Muai - Personal Pronouns

Me, Myself and A.

The basic Muai personal pronouns are the following:

kioi : 1st. person - I, we
tiei : 2nd. person - you
liai : 3rd. person - it, he, she, they, the (the definite article)
siai : 4rd. person - one, a (the indefinite article)

All those pronouns work like "you" in English: they can be singular or plural. If you really need to specify, you can use the specifiers koi and fai :

kioi-koi : I, me
tiei-koi : you (singular)
liai-koi : he, him, she, her, it
siai-koi : one

kioi-fai : we, us
tiei-fai : you (plural)
liai-fai : they, them
siai-fai : people (plural of "one")

Those specifiers should be used only when absolutely necessary. Context is usually sufficient to decide if kioi means "I" or "we". Note how beautiful is the following below:

.kioi mieko tiei.
I love you.

The use of kioi-koi instead of bare kioiwould sound somewhat like "I myself".

.kioi-koi mieko tiei.

I myself love you.
Me, I love you.
It's me who loves you.

Possessives, demonstratives and space-time adverbs are usually related to personal pronouns as well. For instance, "my" means "belonging or related to me", "here" means "near to me", "this" means "the thing near to me" and "now" means "my time". In Muai, when no further specification is needed, the same word can be used to all those concepts related to each personal pronoun; you need just change -i to -u :

kiou : my, our, this, here, now
tieu : your, that, there, then (in your time)
liau : its, his, her, out there, then
luau : one's, people's, in a place, once upon a time

For instance:

.tiei mieko liau puomi.

You like its fruit.
or
You like his fruit.
or
You like her fruit.

Later, we'll be able to specify "its", "his" or "her" (although that's frequently not necessary), or even things like "the last subject", "the last object", "the following thing", etc.

The specifiers koi and fai also work for relational pronouns:

kiou-koi : my (with other pronouns and adverbs related to the 1st person singula)
kiou-fai : our (with other pronouns and adverbs related to the 1st person plural)

An example...

.kioi-fai kuomo kiou-fai puomi.
We eat our fruit.

If you like, you can even "conjugate" the verb with the very same specifier fai (although it's completely redundant):

.kioi-fai kuomo-fai kiou-fai puomi.
We eat our fruit.

The noun puomi itself is not necessary singular or plural, and that's fine in Muai, but if that's not fine to you, you can fix that two:

.kioi-fai kuomo-fai kiou-fai puomi-koi.
We eat our (one) fruit.

.kioi-fai kuomo-fai kiou-fai puomi-fai.
We eat our fruits.

Some poetry is already possible:

.kioi mieko tiei .kiou mieku .kiou mieki

I love you
My love
My lover

You probably noted the similarity between mieko, mieku and mieki. This system is explained in the section Nouns and Verbs.

Back to Muai Home Page