
Necthiøth - free word order, no real case marking. In most cases, the animacy hierarchy tells you who's doing what to whom.
1) Simple enough.
Snau tuazaranoph.
[ snaw twáʃaʁanopʰ ]
nsau tuazar-no-ph
male eat-3SG-GOOD
The man eats.
2) Two options here, depending on whether the woman's being seen by multiple people or just one person. Necthiøth doesn't have a proper passive, the agent of the sentence still hangs around in the person-marking on the verb.
Phia nømán.
[ pʰjá nømán ]
phia nø-má-n
woman see-3PL-BAD
The woman is seen by them.
In this example, the person-marking is assumed to refer to a dropped pronoun, which would have higher animacy than the woman. So it's clear that the woman is the patient of this sentence.
Phiatua nølın.
[ pʰjátwa nǿlɨn ]
phia-tua nø-no-n
woman-INV see-3SG-BAD
The woman is seen by him/her.
In this example, without the inverse marker, it would be assumed that the person-marking refers to the woman herself - "the woman sees". So an inverse marker is tagged onto the noun to make it clear that the woman's the patient, not the agent.
(In theory, you could just resurrect the dropped pronoun -
Phia nølın fa.
[ pʰja nǿlɨn fa ]
phia nø-no-n fa
woman see-3SG-BAD 3SG
?The woman is seen by him/her
- and make it perfectly clear that the person-marking refers to the higher-animacy pronoun. But to a native Necthiøth speaker, this would come across as quite a clunky way of phrasing things.)
3) This one's nice and simple - men are higher animacy than food.
Snau tuazaranoph flʉnau.
[ snaw twáʃaʁanopʰ flýnaw ]
nsau tuazar-no-ph flʉnau
male eat-3SG-GOOD food
The man eats the food.
4) The swapped word order brings the food forward to be the topic of the sentence, but doesn't affect the underlying animacy structure.
Flʉnau nølın phia.
[ flýnáw nǿlɨn pʰja ]
flʉnau nø-no-n phia
food see-3SG-BAD woman
The food is seen by the woman.