I think all languages need one word that means some extremely specific thing, and it will always be written and said the same, no matter their writing system and phonetics. Make the word something like "That feeling you get in you left pinky toe when a gay giraffe licks you, interrupting you eating a hamburger."
My conlang's word(s) for that is: Kilunajika Lefena Dokalos Tikamurna, literally meaning 'Hating to leave bed morning' and I made up Kilunajika for that. It can be shortened to Kiledotik
@@Biblaridion Wow. I didn't know about that. The closest word I could come up with is tiredness. I have this all the time. I am not a morning person. I hate to be forced out of bed too early. At worst I feel like I have been hit by a truck. I do know that the perfect antonym for this is insomnia. I have insomnia a lot as well. I like to say up late at night, and my mind is busy. I hate being forced to go to bed at this time, because I can't sleep. It feels like torture. It is funny how things can get thier own names.
When coming up with root words, something that I find *exceedingly* helpful is onomatopoeia. Instead of declaring "X word = rock", you could instead try describing the qualities of a rock, phonetically, the way an early speaker of your language might, e.g. "tiku" could mean "rock" by way of your early speakers describing the sound of rocks hitting each other. Similarly, words like "pata" could emulate slashing and therefore mean "water", and "foha" could emulate the sound of wind and therefore mean "sky". There's also the idea of "bouba vs. kiki". Basically, words with lots of P, B, O, and A sounds tend to feel "rounder and softer" when used together, compared to words that have K, T, I, and E sounds, which tend to feel "harder and sharper" when used together. Therefore, "obu" could refer to something large, round, and lethargic, such as a boulder or a tree. Meanwhile, "teki" could refer to something small and sharp, like an animal's claw.
Hey, that is a really good idea. I will definitely use it. Also, can I ask how did you connect the sounds with letters? Did you just think of a sound and asign it a letter, or did you just use the sound symbols?
@@ivoivanov8307 That's called romanization and it's explained in the previous video. Idk if you need this knowlege after 1 year, but I'll leave it here anyway.
Basically. Slightly more fiddly around the edges here and there, from memory, but that's the basics of it. Certainly most failed "Yoda-speak" comes from failing to do that properly. (Noticeably, Yoda will take "will" in "will go" as the primary verb with "go" as part of its object, rather than treating "will go" as one verb, or "go" as the verb and "will" as a modifier. Basically, its a bit fuzzy on how much of the verb phrase is or is not part of the object phrase.)
@@bonbonpony "go you will" is something anybody would recognize as Yoda-speak, but it isn't correct technically. The correct OSV would be "you will go", but that sounds like plain English. "Will" is a modifier, not a verb in itself.
That's because modern English is a mix of several different languages with different rules. It's basically a Frankenstein language made of body parts taken from corpses of other dead languages :q
I watched this series once and barely understood anything. Now I'm watching it again while making a conlang myself, the hype I'm getting from just making up words and putting them together is unbelievable
1:30. They're so rare you needed a fictional language just to represent the first one properly, and presumably couldn't even find three for the last one.
One correction: Latin, while preferring SOV, actually has free word order, like many other synthetic languages. For example, the sentence "Felix loves Julia." can be stated in Latin in any of the following ways, all having pretty much the same meaning: "Felix Iuliam amat." - by far the most common pattern (SOV) "Felix amat Iuliam." - quite common "Amat Felix Iuliam." - very poetic :) "Iuliam Felix amat." - a bit less common, but completely valid (answers the question "Whom does Felix love?") And the two other permutations are possible, though perhaps sounding a bit contrived (still, quite usable in poetry, where rhyme and meter justify not following the usual word order). This is possible because the accusative case suffix -am in "Iuliam" clearly states that she is the direct object of the sentence, while "Felix" is the subject, being in the nominative case. Contrast this with analytic languages, like English, where there are no case endings and changing the order of words completely changes the meaning ("Dog bites man." vs "Man bites dog.").
Thats correct. Classical Sanskrit is also word order free. रामः विद्यालयं गच्छति। ( Ram goes to school) विद्यालयं रामः गच्छति ( to school Ram goes) गच्छति रामः/विद्यालयं विद्यालयं/रामः (this is a bit uncommon.) Actually that double dot( : ) indicates the subject in male nouns and the dot on top (.) Represents the object. So the order isnt that necesary. This gives Sanskrit a freedom and is very well suited for poetry. PS- The double dot and the top dot arent only indicators but have distinct sound of their own . There r vowels. The double dot is aspirated sound like (ha) while the dot is (am).
