Not Glossing Over Anything

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," we know the subject is the cat because it is first. In many languages, nouns are declined (remember noun case? yeah that) instead of using a rigid word order to convey information like English. Spanish is SVO like English but can change to VSO if the verb is the important part of the sentence. Pablang will do the opposite: by default it is VSO but when the subject is the important part of the sentence is the first it will put the subject first.

The subject of the sentence is also optional. In a proto version of the language, the subject attatched to the verb and became the suffix. So why repeat it if you don't have to? If I have the subject following the congugated verb telling me the verb is in the third person paucal, and I know we are talking about John and Claire, why do we have to say it was them? We don't, it would be redundant! Don't always omit the subject; only do it when its redundant because the conversation was already about

Well what about the rest of the words? Languages fall into two camps here: head-initial or head-final.

Head initial:

  • Adjectives go after nouns.
  • Genitives (something that possesses something else) go after nouns.
  • Adpositions go before nouns. These are known as prepositions.
  • Relative clauses go after nouns (The man whom I saw, for example)
Head final just means all these are reversed, and prepositions are called postpositions. Usually languages aren't exclusive and pull a bit from both. English is mostly head initial but adjectives and genitives go before the noun (e.g. my big cat). By contrast, Japanese is extremely head final. Pablang will be extremely head initial, following all of the guidelines outlined above.

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