As a Oligosynthetic Language, Verbum uses a set of modifying morphemes to create concepts, meanings, and words. Its collection of morphemes is less than 100 allowing it to fall into the category of a Oligosynthetic and the number of root words in the language is also quite small. But, unlike Toki Pona, Verbum tries to create a language that can be used for the full breadth of communications including complex subjects such as mathematics and other scientific subjects. Will Verbum succeed at this? That is still to be seen.
Verbum’s primary goal is to provide a language that is designed in a technical, strategic way such that people can learn the language fairly easily, but more importantly, understand general topics and concepts of conversation without actually knowing the full meaning of every word in the language. The intent is that someone learning Verbum can still understand the basics of what is being said as they learn more. This makes learning the rules of the language and morpheme catalog important to the basics of Verbum understanding. For example, Verbum has what is known as Primary Verbs with each corresponding to English equivalents such that knowing only the first letter of the Verb tells you what corresponding English verb group it belongs to. In this way any Verb can be equated to the group and a reading of the Verbum sentence can result in a basic understanding of what is being said. So, a learner may not know the verb to Walk (gil). But they do know that the leading “g’ in the verb means its in the to Go family. So gil has something to do with going, moving, travelling, … walking. Now as the Learner starts to understand the morpheme catalog, it becomes fairly easy to determine the intent of a sentence without knowing what the actual verb is. Also, since the language is Verb-centric, most Nouns are also derived from verbs. So understanding the morphology will again help the learner derive what are the noun and subjects. Hopeful this guide will help you develop a general conceptual understanding of the language allowing you to engage in the conversation of Verbum.