But Sanskrit paid a heavy price for this (atleast in my opinion) . As a result the language is frighteningly inflectiony(if thats the word) . It has a LOT of inflections. There r 8 noun cases. 3 numbers and 3 genders. There is a different suffix for every noun case of every gender of every number.
@@saikiariyan1464 Well so do most Slavic languages, plus the slightly different inflection for animacy and definiteness in certain cases and genders. It doesn't seem to have done them any harm, they're pretty live and kicking.
1:31 *laughs in czech* In this language, you can use almost all of the possibilities depending on what information is important in the sentence. Člověk (S) vidí (v) zvíře (o) - "default", commonly used order Zvíře (O) vidí (V) člověk (S). - It is important that the man is the one who sees it. Člověk (S) zvíře (O) vidí (V). - It is important that he *sees* it. Zvíře (O) člověk (S) vidí (V). - I'm not really sure how to explain this one. But I personally use it when I'm being sarcastic or trying to correct someone. I just find this interesting.
This is the episode the loses me- the previous two episodes were just right in terms of complexity, but _this_ episode, goodness. A bunch of complicated concepts are suddenly thrown at me like I'm expected to know what everything means already.
These videos are awesome. I've been trying to create a language for years now and all my attemps were total failures. With these videos I think I finally have all the tools I need to at least get to something decent. I created a fictional world and I'm trying to add a fully fonctional language for the inhabitants of this world. Basically it's for celestial people who live in clouds (similar to angels) and descend to the world beneath the clouds (earth) and expend their territory to an island under their initial city. I chose my sounds, word order, grammar basics....everything but I'm stuck on one simple thing: Root words. I just can't find out how to make simple words that don't look like some already-existing languages and that sound natural for my "angels". For exemple if I want to create the word for "fire", in my mind it feels like it should start with an "F", like many other languages (fire, feuer, feu,...) so I'm stuck on that idea and try to create a word that follows that pattern. Same for water, I have the word "aquatic" in my mind (or aqua, agua, eau... in some languages that I know) and I feel like I have to make a word containing (or starting with) an "A". Or with a "N" for night/nuit/noche/nacht... How do you mix up your letters and decide "that is the word I'll choose for "fire" or "night"" even if it sounds totally different from what your mind is used to for that particular concept?
I can't say I've ever had this issue, but I would recommend having a firm idea of what you want the language to sound like (I often come up with phonological forms for words based on how well they sound with the words I've already created), and if all else fails, you could try using an online word generator like Awkwords.
One thing I do is I’ll still have the “f” for fire, but if you switch up the vowels and order and end up with something like “rofen” it’s not as obvious
"Free" No language provides absolute liberty in this regard. Nor does any, to my knowledge at least, not use word order to express some category of its POS.
Wow, you started with some quite complex syntactic structures right away. There are simpler ones that are more natural to start with when creating a new language, like noun phrases (adjective + noun), prepositional phrases (preposition + noun phrase), possessives, plural forms, thinks like that. Verbs and tenses are usually the most complex and most evolved structure in a language. And the subject-predicate structure is like the most top-level one.
My conlangs have words for "finding it hard to get out of bed in the morning". Here they are: Qwiqwiqwëdaq uses "Æt'tli". Môhru uses "Niqq". Rrarrarar uses "Tamalquiqiqnoqiqqnoqiqngq". Ngweni uses "Tld".
No offense but the third one sounds like it was derived from the sound one makes in bed when they realize they have awoken and proceed to warp their body as they spread out over the whole mattress
6:27 technically speaking, Latin is only really rigid in prepositions. SOV is preferred, but look at any Latin literature and you’ll find OVS, SVO, and even VSO pop up, along with too much hyperbatonning. Possession happens through case marking and is treated roughly equally as Adjectives. It’s beautiful.
But same thing for Turkish too. In poetry you can write in any order including verb is not at last. But in normal text verb is at last .other words including subject can change (and must change otherwise it s weird in meaning of emphasis). the word which is closest to verb means it s emphasised. Bunu=this kim=who yaptı=did Who did this= bunu kim yaptı? (True) Kim bunu yaptı (wrong) (kim is not name of person it means who). Bunu Joe yaptı = joe did this.(true) joe bunu yaptı (wrong).) Only maybe a new Turkish learner can make such mistake, because he will think SOV order way.
@@PimsleurTurkishLessons I don't know Turkish but in Latin you'll find free word order outside of poetry Sallust taught me that (famous Roman historian who wrote stupidly complex sentences)
For my language, I’m having the adjectives be prefixes or suffixes instead of different words. And wether or not it is added to the front or back of the word determines wether it is positive or negative.
