Tag: conlang

This time around, we’re going to look at what I think is one of the more confusing bits of a language: the relative clause. That is, it’s confusing in theory, as in understanding how it works. Implementing it in a conlang turns out to be a bit easier, but it marks a kind of turning point, in that we’re moving out of the simple grammatical concepts (like plurals or the past tense) and into the more complex world of phrase-level grammar. I guess you could even say this starts “Part 2” of the series.

It’s all relative

Relative clauses. What they are is right there in the name. First of all, they’re clauses, meaning that they are essentially self-contained phrases that have all the necessary parts to state a fact about something. (This is different from the prepositional phrases from last time, which can only really add information to an existing clause.) And second, relative clauses are relative. In other words, the new facts they provide somehow relate to something else.

That’s a grammatical definition, anyway. In English, what relative clauses are is fairly obvious: they are the phrases that we use to put more meaning in a sentence. (Conveniently enough, that last sentence ended with one.) Unlike an adjective phrase, a relative clause works more like a whole new sentence embedded in an existing one, except that one part of it refers directly to something in that existing sentence.

For example, let’s take a simple sentence with a relative clause: The nice man who lives next door has three big dogs. Okay, I’m not the best on example sentences, but it’ll work, and it doesn’t use any other grammar we haven’t already seen in the series. So what have we got? Well, let’s break it down. Starting at the end, we have a predicate phrase, has three big dogs, which contains a verb (has) and a noun phrase (three big dogs).

Those are nothing new, so we’ll ignore them completely and focus on the first half of the sentence, the subject phrase: the nice man who lives next door. Clearly, man is the head of this phrase, and the and nice are an article and adjective, respectively. And that leaves who lives next door, which is our relative clause. It’s formed almost like it could be a sentence, with its own verb (lives) and everything, but the subject is all wrong for that.

In a sense, we’ve combined two sentences. We have the main statement, the nice man has three big dogs, but we also want to clarify some things about this nice man, so we have another sentence, he lives next door. In both cases, we’re talking about the same man, and that’s the “hook” that lets us put the relative clause into the original statement.

Subjects and objects

In our example, the subject of the “outer” clause was the same as that of the relative clause. That doesn’t always have to be the case. In English, as in many languages, it’s possible to switch things around. You can also have, for instance, objects with attached relative clauses: I talked to the man who lives next door. Inside the relative clause, the man is still the subject, but on the outside, he’s the direct object. Similarly, the “relativized” part can be the object of its own clause (the man that I saw yesterday), or part of a possessive or other construction (the man whose dogs are always barking).

English, admittedly, makes all this a little unclear. In cased languages, it’s a lot easier to keep track of everything, and that’s one of the grammatical pedant’s arguments in still using whom for relativized objects. (Their opinion on sentences ending in a preposition comes into play here, too, because that comes from the different ways relative clauses are made in English and Latin. In Latin, you can’t “split” the preposition from the relative pronoun, like you can in English.)

Not every language allows all types of nouns to be relativized, though. There are a few different roles available, and it seems to be a linguistic universal that they fall into a naturally order, called the accessibility hierarchy:

1. Subject
2. Direct object
3. Indirect object
4. Oblique argument (English prepositional phrases)
5. Genitive (where English would use whose)
6. Comparative object (such as the people I am older than)

As the theory goes, if any one of these can’t be relativized, then nothing lower on the list can, either. In other words, any language that allows relative clauses at all is going to allow them for subjects, while one that doesn’t let you use them for objects won’t let you for genitives, either. English offers the full range, as do most of the “big” world languages, but that’s not always the case.

Those languages that don’t let you use the full hierarchy often have some way of accomplishing the same thing. There might be a special verbal voice (like the applicative or the antipassive), for example.

Other ways

Now, just because our language creates relative clauses a certain way by default (using a relative pronoun like “who”, “whose”, or “which”), doesn’t mean that’s the only way to do it. And that’s where things can get interesting. Indeed, English itself gives you a few options:

First off, you don’t actually need a relative pronoun; you can get by without one: the girls I saw outside has a relative clause with no pronoun. This one pops up in a lot of languages, and linguists refer to it as a gap strategy. The “gap” refers to where the relativized part of the sentence would go.

Second, you can use the gap strategy with a kind of linking particle, sometimes called a complementizer. This one is also an option in English, using that: the girls that I saw outside. This is common throughout the world, and it has become a kind of catch-all in English, much to the despair of some.

Both of the above alternatives carry less overt information than the relative pronoun typical of European languages. But we can go in the other direction, as well. We can add a resumptive pronoun, which is a regular personal pronoun that appears where the relativized argument would, as if we could say the girls that I saw them outside. (This one can appear in spoken English, when a speaker gets too bogged down in relative clauses. It’s happened to me plenty of times.) The resumptive pronoun can also be moved to the front of the relative clause in some languages, but that doesn’t change the core “method”.

A relative clause can also show up as some other kind of clause. Turkish has a nominalizing construction that would render our example as something like the girls of my seeing outside. Some languages of East Asia, conversely, use a genitive construction that would come out closer to the girls of I saw outside. Constructs like these tend to work best when independent words denote such meanings, rather than case affixes. If a language has a passive voice, that’s another possibility for relative clauses. Our running example in this section makes this one more cumbersome, but you might get something like the girls seen outside.

Finally, a few languages dispense with relativized clauses altogether. These have internally-headed clauses, where the clause that would be relative is simply inserted into the main sentence as-is. Using our original example sentence, this might come out in a literal translation as the nice man lives next door has three big dogs. (This kind shows up a little bit more often among the native languages of the Americas, but also in a few scattered locations elsewhere in the world.) A similar option is found in Hindi, which uses a reduced correlative word or phrase in the main clause, almost the opposite of the “relative pronoun” process of English. Our example sentence might be literally translated in this case as which nice man lives next door, that man has three big dogs.

