Description:

The verb 'an' is the copular verb in Common and is used to form copular expressions and existential clauses. Its base meaning is to be or to exist, or sometimes to have. As a copula, it forms both noun-is-adjective and noun-is-noun type phrases. It is an intransitive verb, meaning that it has one absolutive subject. As a copula, it works on a topic-comment model, where the absolutive subject is the topic and the adjective or noun being connected to it is a comment or new information about it. The comment is connected periphrastically.

Verb:

• Paradigm Verb: pali (intransitive)
• Determiner: se

The main use of 'an' is as a verb. Examples:

Existential Clauses:

An existential clause is an expression like "there is" in English or "il y a" in French that asserts or points out the existence of something. To use an in this way, simply state the absolutive subject. For example:

Y uzre costo se an.
A(ABS) green house stand(NP-IMP) be

"There is a green house"

Copula (Noun-is-Adjective):

To introduce an adjective as new information about a noun, treat it as an adverbial modifier to the verb an. An has the special property that adverbs applied to it are igenerally interpreted as adjectives being introduced to describe the subject. For example:

A costo se an uzre.
The(ABS) house stand(NP-IMP) be green

"The house is green"

This type of usage can also be used with prepositional phrases that describe things like the location or direction of motion of the subject, as Common considers all such words to be modifiers, and aside from their placement being forbidden between the auxiliary and the head term, they act the same as plain adjectives like uzre. Note that the sentence could just as easily have been 'Uzre a costo se an' or 'A costo se uzre an'.

Copula (Noun-is-Noun):

To introduce a noun phrase as new information about a noun, do so periphrasitcally using the null preposition ∅ with the noun being introduced as a comment on the topic/subject being placed in the moninative case as the object of the null preposition. For example:

We se an na Toni
I(ABS) stand(NP-IMP) be the(NOM) Tony

'I am Tony'

'Toni' in this expression is a personal name, derived from Tony in Enlgish. This expression is one of the ways one can say 'My name is Tony'. (The more usual way to introduce yourself would be 'we se Toni' (using the personal name as a verb meaning 'to be named X') or even just 'wen Toni', but in this case Tony may already be a topic of conversation and the speaker is saying something like 'you may not know it, but I am the Tony of which you speak' rather than as a straight introduction.)

Noun:

'An' is never used directly as a noun in idiomatic Common. The derived form 'anka' has a sense like 'being' or 'entity', as in an entity like a human being, and the derived form 'eán' has a sense like 'existence in herbal'. It is thought to be intended to be related to the dummy head term 'yn', where 'yn' was the abstract and 'an' was the concrete.