Important note to everyone who wants to make their own language/conlang. Consider the nouns' gender and semantic classes before creating root words. I didn't and had a really hard time turning things around. 😭
@PowderSnom animal = enimol, person = fwarson wow, some nice original words you got there, totally not copied from the language I'm speaking in right now
I'm on this stage i think. Language: Chegz! Fegza cha chef afech echack? Agza, Fa chef afech echack. Fegza cha gzecha chef afech efeck? Agza! Chachegz! Chechagz. English: Hello! Do you have some eggs? Yes, I have some eggs. Do you also have some herbs? Yup! Thank you! You're welcome.
I know your comment is from a year ago, but I think it would be more along the lines of "The person the animal growing sees" since we're wanting to base the adjective for "big" on an action. Kinda like the example of noun-based adpositions in Mayan.
I think it would be something like, "The person the animal that is big/which is being big sees," but I'm not sure. Aside from English I speak some Yurok, and Yurok does something kinda similar (the way my teacher put it when I was in school, it doesn't use adjectives exactly, but instead the thing doing the action described is, well, doing the action described, so if the action is running, it is running; if the action is being sweet, it is being sweet). I'm not a linguist, so if verb-based adjectives are different from straight up verbs, I'm afraid I can't help you much.
Sure, word order changes happen all the time. Changes from SOV to SVO sometimes happen when some older system of role-marking is lost. The most obvious example is the romance languages: Latin, while having a somewhat free word order, was mostly SOV, but when the case system was lost, the word order shifted to SVO, which has been maintained in French, Spanish, and Italian. I believe the same thing also happened in Old Chinese.
Not quite the same thing, but Greenlandic may end up evolving from an ergative language to a nominative language based on how younger speakers are using it.
Russian is really a free word order language. Sometimes if you jumble up the words too much it would sound a bit unnatural or too bookish, but most of the times it really doesn't matter. It could slightly shift the emphasis, but the determining factor is the way you pronounce the sentence.
Fun fact: in spanish the order of subject, verb and object doesn't matter. For example with the sentence "The man sees the mountain", we can write it as: SVO: El hombre ve a la montaña. SOV: El hombre a la montaña ve. OSV: La montaña el hombre la ve. OVS: La montaña la ve el hombre. VSO: Ve el hombre a la montaña. VOS: Ve a la montaña el hombre. Hombre = man ve = sees montaña = mountain el/la = the (when before a noun) There are some diferences depending on how you rearange the words, for example, adding the preposition "a" to indicate the object, or adding the pronoun "la" (before the verb).
that isn't entirely true. there are a couple situations where the word order can change, usually only when using indirect object pronouns. For example: Ella me lo dijo. (She told me, or literally translated: She me it told) Me lo dijo ella. (She told me, or literally translated: Me it told she) but saying anything other than "El hombre ve la montaña." sounds pretty strange. Also, the "a" in the sentence "El hombre ve *a* la montaña." is grammatically incorrect. The "a" can only come before the noun if the noun is the direct object in the sentence, and if the direct object is a person. For example, you could say, "Yo veo *a* mi amigo Fernando"(I see my friend Fernando, talking about a specific friend") but since "the mountain" is not a person, you cannot use the personal "a"
I spent about an hour and a half puzzling with the random sounds I had come up with and like and trying to turn them into usable pronouns. Took a while, but DAMN I love the way I did it. Has really sad implications for my world and those that use the language. And now I'm calling it for today as my brain is hurting.
"Any sentence will consist of three primary roles: the Subject, the Verb, and the Object." Not an intransitive sentence, or a zero-copula sentence. And the distinction between Subject and Object, or between Nouns and Verbs doesn't always follow the way we think about it (see Ergativity, Active-Stative language, zero-copula, using nouns as verbs meaning "to be (a) _" or "to act like a _")
While this is 5 years late, I feel compelled to say that the video very clearly oversimplifies things to introduce conlanging to more people. It is also better than some textbooks I have read and that are used in schools.
3:00 how would this work for a language in which the adjectives are derived from verbs rather than nouns? And would the adjective come before or after the object? I'm building a VOS language if that makes any difference.
Korean is a neat case here; its default word order is SOV, and as you'd expect its adjectives come before nouns and prepositions after-but it's also transparently clear that the adjectives are verb-like (ignoring compound words/phrases where the initial noun acts as an adjective, they really are just verbs that conjugate somewhat differently) and the postpositions are noun-like (acting kinda like possessees).