Seeing all your relatives

That just about covers the largest category of relative clause, but it’s not the only one. We can also have something called a free relative clause, which isn’t really relative to much of anything. Wikipedia’s English example is I like what I see, which nicely illustrates this. Languages don’t have to allow this one at all, but many of them do; a different wording might be I like that which I see, which sounds very stilted in English, but more explicitly shows the grammar involved.

Another clause that “sounds” relative is the adverbial clause, something like when I came home. I mean, it looks like it’s a relative clause, right? It’s got when, and that’s in the same class as who and where, isn’t it? But it isn’t, not really. It is, however, the topic for the next part of the series, so we’ll leave that discussion for later.

Prepositional phrases, despite how important they are to expressing oneself in a language, don’t have all that much grammar. So we can combine both Isian and Ardari into one post, and we’ll even have time to add in a bit about adverbs while we’re at it.

Isian

Isian uses postpositions instead of prepositions, which is a change that might be hard to get used to. When they’re used to modify a noun, they usually follow it. If they’re supposed to modify a verb, then they’ll usually come at the end of a sentence, but not always. Sometimes, they’ll go right after the verb, and this signifies a greater emphasis on the phrase. It’s all in how you want to say it.

Simple nouns or noun phrases are easy to use with a postposition. Just put it after the phrase: e talar i “in the house”; sir mi fo “from my heart”. (I’ll show a whole bunch more at the end of the post.)

If we want to add in a bit of action to our phrase, then we have a special verbal marker, cu, that indicates something like an infinitive (“to go”) or a gerund (“going”): cu oca anos “without asking”. It’s not only used with postpositions, and we’ll see it pop up a few times later on.

Adjectives, as we saw a few posts ago, usually can’t occur without a noun in Isian. Well, here’s one of the cases where they can. Using an adjective with the special postposition hi (and only this one; it doesn’t work with others) creates a kind of adverb: ichi “beautiful”, ichi hi “beautifully”.

The postposition hi works with nouns, too: sam hi “manly, like a man”. The English translation shows an article, but Isian doesn’t need (and can’t use) one in this situation.

Ardari

As a head-final language, you’d expect Ardari to have postpositions, too, and you’d be right: tyèketö wi “in the house”.

The grammar here isn’t that much different from Isian. Noun phrases in postpositionals work in largely the same way, with one major difference. Remember that Ardari has case for its nouns. What case do we use for a postpositional phrase?

Usually, the accusative is the right answer. But a few postpositions require their nouns to appear in the dative. Some even change meaning based on the case of the noun. For example, wi used with the accusative means “in”, as we in tyèketö wi above. But use it in the dative (tyèkètö wi, note the vowel change), and the meaning becomes “into the house”. It’s a subtle difference, both in form and meaning, but it is indeed a difference.

Using a verb in a postpositional phrase isn’t that hard. The particle ky goes after the (uninflected) verb, and then the postposition goes after that: brin ky vi “while walking”; chin ky nètya “after going”.

Making an adverb out of a noun or phrase uses this same little word, but with the copula verb èll-: kone èll ky “like a man”. (You could say that èll ky is the Ardari adverb marker, but it’s not that simple.) Simple adjectives, on the other hand, can be used directly, so ojet can mean “sweet” or “sweetly”, depending on whether it modifies a noun or a verb: ojeta obla “sweet water”; ojet ajang ky “singing sweetly”.

The list

As promised, here’s a brief list of some of the most common English prepositions and their closest equivalents in Isian and Ardari.

English	Isian	Ardari
above	apay	aj
across	sos	ori
after	eb	nètya
against	ansir	eka
around	oto	òs
at	ni	äl
before	pane	jo
behind	biso	ab
below	didal	ku
by	hoy	sy
for	ir	da
from	fo	tov
in	i	wi
in front of	ihamo	kulyi
into	si	wi +DAT
of	o	me
on	od	oj
onto	ores	oj +DAT
out of	way	zho +DAT
through	aju	tutwi
to/toward	es	lim
until	nobes	nyon
with	was	chès
without	anos	achèsu

Where “+DAT” appears after a word in the Ardari column, it means that postposition requires a dative noun. Other than that, there’s not much else to say about the table.

Next up

To close out the year, we’ll be looking at relative clauses. Once that’s done, we should have enough of the blanks filled in that 2016 can begin with a bang. Since I write these beforehand, I won’t be taking off for Christmas or New Year’s, because those posts will already be done and waiting.

We’ve made quite a bit of progress with our languages since the beginning. They’ve got nouns, pronouns, verbs, and adjectives. We’ve given them plenty of grammar to connect these bits and turn them into sentences. But those sentences are pretty bland. And that’s because there’s no real way for our conlangs to express anything but the most basic of semantic relationships: subject and object. To remedy that, we’re going to talk about a new type of phrase, the prepositional phrase.

English, for example

Prepositional phrases are everywhere you look in English. That last sentence, in fact, ended with one: “in English”. This type of phrase isn’t absolutely necessary to the grammatical “core” of a sentence. It’s extra information that fills in the blanks, giving us more detail about a situation. Prepositional phrases are the way we can learn wheres and whens and hows about something. They’re filler, but that’s exactly what we need.

Looking at English—we’ve got a whole post full of examples, so there’s no reason not to—we can see the general structure of a prepositional phrase. It starts with a preposition, naturally enough, and that’s really the head of the phrase. Prepositions are those words like “in”, “of”, or “below”; they can specify position, location, time, possession, and about a hundred other ideas that are impossible (or just cumbersome) to express with only a verb, subject, and object.

Besides the preposition, the rest of the prepositional phrase is, well, a phrase. It’s usually a noun phrase, but English allows plenty of other options, like gerunds (“in passing“) and adverbs (“until recently“). In theory, there’s nothing stopping a language from letting whole sentences be put into prepositional phrases (“after I came home“), but phrases like that are technically a different kind that we’ll see in a future post. For now, we’ll stick with the more noun-like examples.

