Pablang

Here we are: Adjectives. This one's quite simple. No funky conjugations or declensions. The only part we have to worry about in Adjective-Noun Agreement. In some language, adjectives have to agree with the nouns they modify. This can be agreement of number, case, or class. And these don't have to be so clear cut: take German articles for example. While not adjectives, it serves as a great example of how natural languages are messy. Just like these articles, are adjectives don't have to have a clean, easy agreement pattern. Well, technically, you don't need to have them agree at all, but for the sake of learning I want to. If you remember back to Pablang's nouns, it doesn't have any noun classes to worry about. My chart can be seen here. Wow, quick and easy! See you next time!

Let's start making sentences! I'm going to use words and forms I have already made, of course, just focusing on the words, their order, and how they interact. The first decision is the order of the subject, object, and verb of the sentence. Here are the frequency of each order in natural languages, taken from Wikipedia : Here, I notice a few things. First of all, having the subject before the object is always more common. The subject being first in the sentence for that matter is by far the most common. Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the ancestor of all European and Indian languages (duh) is SOV! No wonder so many languages are like that. Languages aren't locked into one or another. English is pretty obviously SVO, but we switch to VSO when asking questions. Think "Where am I, at school?" versus "I am at school." Other than that, English doesn't change much because the word order encodes meaning. In the sentence "The cat caught the mouse,...

After a stress-riddled hiatus because of college applications, I am back to talk about verbs! Verbs get really, really  messy, and I don't like that, but here we are. I'll try to make it easy, but if you dive in yourself you'll get to see a lot of cool but complicated linguistic features. Here I will walk about tense, aspect and mood, the trifecta of verbs. Verbs encode information about each of these, and sometimes information about the subject as well. As usual, this information manifests in the form of an affix or a particle of some sort. Examples in English include "I had read" vs "I will read" (particle "had" encodes perfect aspect) and "I land" vs " landed" ("-ed" encodes past tense). Tense tells of when the action took place in time relative to other actions. This is a pretty straightforward concept and is the one we all know and love. English has past and non-past verb forms, and adding "will"...

Just like verbs conjugate, nouns decline! But verbs are complicated so I'll start with nouns. Nouns decline based on number, class, case, and definiteness. Let's go through each one: Number should remind you of singular vs. plural, but there is much more to it. Some languages like Latin have single, double, and plural. Some even have triple! There's also a paucal form for a few of a thing (in these languages plural means 'many of a thing.') Even weird ones exist like distributive, which describe a noun being distributed across multiple places/things. There are also mass nouns (English includes water, fire, rice) which don't have plural forms, but instead have to be measured with some amount. Think 'three drops of water' instead of 'three waters'. Noun class gives more information about the noun's purpose in the sentence. In English, we have the Saxon genitive: the 's. This means the noun is in possession of something else. Some lang...

Let's start defining words! Here's the first one: /brol/ means tree. I don't want my langauge to just be a copy of English, and will actively avoid it. When English has two words for the same concept I will combine them but when it has one word for two concepts I will seperate them. I may also not have any way to say certain terms. One technique Artifexian uses is translating back and forth between multiple languages to see what tree is associated with in different cultures and choose what you feels fits best for your culture. You can also derive words from other words! Using /brol/ as our root, we can start affixing (adding/changing/removing bits) to make new words. This includes Prefixes, suffixes, circumfixes, whatever you can think of. Here's my derivation chart: Root                  the root. Location            a place they would be found. Person              ...

While watching another talk by David J. Peterson , the creator of many popular fictional languages such as the ones from Game of Thrones , this quote stuck out to me: "What the Lexicon tells you about is... where the people live, what level of technology they are at, and what their daily interactions are." So far I have gotten away with choices of convenience. And some amount of conveniences are a good thing. I want to speak my own language comfortably and fluently, for all. This is a test run, so I want to explore many different linguistic areas. But I think it is especially important to define more about the fictional race that speaks my language. That's what this is for. Let's start with location. My speakers are live in a temperate grassland/steppe region. On the other side of a tall mountain range is a collection of tropical islands, where other humans have a vibrant culture of maritime trade. (I may borrow words from this other culture later.) Traders and g...