@@_skysick_ No, as a speaker of Mandarin I am certain that there should not be a 的 de at the end. Actually, I don't even think the phrase in the video is correct; I've never even heard of it as a complete sentence. I'd interpret it as 她漂亮的 tā piàoliang de "Her beautiful (unwritten possessee)," which is an incomplete sentence, or just simply a typo of 她漂亮 tā piàoliang, a more informal way of saying 她很漂亮 tā hěn piàoliang "She is (very) beautiful."
@@_skysick_ The Mandarin example is straight up wrong. "True adjectives" in Mandarin all function as stative verbs so to say "X is adjective", you just say "X adjective", no verb needed. However, Mandarin also phonologically dislikes monosyllabic words so sometimes the adjectival copula 很 (normally meaning "very" but in this case doesn't actually mean anything) is added before the adjective. 很 has to be used with monosyllabic adjectives but often gets used with polysyllabic adjectives anyway (to the point where not using 很 sounds a bit improper nowadays). 的 functions as a complementizer when added to an adjective, meaning that the "adjective的" construction must appear in a noun phrase, i.e. there has to be a noun after it.
I love the video, it was very helpful, but I have been trying to find evidence for my school research topic , its on linguistics, and i want to to know where you get your evidence from. Is it from Wikipedia alone?
I'm gonna say that the historical reason for my language's inconsistencies (SOV that has prepositions and adjectives after nouns) is that its prepositions are derived from nouns and its adjectives were derived from verbs. But it's good to know that languages can be weird and that's ok.
I did it!!!! default word order: SOV noun-adjective noun-postposition possessee-possessor sample sentence: "the person sees an animal" taro goju meno lit. man animal see sample sentence #2: "the person sees a big animal" taro goju petu meno lit. man animal big see
2:33 the first line in Japanese is actually a sentence, not just the noun phrase, in Japanese, the adjectives work like verbs, so in this line its a subject-predicate sentemce. But the second line is on the other hand, its a typical noun phrase like adj + n. The two example are in different situation so I think that's not a good example in your explanation, you can use 暑い天気/変な人、今日は暑い/この人は変だ in the same sentence structure as comparison, that would be better. But still appreciated you make this series, that helps a lot😆
looks like youve got some inspiration from tamil - aalu also means person here, and maa means great (or sometimes big too). also, only modern spoken tamil has a default word order of SOV (even that is kind of flexible) - ancient and medieval tamil , the tamil we use in formal occasions or to write, has a extremely flexible word order - SOV, SVO, VSO, VOS, OSV, OVS all are possible. its just that colloquilly we normally use SOV
2:23 Mandarin is not correct. 她漂亮的 is not a complete sentence and can mean something like "her beautiful ...(something)". If you want to say "she is beautiful" you need to say 她很漂亮 (ta hen piao liang) which literally means "she very beautiful". Anyways, really appreciate that you used Mandarin as an example and great video~
This division of adjectives into verb-derived and noun-derived seems a bit strange to be honest. The examples provided actually showcase the difference between the so-called attributive and predicatve adjectives. An attributive adjective is part of a noun phrase (for example - a big horse - 'big' is an attributive adjective), and it can go before and after the noun, sometimes in the same language (and the rules for placing the adjective may be quite complicated). A predicative adjective is a part of a predicative expression: The horse is big. Notice, that in English, there has to be a copula in a predicative expressions with an adjective (not all language have a copula, sometimes it's a zero copula, so you're essentially saying 'Horse big', but it's different from saying 'big horse'). The examples of the noun-like adjectives and verb-like adjectives that Biblaridion provided are exactly that, and, essentially, have nothing to do with adjective somehow being derived from verbs or nouns. Languages usually have both kind of adjectives (attributive and predicative). If you're language is SOV, then predicative adjective should go (at least, from my experience with languages) at the end of the sentence, and if it also has a copula, then this copula goes after the adjective (often being attached to it as an affix). The attributive adjective, though, goes after or before the noun it describes depending whether your noun phrases are head-final or head-initial (there can be both in the same language). Also, pragmatic considerations (like, emphasizing important information) can change the default word order as well. It's not also that simple, and can't be exhaustively explained in a few paragraphs (and I don't know everything anyway). Read up on the theory, study real-life languages, and think for yourself.
