Adjectives: To Agree or Not to Agree

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!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What is Pablang?

Hi! I am Pablo, and this blog details my linguistic journey through making my own constructed language: Pablang! Why am I doing this? I think it was a family Bananagrams game, I’m not exactly sure. But for one reason or another, I was looking in the dictionary under “Sch” to see what other words besides school have that start. I found one that was short and sweet: Schwa: the mid-central, neutral vowel sound typically occurring in unstressed syllables in English represented by the symbol (ə) in the International Phonetic Alphabet. For example, in the word ‘America,’ you don’t pronounce either ‘a’ like an ‘a.’ Instead you make this neutral vowel sound and call it a day. I thought it was funny to have so many consonants leading up to just an 'a' sound. I looked deeper into the word that night (mostly because I felt bad winning with a word I didn't know) and fi ve hours later, I was down the rabbit hole comparing different Mongolian writing systems at 3:00 AM. That ...
Read more

Ack! It's Phonotactics

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...
Read more