Changing it up

English isn’t the only (or even the best) example of how to do prepositional phrases. Other languages do things differently. So, let’s take a look at how they do it.

The first thing to say is that this post’s whole premise is a lie. You don’t need prepositions. You don’t have to have a word that precedes a noun phrase to give more information about a sentence. No, it’s actually a bit more common (according to WALS Chapter 85) to put the preposition after the noun phrase. In that case, it’s not really proper to call it a preposition anymore; pre-, after all, means “before”. So linguists call these words postpositions. Japanese, for instance, uses postpositions, and any anime lover knows of の (no). Thus, “preposition” is technically a misnomer, and the more general term (which we won’t use here) is adposition.

Even rarer types exist, too. There’s the inposition, which pops up in a few languages. It goes somewhere in the middle of the noun phrase. The circumposition has bits that go on either side of the phrase, and this (so Wikipedia says) appears in Pashto and Kurdish. It’s sort of like the French phrasing seen in je ne sais pas. And then there are a few oddballs that don’t seem to have any of these, using verbs or case markers or something like that as stand-ins.

What can fit in the “phrase” part of “prepositional phrase” varies from one language to the next, as well. Noun phrases are let in pretty much everywhere. Not every language has adverbs, though, unless you’re of the belief that any word that doesn’t fit in another class is automatically an adverb. Gerunds aren’t ubiquitous, either. And, of course, languages can go the other way, allowing more possibilities than English.

A note on adverbs

We haven’t really discussed adverbs much, and there’s a good reason: nobody can agree on just what an adverb really is. Sure, it’s easy to say that adverbs are to verbs what adjectives are to nouns, but that doesn’t help much. If you look at it that way, then a prepositional phrase can also be an adverbial phrase. Similarly, some languages—Irish, for example—create regular adverbs by means of a prepositional phrase, their equivalent to English “-ly”. On the other hand, it’s entirely possible for a language to give its adjectives the ability to function as adverbs, as in Dutch.

For a conlang, adverbs are a hard thing to get right. It’s easy to be regular, much harder to be naturalistic. Esperanto mostly goes the regular route, with its productive -e suffix, but there are a few exceptions like hodiau “today”. The best advice I can give here is to have a little bit of both. Have a regular way to derive adverbial meaning from adjectives, but also have a few words that aren’t derived.

In conclusion

How your conlang handles prepositions isn’t something I can tell you. I can give you a few pointers, though. First, there’s a tendency for head-final languages (SOV word order, adjectives preceding nouns, etc.) to use postpositions. This is by no means universal, but it’s something to think about.

And the end of that last sentence brings up another point that often gets overlooked. Can you end a sentence with a preposition? You can in English. The only reason it’s considered “bad” is because of the influence of Latin, which doesn’t allow it. Clearly, a postposition can end a sentence, by its very nature, but the waters are murkier for those that come before. When we get to relative clauses in the next part of the series, the question will be more relevant, but it might be good to have an answer when that time comes.

Other things to consider are what types of phrases can be put in a preposition, where they fit in a sentence (before the verb, after it, at the end, or wherever), case marking (some languages have prepositions that require their nouns to go in a specific case, while case-heavy languages can go with a smaller set of prepositions), person marking (a few languages require this on the preposition), and the relation between prepositional and other types of phrases. And, of course, the main question: do you have prepositions at all?

Once you’re through all that, you’ve greatly increased the expressive power of your language. Not only can you tell what happened and who did it, but now you can specify where, when, why, and how.

We’ve gotten away with neglecting pronouns in our budding conlangs of Isian and Ardari so far, but now the time has come to fill the gap. Now, we’ll give both of them a nice set of pronouns to use, checking off all the boxes from the last theory post.

Isian

Isian will have a fair amount of complexity in its pronominal system, and it will contain more than one irregularity. In that sense, we’re making it much like the languages common in the West.

If you’ll recall, Isian doesn’t use case on its nouns, much like English. But we will have personal pronouns that change depending on their role in a sentence. Specifically, Isian has, for most of them, a subject, object, and possessive form. Here’s the full list:

Pronouns	Subject	Object	Possessive
1st Singular	em	men	mi
1st Plural	mit	mida	mich
2nd Person	so	tas	ti
3rd M. Sing.	i	im	ey
3rd F. Sing.	sha	shim	shi
3rd M. Pl.	is	sim	si
3rd F. Pl.	shas	sham	shay

In the third person, there are separate pronouns for masculine and feminine; unlike English, the plural also changes for gender. (Masculine is the default in “formal” Isian, but we’ll see a way to change that in a moment.)

We can use the subject and object pronouns in sentences anywhere a noun would go: sha fusas men “she kissed me”; em hame tas “I love you”. The possessive pronouns, however, function more like articles, and they always go at the beginning of a noun phrase: mi doyan “my brother”; ey wa talar “their big house”.

We also have a “generic” third-person pronoun, which doesn’t change for case. In the singular, it’s ed, while the plural form is des. This can be used like the English generic “you” or “one”: ed las an yoweni “you can’t enter”. In informal speech, we can also use these as genderless personal pronouns, more like English singular “they”: ed an daliga e talar “they don’t live in the house”.

Finally, we have the reflexive or intensive pronoun lan. This covers the functions of all of English’s “-self” pronouns all by, well, itself: e sam sipes lan “the man cut himself”; e esher hishis lan “the girls washed themselves”; em ocata lan “I asked myself”.

Beyond the personal pronouns, we have a couple more classes. We’ll start with Isian’s demonstratives, which come in distinct singular and plural forms. For near things, we have the singular ne and plural nes. Far things are denoted by to and tos. These four words are close in meaning and scope to English “this”, “these”, “that”, and “those”, respectively, and they can be used in much the same way, either as independent pronouns or like adjectives: nes “these”, nes jedi “these boys”.