Wow. There are so many options for syntax. I like to think of a kind of flow of action in a sentence. It is reminiscent of sentence diagrams. The SVO pattern and the head initial patterns show flow better. So I would like to go with those. The sample sentence works like this. Person the sees animal big the. The subject comes first, because that is where the action starts. Then the verb comes afterwards, because the action flows through it. Having the subject and verb as two words is the bare minimum for constructing a sentence. It may be a good idea to start out writing sentences like this. Here are some examples. Person sees. Dick plays. Jane runs. It is really bare bones, but one has got to start somewhere. It is possible to have one word sentences in English if they are imperative. There is a subject of you that is implied. Here are two examples. Stop. Run. Getting into imperative may be a bit too complicated for starters, so one should postpone that. Some sentences have objects. The object goes last, because that is where the action ends. Person sees animal. There are two kinds of objects direct and indirect. If both appear, than the direct object goes first. It gets the action before the indirect object. Person watches animal for owner. This sentence has watch. It can mean seeing or babysitting something. The animal is what the person watches. So this is the direct object. Doing an action to or for something makes an indirect noun. The person is directly babysitting the animal, and they are doing that to help the owner. The person is not babysitting the owner. So the owner is an indirect object. Then there are words that modify other words. The nouns and verbs are the main vessels which the action flows through. Pronouns replace nouns entirely. Then the modifying words come later, because they lack the flow. The modifying word comes after the noun, so the proximity indicates a connection. Adjectives modify nouns and pronouns. So they go right afterward. This completes the sentence. Person the sees animal big the. Maybe even articles can come afterward. It is really different than what happens in English. Articles are so short and are used so often that they almost loose thier meaning. So they can go in the back, where they are far removed from the action flow. That is why I put the behind big. Both modify animal. Adverbs modify verbs, adjectives and other adverbs. They get the same rule of going after the word they modify. I added adverbs to the sentence. Person the sees carefully quite animal big very the. Carefully, quite and very are all adverbs. This gets complicated as there is a chain of modifiers. Sees-carefully-quite is a chain. Carefully modifies sees, which is a verb. In turn quite modifies carefully, which is an adverb. Animal-big-very-the is another chain. Big is a pronoun. It modifies animal, which is a noun. Very is an adverb. It modifies big. The is an adjective. It modifies animal. Very is after big. This indicates it modifies big. It doesnt modify the. Wow. This is getting really different from English. In English the sentence would go like this. The person quite carefully sees the very big animal.
There can be other things beyond the basics of syntax. I would like prepositions to be between the two objects they connect. I am not sure if that is an adposion or preposision. I would like to use preposition to indicate possetion. There would be a word between posessor and possesee. It is like the word of, but it is a special word used just for possesion. The possessee always comes first, because it receive the flow of action more directly. Proper English would have this. The man's dog. I would have the syntax like this. Dog of man the. I would even like to use this for pronouns that are possessors. English modifies like this. His dog. I would have the syntax in two possible ways. Dog of he. Dog of him. The difference is that he is a subject and him is an object. I don't want to make such distinction. I can just use the context of the syntax to determine whether the pronoun is a subject or object. I am thinking about dropping gender entirly. So it would be like this. Dog of it. Funny enough in English it can be used as a subject or object. It makes perfect sense in context anyway. A man is very masculine in a biological sense. However I think it is plausable to ignore that completely in a grammatical sense. It is not meant to be a dehuminizing way, expecially when speakers of a language are used to having gender neutral words. In English, male animals get thier gender ignored all the time. It makes sense. In most animals it is difficult to tell the gender. There are some easy ones, like lion, deer and peafowl. However the easy ones are the exception, not the rule. I may be biased as an English speaker, but I think ignoring genders of humans and animals makes more sense than giving genders to inanimate object. Genders don't even work for plants very well, since most are hermaphrodites. The only plant I know that could be separated to he and she is the ginkgo. There are words that are classified as verbs, but they don't do much. The main example is the verb to be. I wonder if subject and object can still apply. The action is just a state of being and that is it. Sometimes the obeject is an adjetive that describes the subject. I wonder if the adjetive can be used as an object or should it be reworked somehow. There is an example. I'm a nut. Maybe I is the subject, am is the verb and nut is the object. I have this particular sentence in mind, because the song is in my head. It is so catchy.
1:40 Classical Sanskrit also had a free word order for language as a whole but different dialects were bound to different word orders and were still mutually intelligible without any difference.
