- two, piççe - brother, sakkăr - eight, appa - sister. Grammar As characteristic of all Turkic languages, Chuvash is an agglutinative language and as such, has an abundance of suffixes but no native prefixes or prepositions, apart from the partly reduplicative intensive prefix, such as in: - white, - snow-white, - black, - jet black, - flat, - absolutely flat, - full, - chock full (compare to Turkish - white, snow-white, - black, - jet black, - flat, - absolutely flat, - full, - chock full). One word can have many suffixes, which can also be used to create new words like creating a verb from a noun or a noun from a verbal root. See Vocabulary below. It can also indicate the grammatical function of the word. Nominals Nouns Chuvash nouns decline in number and case and also take suffixes indicating the person of a possessor. The suffixes are placed in the order possession - number - case. There are six noun cases in the Chuvash declension system: In the suffixes where the first consonant varies between р- and т-, the allomorphs beginning in т- are used after stems ending in the dental sonorants -р, -л and -н. The allomorphs beginning in р- occur under all other circumstances. The dative-accusative allomorph beginning in н- is mostly used after stems ending in vowels, except in -и, -у, and -ӑ/-ӗ, whereas the one consisting only of a vowel is used after stems ending in consonants. The nominative is used instead of the dative-accusative to express indefinite or general objects, e.g. утӑ типӗт 'to dry hay'. It can also be used instead of the genitive to express a possessor, so that the combination gets a generalised compound-like meaning (лаша пӳҫӗ 'a horse head' vs лашан пӳҫӗ 'the horse's head'); with both nominative and genitive, however, the possessed noun has a possessive suffix (see below). In the genitive and dative-accusative cases, some nouns ending in -у and -ӳ were changed to -ӑв and -ӗв (ҫыру → ҫырӑван, ҫырӑва, but ҫырура; пӳ → пӗвен, пӗве, but пӳре). In nouns ending in -ӑ, the last vowel simply deletes and may cause the last consonant to geminate (пулӑ 'fish' > пуллан). Nouns ending in consonants sometimes also geminate the last letter (ҫын 'man' → ҫыннан). There are also some rarer cases, such as: Terminative–antessive (to), formed by adding -(ч)чен relic of distributive, formed by adding