Next are the interrogatives, or question words. Isian has two of these. For people, we use con, while things take cal. All the other possible questions (where, when, etc.) can be made from compounds or phrases based on one of these, which we’ll see in a later post, when we look at forming questions.

More relevant to today’s subject are the indefinite pronouns, which are derived from the question words. We have four pairs of these, each of them created by means of a prefix:

• je- “some”: jecon “someone”, jecal “something”.
• es- “any”: escon “anyone”, escal “anything”.
• licha- “every”: lichacon “everybody”, lichacal “everything”.
• ano- “none”: anocon “nobody” or “no one”; anocal “nothing”.

Finally, “standard” Isian (assuming a culture that has such a thing) doesn’t normally allow pronoun omission, or pro-drop. We’ve been using it so far, but that’s because we didn’t have any pronouns up to this point. Our hypothetical speakers of Isian would find it a little informal, though.

Ardari

Ardari has quite a few more pronouns than Isian, but the idea is still the same. First, let’s take a look at the personal pronouns:

Pronouns	Subject	Object	Possessive
1st Singular	my	myne	mynin
1st Excl. Plural	nyr	nyran	nyri
1st Incl. Plural	sinyr	sinran	sinri
2nd Informal	sy	syne	synin
2nd Form. Sing.	tro	trone	tronin
2nd Form. Pl.	trowar	trone	tronin
3rd Masc. Sing.	a	anön	ani
3rd Masc. Pl.	ajo	ajon	oj
3rd Fem. Sing.	ti	tise	tini
3rd Fem. Pl.	tir	ti	tisin
3rd Neuter Sing.	ys	yse	ysin
3rd Neuter Pl.	ysar	ysar	ysoj
Impersonal	mantö	manetö	manintö

That looks like a lot, but it’s really not too much. It’s the different distinctions that Ardari makes that can be hard to understand. The cases are largely the same as they were in the simpler conlang. It’s the left-hand column where the complexity lies.

For the first person, the singular should be obvious. But we have two plurals, labeled “exclusive” and “inclusive”. Which one to use is determined by whether you want to include the listener in the action. If you do, you use the inclusive; otherwise, you need the exclusive.

The second person again has a distinction unfamiliar to speakers of English, but this one shows up in plenty of other languages. The informal is used, surprisingly enough, in informal situations, such as among friends, and it works for singular and plural. The formal is for people you don’t know as well, when you need to show deference, or similar situations. It does change for the plural, but only if it’s the subject.

The third person shouldn’t be that hard to figure out. Remember that Ardari has masculine, feminine, and neuter. Here, we can use the neuter for the case of the unknown or of mixed gender; it doesn’t carry the same connotations of inhumanity as English “it”.

The impersonal form can be used for generic instances and cases where you’re not sure which person is right; it’s transparently derived from man “one”, with the definite article attached.

Reflexive pronouns can be made by adding the regular suffix -das to any object pronoun: mynedas “myself”; anöndas “himself”. Attach it to a subject pronoun, and you get an intensive meaning: mydas “I myself”.

And then we have a special, irregular pronoun lataj. This one roughly means “each other”, and it’s used anywhere you’d need a “reciprocal” meaning: ysar lataj salmedi “they love each other”.

Finally, to add flavor and that hint of verisimilitude, Ardari has vocative forms of a few pronouns. These are: second-person formal troda and plural trodavar; third-person masculine anaj and aja; third-person feminine tija (singular and plural); and third-person neuter singular ys.

Of course, few of these are really needed in Ardari, because the language employs pro-drop liberally, thanks to the concord marking on verbs. If you can get away without a subject or even object pronoun, our hypothetical Ardari speakers would, except in the most formal situations.

For demonstratives, we have a threefold division. The table below shows the “determiner” form; separate pronouns can be made by adding the suffix -man. (Literally, zaman translates to “this one”, and so on for the rest.)

	Near	Middle	Far
Masc. Sing.	za	pro	gyon
Fem. Sing.	zi	pri	gyen
Neut. Sing.	zall	prall	alyör
Plural	zej	prej	ejn

“Near” is those things near or known only by the speaker, or something specifically referred to recently in conversation, so that both speaker and hearer know it. “Middle” is used for things closer to the listener, or something that is well-known to both parties but absent. The “Far” demonstratives are used for those things that are far away from both speaker and listener, are not known to the listener at all, or are speculative in some way.

A few examples of these, since there are so many, and they don’t fit the same pattern as English:

• ablonyje zallman “listen to this”; uses the “near” form because the speaker knows it, but the listener doesn’t.

• sinyr prallman virdondall “we’ll sell that one”; takes the middle form, indicating something nearby and known to both parties.

• mynin tyeri ejnman majtasa “my daughter wants some of those”; the far form connotes something that neither the speaker nor the listener has.

After all that, the interrogatives are easy. In fact, they’re all derived from a single word, qom “what”. From this, we get qomban “who”, qomren “where”, qomlajch “when”, and qoman “which (one)”. These inflect like any other neuter noun, but they can’t take an article suffix.

Indefinite pronouns can be formed from these just like in Isian. (Call it linguistic borrowing or author laziness, the effect is the same.) We have four possibilities here: ta “some”, za- “every”, du- “no”, and manö- “any”. Making whatever you need is as simple as slapping these in front of an interrogative: taqomban “someone”, zaqom “everything”, and so on.

Pausing the game

After this post, the series is going on temporary hiatus. You’ll see why tomorrow, but I’ll be back with more conlanging action on December 4. In the meantime, have fun playing with Isian, Ardari, or your own language.

When I come back, we’ll work on prepositional phrases, relative clauses, and whatever else I can think of. Then, for the start of the new year, you’ll get to see the first significant writing in both languages.