Quick question, so my language follows a OSV pattern. Assuming my adpostions are derived from verbs, would my adpostion still come last in the sentence or would it follow the noun it modifies. Ex. (Rak Pe Kan, "Rock Man Sits.") Would this turn into Rak Kan Pe to mean "The man sits on the rock" or would it still keep the original word order? This is my first conlang and everything else has made sense so far up until this point and I have been unable to get past it now for a few days. I know osv is a horrible option for my first conlang but most everything else i've chosen has been a good call lmao
My r'oyya language's word order is quite complicated ,because most sentences are a single word, yeah the language is polysynthetic take the word which a mother might say isespansacfangatuletikessa [i saw your birth] you don't need any explaining do you? Here you can't put the affixes in a diferent position ,another reason for monstrosly long words is inspiration from ilothwi with it's classifiers,then i decided to create some classifiers for my one language ,to reduce the number of adjectives beacause i hate them but i need them ,i've barely started so i can't give you any examples. Another of the quirks is the script which looks swishy and square at the same time and it's kind of confusing because it works something like the japanese script[although this idea is original] the main idea is of a supersylabarye but it's also a logography r'oyya has a very highly complex sylable structure so it will be hard to create extra sylable characters and because the language is polysynthetic you can take a logograph for root words take the root sdbre[cake] but you can affix it further to sdbretu[coockie] and sdbretunga[to bake cookies] pansdbretungaesse [you baked cookies] and so on, well is the logic getting into your head? I am 9 years old.
I'm now making a conlang I'm calling Puranki. (Pronunciations are the same as the IPA symbols.) It has a VSO word order and follows all of the common head-initial traits. "li" means "see," "puranki" means "person," and "ma-a" means "animal." "li puranki ma-a." (The person sees the animal.) This series has been really helpful for me while I'm creating this language! ^^
@@Ipman-zw4yc That depends on the word order, if the default word order is SVO, OSV or SOV it comes after the noun, if your default word order is VSO, VOS or OVS it comes before the noun.
@@pepijndeputter8892 Hold on. In English, we have the word order SVO, but adjectives come before our nouns. We would say 'I like the pretty cat', not 'I like the cat pretty'.
1:25 in most cases, Russian doesn't actually distinguish between SOV and SVO. 'Ya tibya lublyu' (lit. I you love) and 'Ya lublyu tibya' (lit. I love you) mean the same thing. also please excuse my transliteration here I've always had problems with Russian transliteration. (also sidetone but most transliterations dont distinguish between 'e' which sort of sounds like 'ie or ye' and 'э' which sounds like the 'e' in enter and it always annoys the heck out of me.)
When the video was saying that English had a basic word order of SVO, I was saying the person sees the dog, the person has the dog seen, seeing the dog is the person, seen by the person is the dog, the dog is seen by the person and the dog has a person seeing it😂🎉
Uncommon but exists typically in answer to 「你到哪里去？」(where are you going?), and typically you add something to do, e.g. 「我到北京去见个朋友。」(I'm going to Beijing to meet a friend.)
You use a CV notation for your open syllable, but what are the other options? How would we indicate if a coda is allowed, or if only some codas are allowed?
Well subordinate clauses are dependent on the main clause, so in absolute head final languages you'd have your main clause come after the subordinate clause(s). This seems incredibly unnatural though, so you'd probably stick to head first for clauses. "Vanilla especially, I like icecream" is as close as I can come to preducing a head final clause structure off the top of my head.
TheApexSurvivor strictly head final languages like Japanese do put their relative clauses first (because they are adjectives)... but I was wondering more how to evolve them at all regardless of where they go. You know like cases come from adpositions glomming on to their noun. How do these structures appear in the first place?
Hey, just wondering something, could you please tell me why some of the words in your lexicon have unstressed second syllables if that was a rule you made? For example "pohlu" has two syllables but the "u" in "hlu" isn't stressed? Thank you.
Is this too long of a pronoun list? Pa - I Pa’ne - we Tuk - you Tu’ne - you pl. Tsam - he Tsa’ne - he pl. Atsal - she Atsa’ne - she pl. Ku’tsa - person of unknown sex Ku’tsa’ne - group of people of unknown/mixed sex, i.e. “they” Paklut - animal of unknown sex Paklu’ne - group of animals of unknown/mixed sex Pak’tsam - male animal Pak’tsa’ne - group of male animals Pak’atsal - female animal Pak’atsa’ne - group of female animals Ukat - non-living noun, i.e. “it” Uka’ne - group of non-living nouns
The person sees the animal In my language it's: Les ŕvelst scale'auv les xuvaŕn The:les person:ŕvelst (ŕ=thrilled) See:scale -s: 'audv or 'auv Animal: xuvaŕn (x: zh)
2:03 then there is Italian where you can put the adjective wherever you want around the name and it still means the same. Actually it sounds a bit different, just like a difference in the tone would sound different. It's pretty strange. Still, the sentence would mean the same in almost all cases. One could tell something similar about the object, verb and subject order thing, but that's a bit more strict
I guess my confusion lies in how much of this stage should be done before I move on to the next one? I built some root words, including ones that are culturally significant to the people for whom I'm trying to sculpt a language, but I don't know how many I need to be able to effectively start building the grammar of the protolanguage. I have, in total, 20 root words made, 16 if you don't count the suffixes I made, two of which denote a person from an animal, and two of which denote adjectives, one noun-like and one verb-like.
