The grammar of the Manx language has much in common with related Indo-European languages, such as nouns that display gender, number and case and verbs that take endings or employ auxiliaries to show tense, person or number.
These include initial consonant mutation, inflected prepositions and verb–subject–object word order.
Some mostly monosyllabic nouns pluralise by means of internal vowel change, such as mac "son" to mec, kayt "cat" to kiyt and dooiney "man" to deiney.
Manx also has a handful of irregularly formed plurals, including ben "woman" to mraane, keyrey "sheep" to kirree and slieau "mountain" to sleityn.
Historical genitive singulars often survive in compounds and fixed expressions although no longer productive, such as thie-ollee "cowhouse" using the old genitive of ollagh "cattle" or mullagh y ching "the crown", literally "the top of the head", employing lenited king "of a head" (nominative: kione).
[3] Certain adjectives may be made plural by the addition of -ey to the singular form (ben veg "little woman", mraane veggey "little women").
In earlier versions of the language, these were used attributively, but are rarely employed in modern Manx.
As in Irish and Scottish Gaelic, the comparative-superlative is commonly marked by the copula verb s in the present and by in the past.
The superlative is often shown by the word nys, from Middle Irish ní as "thing that is" (cf.
Only the future, conditional, preterite and imperative can be formed directly by inflecting the main verb, but even in these tenses, the periphrastic formation is more common in Late Spoken Manx.
The future and conditional tenses (and in some irregular verbs, the preterite) make a distinction between "independent" and "dependent" forms.
There are a few peculiarities when a verb begins with a vowel, i.e. the addition of d' in the preterite and n' in the future and conditional dependent.
The prepositional phrase for "home(wards)" is formed with dy "to" and the noun balley "place, town, homestead" to give dy valley, while the noun thie "house, home" can be used unchanged as an adverb to convey the same meaning.
[3] In common with its Goidelic sister languages, Manx has a number of adverbs corresponding to English "up" and "down", the meaning of which depend upon such things as motion or lack thereof and starting point in relation to the speaker.
Examples of practical usage are Ta dooinney heese y traid "There's a man down the street" and Ta mee goll sheese y traid "I'm going down the street", Jean drappal neese "Climb up (towards me)" and Jean drappal seose "Climb up (away from me)".
[3] In common with Irish and Scottish Gaelic, in addition to its regular personal pronouns, Manx has also a series used for emphasis.
Subordinating conjunctions include choud('s) "while", derrey "until", dy "that; so that", er-y-fa "because", ga dy/nagh "although (affirmative/negative)" and tra "when".
Some speakers use a more modern decimal version of some numbers, in a similar way to Irish and Scottish Gaelic, for example, to simplify the teaching of arithmetic.