Pablang

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...

Now that we know what sounds we have, we have to create rules called phonotactic constraints (phone meaning sound, tacticos meaning arrangement) about how those sounds combine. For example, in English we can say “plant” but not “lpatn.”  So where do we derive these rules from? First, we need to know what each syllable will look like. The onset is the beginning, the nucleus is the middle, and the coda is the end. In English, we have this structure: (C) 3 V(C) 5 (Example: the word “strengths” /stɹɛŋkθs/ is CCCVCCCC. That’s pretty big!). This means each syllable must have a vowel and can have up to three consonants at the front and up to five at the end. Some languages are much more minimal, like Japanese’s humble (C)V. On the other side, we have Heiltsuk-Oowekyala, which allows for huge consonant clusters ! For pablang, I think I’ll go with something simple-but-not-too simple, with (C)(C)V(C)(C). Now while researching these consonant clusters, I stumbled across something ve...