My language, Aeri, is Head-Initial in that the Verb comes before the Object. Everything else (Adjective-Noun, Noun-Postposition, Possessor-Possessee) is Head-Final. Also, RU-vid is yelling at me for Postpositions and Possessees. I guess the English version of youtube was designed to be used by Head-Initial speakers rather than Head-Final speakers. Also, I just want to say thank you for making these videos, they're really helping me with creating Aeri.
currently trying to make a conlang based on a few already existing languages, that actually derives from said languages (french, german, a few romance languages)
I don't need this to be so complicated. I don't need it for some like novel, I just want to make a language that me and only 1 or maybe 2 other people in the world can converse without anyone understanding what we're saying.
So far I’m just copying the same sentences but just in my language because I don’t know what I’m doing and it’s best I don’t make my own sentences just yet. Also: what do u do for adpositions based off nouns
I made a poem with my previously made conlang (I've loads of them) Fo Bai dong ad bini esda sa a dong vais, a dong twa tifisa cqwistö kongyösa fih[i]tö (I forgot how it continued...)
Delang: The person sees an animal: Δеƕомі ананімаљ ҩьѡіљі (Dehomi ananimall auqwilli) /dehu:mi a:nanimaɭ ɔqwiɭi/ The big animal: δанімаљ бігг (danimall bigg) /danimaɭ bigg/ On the table: на δеменѕа (na demensa) /na deme:nsa/ On the mountain: на δемҩнс (na demaunz) /na demɔ:nz/ I go to Beijing: Ас ҩнј Бејδҍіњ ҫиані (Az aunj Bejdqjing zjuani) /az ɔnj bejdçiŋ ʃʉ:ani/ (litt: I to Beijing travel by boat) The man is at (beside) the rock: Δеман о δепеłес ƒłе (Deman o deperez fre) /dema:n u: depeɹez fɹe/ The man is on the rock: Δеман на δепеłес ƒłе (Deman na deperez fre) /dema:n na depeɹez fɹe/ The man's animal: Δанімаљ ҩнδеман (Danimall aundeman) /danimaɭ ɔndema:n/ (Prepositions, but possessor follows possessee)
In my conlang, when you say "The man is slicing bread." You will say "The is slicing man the bread." When words are used to describe something in this language, the words will be before the actual noun. The sentence structure is (Subject Checker), Adjective/Verb, Postpostition/Preposition (in informal cases | formal cases will only have Prepostition), Noun/Possessor, Postposition (only in formal cases), Possesse Also I now have a sentence in my conlang, Ecto shvensko Elo ecta Elavid. (Literal meaning: The look he the her. | Meaning: He looks at her.)
How come in a pair of Noun & Adposition (preposition or postposition), the Adposition would be the head? I'd say the phrase can be said without the adposition, but not without the noun - the adposition defining the noun like adjective.
@@Drazzz27 Then I would call it something else than a head. Like definer, or determiner. Head brings to mind more like the word order, the main topic around which the defining details gather. This is the difficulty of using every day words with possibility to many metaphorical dimesions - like head here. They are vague in a new environment, not very infomative.
@timomastosalo well, that's a standard terminology from syntactical analysis. The (syntactically) main noun in a phrase is the head, while other words are dependents (cause they depend from it). What is meant by 'syntactic category' is, essentially, when we want to say that it's 'X phrase', we look at the head word in the phrase to determine that: - noun phrase "the lazy dog" (the head is a noun) - adjective phrase "incredibly fast" (the head is an adjective) - prepositional phrase "with my family" (the head is a preposition) And when we analyze a sentence by means of, for example, dependency analysis, we determine the syntactically main word (the verb) and which words (or phrases) are dependent on it. Each of the dependent phrases is a separate structure which itself has to be analyzed to determine what part of it is the head, and what are the dependents, and so on. We continue like that until we order all words in the sentence into a nicely organized dependency tree. So it kinda looks like that: I am looking at the white board. The head is the auxiliary verb "am" (it's the root node of the tree). Its direct dependents are the subject "I" and the participle "looking". The pronoun "I" doesn't have any branches (child nodes), so we stop there). The only dependent element of "looking" is the preposition "at", its direct dependent is the noun "board". This noun, in its turn, is the head of the noun phrase "the white board" and both the article "the" and the adjective "white" are its dependents. The resulting tree is (i'm not sure if it renders properly in the commentary): am I looking at board the white Kinda like that. Look at the example on the wiki in the article "Dependency grammar". You yourself was probably thinking about something else (something that only make sense to you, but isn't necessarily compatible with the rest of linguistics). The closest thing that comes is the difference between content words (which carry the semantic meaning, like nouns, adjective, semantically important verbs) and function words (that play an auxiliary role in forming syntactical relation and carry grammatical meaning, like preposition, articles, modal verbs, conjunctions, pronouns, etc.). They are usually mentioned in the context of phonetics, because the content words are usually pronounced in full and bear the full stress, while function/auxiliary words are usually unstressed (often becoming something like clitics), weak and often reduced in pronunciation. Or perhaps you were talking about something more literary (with your 'main topic' and 'details' or 'descriptions'). Anyway, that's my two cents.
