Keeping in our pattern of making Isian a fairly simple language, there’s not going to be a lot here about the conlang’s simple nouns. Of course, when we start constructing longer phrases (with adjectives and the like), things will get a little hairier.
Noun roots
Isian nouns can look like just about anything. They don’t have a set form, much like their English counterparts. But we can divide them into two broad classes based on the last letter of their root morphemes: vowel-stems and consonant-stems. There’s no difference in meaning between the two, and they really only differ in how plural forms are constructed, as we shall see.
Cases
For all intents and purposes, Isian nouns don’t mark case. We’ll get to pronouns in a later post, and they will have different case forms (again, similar to English), but the basic nouns themselves don’t change when they take different roles in a sentence.
The plural (with added gender)
The plural is where most of Isian’s noun morphology comes in. For consonant-stems, it’s pretty simple: the plural is always -i. From last week, we have the nouns sam “man” and talar “house”. The plurals, then, are sami “men” and talari “houses”. Not much else to it.
For vowel-stems, I’ve added a little complexity and “naturalism”. We have three different choices for a plural suffix. (This shouldn’t be too strange for English speakers, as we’ve got “-s”, “-es”, and oddities like “-en” in “oxen”.) So the possibilities are:
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-t: This will be the most common marker. If all else fails, we’ll use it. An example might be seca “sword”; plural secat.
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-s: For vowel-stems whose last consonant is a t or d, the plural becomes -s. (We’ll say it’s from some historical sound change.) Example: deta “cup”; plural detas.
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-r: This one is almost totally irregular. Mostly, it’ll be on “feminine” nouns; we’ll justify this by saying it’s the remnant of a proper gender distinction in Ancient Isian. An example: mati “mother”; matir “mothers”.
As we go along, I’ll point out any nouns that deviate from the usual -i or -t.
Articles
Like English, Isian has an indefinite article, similar to “a/an”, that appears before a noun. Unlike the one in English, Isian’s is always the same: ta. It’s never stressed, so the vowel isn’t really distinct; it would sound more like “tuh”.
We can use the indefinite when we’re talking about one or more of a noun, but not any specific instances: ta sam “a man”; ta hut “some dogs”. (Note that we can also use it with plurals, which is something “a/an” can’t do.)
The counterpart is the definite article, like English the. Isian has not one but two of these, a singular and a plural. The singular form is e, and the plural is es; both are always stressed.
These are used when we’re talking about specific, identifiable nouns: e sam “the man”; es sami “the men”.
More words
That’s all there really is to it, at least as far as the basic noun structure. Sure, it’ll get a lot more complicated once we through in adjectives and relative clauses and such, but we’ve got a good start here. So, here’s a few more nouns, all of which follow the rules set out in this post:
- madi “mother” (pl. madir)
- pado “father” (pl. pados)
- shes “woman”
- tay “child” (pl. tays)
- chaley “friend”
- gol “head”
- bis “eye”
- ula “mouth”
- fesh “hand”
- pusca “foot”
- her “cat”
- atul “flower”
- seca “sword”
- deta “cup” (pl. detas)
- jeda “shirt” (pl. jedas)