Pronouns are, at the most basic level, words that stand in for other words. Think of “he” or “them” in English. Those words don’t really mean anything by themselves. They usually have to be said with reference to some other thing, like “a man” or “a bunch of kids”. A few of them, like “someone”, don’t, that’s true, but most pronouns do tend to refer to another noun.

Also, the definition of “pronoun” covers more ground than you might think. And the way this ground is divided up varies from one language to another. Sure, it’s obvious that the examples above are pronouns, but so are words like “these” and “who”. However, some languages don’t have an equivalent to “these”, because they don’t need a plural form of “this”. The word for “who” might be different, too, based on various factors. So let’s take a look at all the kinds of pronouns we can find in a language, all those that might fit in a conlang.

Getting personal

The most well-known class of pronouns has to be the personal ones, exemplified by words like English “he”, “she”, and “us”. Despite the name, these don’t necessarily refer to people (“it” normally doesn’t, for example), but they match up fairly well with the person distinction on verbs, where the first person is the speaker, the second is the listener, and the third is everybody else.

That’s the ideal situation, anyway. In practice, even the three-way person distinction can be a bit nebulous. Some languages have two sets of third-person pronouns, one each for those things close by (proximate) and far away (obviative); the latter is sometimes called “fourth person”. We’re off to a good start, aren’t we?

For many languages, pronouns are distinguished in most or all of the ways that nouns are, whether by number, gender, case, or whatever else. In quite a few, they actually have finer distinctions than ordinary nouns. English is one of these, as its pronouns can be marked for case (“we” versus “us”) and gender and even animacy (masculine “he”, feminine “she”, inanimate neuter “it”, and—informally—animate neuter “they”).

Personal pronouns also often show contrasts in ways that are relatively rare for common nouns. Honorific or formal pronouns are common, mostly in the second person. Spanish Usted is an example, as are the many possibilities in Japanese. Animacy is another case of this, as you can see in the English example above. And the first person can come in inclusive and exclusive forms, depending on whether “we” is supposed to include the listener.

Beyond the basic three (or four) persons, we have a few other odds and ends. Impersonal pronouns exist in many languages; the English form is “one”, which isn’t much used in modern speech. Generic pronouns, like the “you” that has largely supplanted impersonal “one”, are a close relative. You can have reflexive pronouns, like the “-self” group, which refer to…well, themselves. Emphatic pronouns, in English, take the same forms as reflexives, but they’re meant to emphasize a specific noun, rather than simply refer to it: “I will go myself.” Possessive pronouns are another important class. Languages with case might treat them as genitive forms of personal pronouns, but they could also be independent. And finally, a reciprocal pronoun (English “each other”) pops up in many places, specifically to deal with a single situation.

Demonstration

The demonstratives are another group of pronouns. This is the group that includes English “this” and “that”, used to refer to a specific, known instance of something. English has a pair of these, a bit like the proximate/obviative split mentioned earlier. “This” is for nearby things, while “that” is used to refer to something at a distance. We can add a third degree into this—as in Spanish, for example—either between “this” and “that” or beyond both of them, like “yonder”, which is non-standard in most dialects, but not mine. Four or even five contrasting degrees of distance aren’t unheard of, either, and a few languages have none at all.

Questions and others

Interrogative pronouns, like English “who” and “what”, are used to form questions. (We’ll see exactly how that’s done in a later post.) We use these when referring to a noun we don’t know, as when we ask, “What is it?” This class isn’t limited to people and things, either. Many languages have specific pronouns to ask about time (“when”), place (“where”), and reasons (“why”), among others.

It’s also common to derive a few other pronouns from the interrogatives. Relative pronouns, for those languages that have them, often come from the question words: “the man who hired me”. Relative clauses are worth a whole post by themselves, though, so we’ll hold off further discussion about them.

The indefinite pronouns, on the other hand, we’ll talk about right now. They’re a big group of words that tend to be derived in some fashion. Some languages, like English, make them out of interrogatives, as in “somewhere” or “anyhow”. Others, like English (funny how that works out), create them from generic nouns like “thing” or “one”: “someone”, “nothing”, “everyday”, “anybody”. And then a few of them have special cases, as in Spanish algo “something”, which is a morpheme to itself.

The making of

In form, pronouns can take just about any shape. They can be separate words that function as nouns in their own right, as they are in many languages. They can appear as verbal suffixes, as is the case in polysynthetic tongues. Or they could be a mix of these.

One interesting notion we can discuss here is the idea of pro-drop, omitting pronouns that would be redundant due to verbal conjugations or other factors. We don’t have it in English—pronouns are always required—but it’s one of the first grammatical aspects students learn about Spanish, and many other languages allow it. Japanese might be considered an extreme example of pro-drop, as context allows—and decorum sometimes requires—a speaker to omit subject pronouns, object pronouns, and any other extraneous bits.

As far as the specific sounds used to create a pronoun, there are a couple of trends. Quite a few languages, for example, have a first-person pronoun with a front nasal sound like /m/, and many of those then go on to have a second-person pronoun with a central consonant like /t/ or /s/. Most European languages show this pattern (Spanish me/te; English me/thee; German mich/dich), enough to make you think it’s an Indo-European thing. But then you have Finnish, a Uralic language, with minä/sinä. And then WALS gives the example of Nanai, a language of eastern Siberia: mi/si. Clearly, there’s some process at work here. That is also made clear by a contrary trend, where the first person shows /n/, the second /m/. This one is more widespread in America, with occasional occurrences elsewhere in the world, in unrelated languages.

For your information

When making a conlang, pronouns can be a hassle to get right. Their very definition lends itself very well to a mechanical approach, especially in agglutinating languages, where you can just attach the right markers to some generic base. It’s harder to make a full set like English, where just about every personal pronoun on the chart has a different history.

