Wiktionary:About Tokelauan

Main category: Tokelauan language

This page deals with the specific issues of Tokelauan entries on Wiktionary.

Orthography

Tokelauan has five vowels and ten consonants:

a	e	i	o	u	f	g	k	l	m	n	p	h	t	v
/a/	/e/	/i/	/o/	/u/	/f/	/ŋ/	/k/	/l/	/m/	/n/	/p/	/h/	/t/	/v/

Long vowels are signified by a macron: ā, ē, ī, ō, ū.

Some texts published in Tokelau may use long vowels without a macron. These spellings are not represented in Wiktionary, since they are predictable.

Phonology

Tokelauan orthography is phonemic, so the pronunciation is highly predictable. The word stress almost always occurs on the second-to-last syllable if no long vowels are present, and on the long vowel if one is present. The template {{tkl-IPA}} should be used to generate Tokelauan IPA transcriptions in entries.

Parts of speech

Most of Tokelauan's lemmas can be placed into one of two parts of speech: nouns and verbs.

Verbs

There are three types of verbs:

• Transitive (which take a direct object)
• Intransitive (which don't take a direct object)
• Stative (which describe a state of the subject)

Stative verbs may also be called adjectives or even numerals, but they shouldn't be categorised as such. For example, the definition of the verb tahi (“one”) should read the following:

===Verb===
{{head|tkl|verb|cat2=cardinal numbers}}

# {{lb|tkl|stative}} to be [[one]]

Intransitive and stative verbs may have a plural. This should be given in the header template. For example, the definition of the verb lele (“to fly”) should read the following:

===Verb===
{{head|tkl|verb|plural|felelei}}

# {{lb|tkl|intransitive}} to [[fly]]

The plurals should be given a non-lemma entry:

===Verb===
{{head|tkl|verb form}}

# {{plural of|tkl|lele}}

Others

Other parts of speech include:

• adjectives: a very small group of lemmas, only including modifiers that occur before a noun: e.g. mātuā.
• adverbs: a very small group of lemmas that modify verbs
• articles: these include only the personal, definite and indefinite articles (see {{tkl-articles}}).
• conjunctions: these join multiple sentences together.
• determiners: these are often also called "articles" and include all other modifiers, such as the demonstrative determiners and words like hetahi (“another”).
• interjections: these express emotions, sounds or exclamations.
• particles: these have various functions, often impossible to define with glosses; these also include postmodifiers, like lele.
• prepositions: these modify the following noun or pronoun in respect to among others location and time.
• pronouns: these refer to nouns, taking their place in a sentence.

References

A major reference is {{R:tkl:TD}}: the Tokelau Dictionary. It includes a grammar introduction and both a Tokelauan-English and English-Tokelauan dictionary.