it's a distributive plural, meaning "each of several". This triggers sandhi effects that are not completely understood.

Verbs
Verbs do not conjugate for number and person, seeing as the subject (which is not a null subject) generally immediately follows the verb as if it's already a suffix.

Past tense, irrealis mood, and progressive aspect are fairly orthogonal. The past tense is expressed by a prefix ia- before the verb. The consonant after verb stem's accented vowel becomes geminate if it is not already a geminate or cluster, and in some verb stems, this vowel becomes o. An initial vowel of the verb stem may be dropped. Single actions in the very recent past are not marked past. In a non-finite verb, ia- may represent having finished something.

An auxiliary verb rai, roughly meaning "will", expresses the future tense or irrealis mood.

Another auxiliary verb inca ( 'nca  after a vowel, or ca when sentence-initial, finite, and present), roughly meaning "keep" or "remain", denotes an ongoing, repeated, or explicitly present action. Inca is not used with state of being verbs, but it itself is used as a generic state of being verb in much the same way as Spanish estar. As with other verbs, the past prefix fuses with each of these: iarai "would (have)", and ianca "(had) kept".

Like several other languages, it uses an existential possession clause where English uses "X has Y", of the form (in)ca Y la X, literally "Y remains to X". But because complements in being clauses are also in the dative (la), such a form can also mean "Y is X". Context, particularly which nouns are definite, distinguishes this these two.

These auxiliary verbs pull the subject in front of the verb: rai la(n) i or inca la(n) i. The n of lan in this position is dropped when the verb starts with a consonant cluster or when the action was not mentioned before. Commands thus begin rai si la(n), which is often abbreviated in speech to la(n) alone due to conversational deletion when not in rai si lan! "do it!".

This structure ultimately arises from the gerund or infinitive being largely a null morpheme, signified by a verb lacking a subject. Any sentence beginning with a verb can be used as a noun phrase meaning the V-ing by S of O. In fact, verbal noun marking could almost be seen as a disfix when the verb's final vowel is contracted out between a subjectless verb and the i of its direct object.

Verbs are negated with the suffix -nai. A final diphthong may be simplified: rai "will" to ranai "won't". Though VSO typology would predict a prefix like the Semitic lâ, the use of a suffix is likely the result of a Jespersen cycle.

Dialects
One dialect habitually silences unstressed i, and all its plurals use the ci paradigm without dropping the preceding vowel.