The personal pronouns are probably the easiest, though it’s not exactly hard to go overboard. Indefinites, relatives, and all the rest aren’t as necessary at the start, if only because the things you’d most likely say in the early stages won’t need them. But they shouldn’t be too far behind, because they’re no less useful.

Remember that pronouns often follow a paradigm, but there are plenty of irregularities. In natural languages, that’s from borrowing, sound change, and all the other natural factors of linguistic evolution. But there are languages out there with very regular pronoun systems, too.

Future reference

The next post in this series will have all the pronouns you could ever want for Isian and Ardari. Since this post covered most of the theory, there won’t be that much left to do, so we’ll get words, words, and more words. After that, we’ll move to the things that we call prepositional phrases, which aren’t always what they seem.

(Editor’s note: If you’re wondering about the odd posting time, well, there’s a simple explanation. I wrote this on September 14, but I noticed when I went to schedule it that it would appear on October 16. That’s my birthday, and 5:38 PM is what I’ve been told was my time of birth. So, when this goes up, I’ll be 32. I couldn’t resist the extra touch.)

For Ardari, adjectives look like nouns at first glance. They take all the usual inflections for case and number, with the additional wrinkle that they agree with their head nouns in gender. Because of this, the “dictionary” form of an adjective will always be the neuter form: dyet “good”, òlk “loud”, jysall “sad”, chel “young”.

We can add these adjectives into a noun phrase by placing them before the head noun: dyeta rhasa “good dog”; òlko blèdo “loud animals”; jysalla konatö “the sad man”; chelisèn nälisèntös “of the young women”. As you can see from the last two examples, adjectives modifying nouns don’t need articles.

In contrast to English (and Isian, for that matter), Ardari adjectives work just fine alone, without the need for a head noun. In this case, they inflect as if they were neuter nouns: dyetardös “the good ones”.

Predicate adjectives

We can go the other way, too, and make adjectives into verbs, although this only works with certain words. Three of our four examples work: dèblatö òlkda “the river is loud”; sèdardös jysalldiru “the children are not sad”; pwatö chelda “the boy is young”. (Note that these verbified adjectives act like inactive verbs, using patient concord markings for their subjects.)

For dyet and words like it, we use a different, more general, approach. This involves the copula verb èll-, and it’s just like making a normal sentence. The adjective agrees with the subject noun in gender, but it’s always in the nominative case: rhasatö èlla dyeta “the dog is good”.

In fact, any adjective can be used in this copula construction. It implies a more “permanent” state than directly using the adjective directly. So, instead of dèblatö òlkda, we might say dèblatö èlla òlka, which has the same meaning, but carries the connotation that this particular river is always loud.

Comparatives

Ardari doesn’t have special adjective versions for comparatives and superlatives, like English does. Instead, it has a general word am that can appear before an adjective. It does double duty, acting like both “more” and “most”, with the actual meaning depending on context.

In a simple noun phrase, it’s usually a superlative: am dyeto rhasodys “the best dogs”. The exception is when it’s being made into a comparative phrase, which we’ll meet in a future post.

When used on a bare adjective, am always means “most”: am dyetardös “the best”.

On a predicate, am implies the superlative unless it’s clear from context that it’s a comparison. As an example, we might have uswall tyèktö èlla grov “the blue house is big” followed by ajzhtö èlla am grov “the white house is bigger”. If we just said ajzhtö èlla am grov alone, the meaning would instead be “the white house is the biggest”.

Phonetic alteration

That just about does it for Ardari adjectives, except for one thing. Some of these words change slightly. In the neuter form, they have a regular, non-palatalized consonant. In the other genders, these can become palatalized.

One example of this is mil “happy”. In the neuter, it stays how it’s written: mil sèd “a happy child”. Otherwise, it changes: milya pwa “a happy boy*; milyi gli “a happy girl”.

This change can happen with many consonants in Ardari. The stops alternate with their palatalized versions (p becomes py, etc.), while l and n become ly and ny, respectively.

Ardari word list

Like with Isian, here’s a huge list of Ardari words. Verbs are always listed as stems (you can tell by the hyphen at the end), and adjectives are shown in neuter form.

There are three adjectives in the list that show the palatalizing change. These are shown with a following (y), as in mil(y) for “happy”.

Two specific words need to be pointed out. First, “not” is listed as -(r)u, which shows the two possible forms of the negative verbal suffix, -u after consonants and -ru after vowels. Second, the word for “friend” changes based on gender: neuter ast, masculine asta, feminine asti. This is shown as ast(a/i).

