Enclitic


These are "attached" to and placed after another word. Hence, these are not used at the beginning of a sentence. For example, genitive pronouns in Philippine languages are enclitics because we cannot just put those "farther away" from the verb/noun they follow. On the other hand, enclitic nominative personal pronouns are usually shorter than their "free" counterpart.

For a more concrete example: "Binilí ko ang... ." in Tagalog means "I bought the... ." The word "binilí" corresponds to "bought" and "ko" is a personal pronoun in genitive meaning "by me". The word "ko" being enclitic means that "Binilí ang... ko." is ungrammatical.

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