@@Drazzz27 Well, so I said: for me the word 'head' in a sentence sounds like the main noun - not the adposition: isn't that the preposition or postposition? I am a linguist, though my mother tongue is not English. So don't explain basic concepts lpease. And keep it shorter, if you'd please. My eyes are not young anymore - just watering if I'd try to read all that. Just this shortly: isn't the adposition either preposition, or postposition? And if Head is the main noun - like I wrote that it would make sense intuituvely, and also how that is defined in my language (just with a different word. So does the the adposition determine the syntactical category (which would sound logical) - or the Head? Please, just briefly about that, not an essay :) Now it seemed you first spole of the prepositins & postpositions, then the main nown (subject or system etc. of the sentence). xxx And it still remains, that very general every day words are a bit ambiguos as specified scientific terms, be it that they were generally accepted standard terms. Not all the terms are always successful - as a linguist you've likely met this. Like the terms imperfect and perfect tense used in different languages is one examples of confusion. Mixing the meaning and structural level, between English and French for one commonly known case.
@@timomastosalo I'm not sure, what you're trying to argue with. It's a standard term in English linguistics. I've tried to explain it as simple as possible. If the post is too long for you to read, I can't do much about that. I'm not talking about the head of the sentence, I'm talking about the head of the phrase. Adposition is the governing word in the structure of the adpositional phrase. The phrase attaches itself by its head to other elements of the sentence. Yes, adposition is a general name for a preposition or postposition. I don't know what's the standard French terminology is. The problem is - there may even not be such a concept in French linguistics, so you'll have to learn it from scratch in English.
I chose to opt for basically ignoring possession and instead having possession denoted by word order using the verb "to own". I also use VSO order, and verb-like adjectives, so something like "the big man's little dog sees the blue rock" would become; "see (own man big dog little) rock blue" which in English requires at the very least commas where I've added brackets just to get over how jarring it is to see "[verb] [verb]". Oh also my adpositions are postpositions, so the heads thing... I guess I'm kinda head-initial aside from the adpositions, and technically possession doesn't exist as a distinct concept in my conlang so I guess it's native speakers aren't too concerned with ownership but are really concerned with "things" rather than their variation or manner... World building beforehand might have been a good idea but I'm starting to enjoy accidentally limiting the world through the language which exists within it
For example Czech is a language with free word order. pán viděl psa (SVO), pán psa viděl (SOV), viděl pán psa (VSO), viděl psa pán (VOS), psa viděl pán (OVS) and psa pán viděl (OSV) are all possible, meaning "a man saw a dog", although the SVO is the by far most common and the others feel pretty weird, but it's possible because of Czech's different word forms based on the word being object, subject and others (total of 7 in singular and 7 in plural). So "psa" (meaning dog) (which is in the 4. or object word form) is different from "pes" (1. form if it was subject)
With subject-object-verb, how would a sentence with 2 verbs like "I saw a man walking" be said? I know nothing of linguistics so excuse me if its a dumb question.
I think you would replicate your noun-verb order from the bigger structure, so you would treat the object like the subject of a smaller structure. It would end up like "I (a man - walking) saw."
yeah but you can't just spilt the verbs anyway you want each language has consistent but different rules. The verbs have to be split into different phrases.
v2 is not a real word order, but i do agree with you in spirit. It's important to remember that these word orders are very simplistic, and (almost) no language will follow them exactly. german is just mostly svo with some spice thrown in there.
By that logic you could have infinite possibilities, you could just endlessly add S's V's and O's. But it's still important not to oversimplify it, Biblariodion should've talked about V2 word order
actually tamil is word order flexible - you can order the words however you want and it will still make sense. but mostly that is only used in old tamil literature and modern tamil uses SOV ( mostly)