English	Ardari
air	impän
all	laz
angry	nyol
animal	blèda
any	by
arm	kyem
back	sur
bad	gall
beautiful	sli
bed	mäs
big	grov
bird	pèdi
bitter	nykh
black	zar
blood	chonga
blue	uswall
boat	druni
body	apsa
bone	oqa
book	byzri
bottom	tòn
boy	pwa
bread	nami
bright	wich
brother	emöna
car	kolyi
cat	avbi
chest	ghall
child	sèd
city	präzda
closed	nòp
cloth	chill
cloud	nawra
cold	glaz
color	kyos
correct	rik
cup	kykad
daughter	tyeri
day	jan
daytime	tulyana
dim	nyn
dog	rhasa
door	kopa
dress	lesri
drink	ach
dry	khèv
ear	mèka
earth	dyevi
egg	oghi
every	ining
eye	agya
face	sòl
false	ill
father	aba
few	ikön
field	tevri
finger	inda
fire	aghli
flower	afli
food	fès
foot	allga
forest	tyëtoma
friend	ast(a/i)
front	chej
fruit	zulyi
girl	gli
glass	träll
gold	owènyi
good	dyet
grass	sèrki
green	rhiz
hair	zhaj
hand	kyur
happy	mil(y)
hard	khòrd
hat	sèla
head	chäf
heart	rocha
hill	dyumi
hot	fed(y)
house	tyèk
ice	sill
island	symli
king	kujda
knife	yagha
lake	oltya
leaf	däsi
left	fong
leg	khära
light	blis
long	tur
loud	òlk
man	kona
many	majos
meat	arba
milk	mechi
moon	duli
mother	emi
mountain	antövi
mouth	mim
name	all
narrow	will
net	pèrta
new	vän
nice	tèch
night	goz
nose	khun
not	-(r)u
old	pòd
open	owar
paper	rhesta
peace	ichuri
pen	pyela
person	ban
plant	pämi
poor	nydor
pot	gyazi
queen	kujvi
rain	luza
red	jor
rich	agris
right	leng
river	dèbla
rock	qada
rough	dyaraz
sad	jysall
scent	ymin
sea	oska
sharp	krit
shirt	tèwar
shoe	saz
short (tall)	nyan
short (long)	nèr
silent	däch
sister	tamöni
skin	prall
sky	weli
small	nèr
smooth	chus
snow	qäsa
soft	èz
son	era
sound	onda
sour	rukh
star	pala
sun	chi
sweet	ojet(y)
sword	èngla
table	kombas
tail	pija
tall	vol
thick	gwad
thin	tip
to allow	rhoten-
to ask	mykhes-
to be	èll-
to begin	sòto-
to blow	fu-
to build	moll-
to burn	secha-
to buy	dyem-
to catch	kòp-
to come	ton-
to cook	lòsty-
to cry	ajn-
to cut	okön-
to dance	tatyer-
to die	lo-
to do	agh-
to drink	kabus-
to eat	tum-
to end	jop-
to enter	idyn-
to feel	luch-
to give	anyer-
to go	chin-
to guard	chud-
to have	per-
to hear	ablon-
to hit	king-
to hold	yfily-
to hunt	kwar-
to kiss	alym-
to know	trod-
to laugh	jejs-
to learn	prèll-
to like	lyeb-
to live	derva-
to live in	daran-
to look at	tojs-
to look for	tèlas-
to love	salm-
to make	grät-
to plant	mäp-
to play	rej-
to pray	nyes-
to read	proz-
to receive	bèrill-
to run	okhyn-
to say	is-
to see	ivit-
to sell	vird-
to sing	ajang-
to sit	bun-
to sleep	rhèch-
to smell	aws-
to speak	sim-
to stand	minla-
to taste	aty-
to teach	sydon-
to think	bejë-
to throw	ghur-
to touch	tejv-
to walk	brin-
to want	majtas-
to wash	oznèr-
to wear	ilya-
to write	farn-
tongue	lèta
tooth	käga
top	khaj
tree	buri
true	chäll
ugly	qöbar
war	idyaza
warm	fynin
water	obla
wet	bol
white	ajzh
wide	wok
wind	fawa
wise	trodyn
woman	näli
wood	dräza
word	non
world	omari
wrong	nej
year	avèch
yellow	mingall
young	chel

Adjectives in Isian, like in English, aren’t that much of a problem. They don’t have a specific form that marks them out as what they truly are. They don’t change for number like nouns do. They’re really just…there. A few examples of Isian adjectives include wa “big”, hul “cold”, yali “happy”, and almerat “wise”.

As we saw in the last Isian post, the normal word order puts adjectives before nouns, and articles before adjectives. So we can make fuller noun phrases like ta wa talar “a big house” or e yali eshe “the happy girl”. In each case, the order is mostly the same as in English: article, then adjective, then noun.

We can even string adjectives together: es almerat afed sami “the wise old men”. (If you prefer adding commas between adjectives, that’s fine, too. It’s okay to write es almerat, afed sami, but it’s not required.)

Like in English, we can’t use an adjective like this without a noun. It’s not grammatical in Isian to say es almerat. Instead, we have to add an extra word, a: es almerat at “the wise ones”. (At least it has a regular plural form.) After a vowel, it becomes na: ta wa na “a big one”.

We can also use an adjective as a predicate. Here, it follows the copula (tet or one of its conjugations). An example might be en yali “I am happy”.

Isian adjectives also have equivalents to the English comparative and superlative (“-er” and “-est”) forms. As with many suffixes in the language, these vary based on the stem’s ending. For consonant-stems, the comparative is -in and the superlative is -ay. Vowel-stems simply insert a d at the beginning of the suffix to make -din and -dai, respectively. So yali “happy” becomes yalidin “happier* and yaliday “happiest”, while hul “cold” turns into hulin “colder” and hulai “coldest”.

There are a couple of differences, though. First, these suffixes can be used on any adjective; Isian has no counterparts to those English adjectives that require “more” and “most” instead of “-er” and “-est”. (On the plus side, we don’t have to worry about three forms for bil “good”. It’s fully regular: bil, bilin “better”, bilai “best”.)

Second, adjectives that are derived from nouns, like “manly” from “man”, usually can’t take the superlative. We haven’t yet seen any of those (or even how to make them). For these, the comparative serves both purposes.

That’s pretty much all there is to adjectives in Isian, as far as the basics are concerned. Now we can make quite a few more complex phrases and even some nice sentences. There’s still a lot more to come, though.

Isian word list

Not every word that we’ve seen is in this list, but it covers almost all of the “content” words in their base forms, along with a whole bunch of new ones you can try out. Also, words with irregular plurals have their plural suffixes shown in parenthesis, e.g., the plural of tay is tays.

English	Isian
air	rey
all	sota
angry	hayka
animal	embin
any	ese
arm	ton
back	bes
bad	num
beautiful	ichi
bed	dom
big	wa
bird	firin
bitter	guron
black	ocom
blood	miroc
blue	sush
boat	sholas
body	har
bone	colos
book	peran
bottom	dolis
boy	jed
bread	pinda(r)
bright	lukha
brother	doyan
car	choran
cat	her
chest	sinal
child	tay(s)
city	eblon
closed	noche
cloth	waf
cloud	albon
cold	hul
color	echil
correct	ochedan
cup	deta(s)
daughter	sali(r)
day	ja
daytime	jamet
dim	rum
dog	hu
door	opar
dress	lash
drink	adwar
dry	khen
ear	po(s)
earth	tirat
egg	gi(r)
every	alich
eye	bis
face	fayan
false	nanay
father	pado(s)
few	uni
field	bander
finger	ilca(s)
fire	cay
flower	atul
food	tema
foot	pusca
forest	tawetar
friend	chaley
front	hamat
fruit	chil
girl	eshe(r)
glass	arcol
gold	shayad
good	bil
grass	tisen
green	tich
hair	pardel
hand	fesh
happy	yali
hard	dosem
hat	hop
head	gol
heart	sir
hill	modas
hot	hes
house	talar
ice	yet
island	omis
king	lakh
knife	hasha
lake	fow
leaf	eta
left	kintes
leg	dul
light	say
long	lum
loud	otar
man	sam
many	mime
meat	shek
milk	mel
moon	nosul
mother	mati(r)
mountain	abrad
mouth	ula
name	ni
narrow	ilcot
net	rec
new	ekho
nice	nim
night	chok
nose	nun
not	an
old	afed
open	bered
paper	palil
peace	histil
pen	etes
person	has
plant	dires
poor	umar
pot	fan
queen	lasha(r)
rain	cabil
red	ray
rich	irdes
right	estes
river	ficha(s)
rock	tag
rough	okhor
sad	nulsa
scent	inos
sea	jadal
sharp	checor
shirt	jeda(s)
shoe	taf
short (tall)	wis
short (long)	wis
silent	anchen
sister	malin
skin	kirot
sky	halac
small	ish
smooth	fu
snow	saf
soft	ashel
son	sor
sound	polon
sour	garit
star	key
sun	sida
sweet	lishe
sword	seca
table	mico
tail	hame
tall	wad
thick	gus
thin	tin
to allow	likha
to ask	oca
to be	tet
to begin	nawe
to blow	furu
to build	oste
to burn	becre
to buy	tochi
to catch	sokhe
to come	cosa
to cook	piri
to cry	acho
to cut	sipe
to dance	danteri
to die	nayda
to do	te
to drink	jesa
to eat	hama
to end	tarki
to enter	yoweni
to feel	ilsi
to give	jimba
to go	wasa
to guard	holte
to have	fana
to hear	mawa
to hit	icra
to hold	otasi
to hunt	ostani
to kiss	fusa
to know	altema
to laugh	eya
to learn	nate
to like	mire
to live	liga
to live in	dalega
to look at	dachere
to look for	ediche
to love	hame
to make	tinte
to plant	destera
to play	bela
to pray	barda
to read	lenira
to receive	rano
to run	hota
to say	ki
to see	chere
to sell	dule
to sing	seri
to sit	uba
to sleep	inama
to smell	nore
to speak	go
to stand	ayba
to taste	cheche
to teach	reshone
to think	tico
to throw	bosa
to touch	shira
to walk	coto
to want	doche
to wash	hishi
to wear	disine
to write	roco
tongue	dogan
tooth	ten
top	poy
tree	taw
true	ferin
ugly	agosh
war	acros
warm	him
water	shos
wet	shured
white	bid
wide	pusan
wind	naf
wise	almerat
woman	shes
wood	totac
word	ur
world	sata(r)
wrong	noni
year	egal
yellow	majil
young	manir

We’ve talked about nouns. We’ve talked about verbs. That’s two of the main three parts of speech present in most languages, which leaves only one, and that one is the subject of this post.

Adjectives are describing words. They tell us something about a noun, such as its color (“red”), its shape (“round”), or its mood (“angry”). In theory, that’s pretty much all there is to the adjective, but we can’t stop there.

A brief introduction

Just about every language has adjectives. (Most of those that claim they don’t are merely cleverly disguising them.) And most languages have a few different sorts of adjectives. The main kind—probably the most interesting—is the attributive adjective. That’s the one that modifies a noun or noun phrase to add detail: “the red door”, “a big deal”. We’ll be seeing a lot of these.

Predicate adjectives don’t directly modify a noun phrase. Instead, they function as a “predicate”, basically like the object to a verb, as in English “the child is happy“, “that man is tall“. We’ll talk more about them a little later, because they can be quite special.

Most of the other types besides these two aren’t quite as important, but they serve to show that adjectives are flighty. Some languages let them act like nouns (the canonical English example is the biblical quote “the meek shall inherit the earth”). Some treat them like verbs, a more extreme variant of the predicate adjective where it’s the adjective itself that is marked for tense and concord and all the other verb stuff. Adjectives can even have their own phrases, just like nouns and verbs. In this case, other adjectives (or adverbs) modify the main one, further specifying meaning.

So there’s actually a lot more to the humble adjective than meets the eye.

Attributives

First, we’ll look at the attributive adjectives. Except for the head noun, these will probably be the “meatiest” portions of noun phrases, in terms of how much meaning they provide. Depending on the language, they can go either before or after a noun, as we saw when we looked at word order. English, for example, puts them before, while Spanish likes them to go after the head noun.

In languages with lots of nominal distinction (case, number, gender, etc.), there’s a decision to be made. Do adjectives follow their head nouns in taking markers for these categories? They do in Spanish (la casa grande, las casas grandes), but not in English (“the big house”, “the big houses”). Also, if gender is assigned haphazardly, as it is in so many languages, do adjectives have a “natural” gender, or are there, say, separate masculine and feminine forms? What about articles? Arabic, for example, requires an adjective to take the definite article al- if it modifies a noun with one. Basically, the question can be summed up as, “How much are attributive adjectives like nouns?”

English is near one end of the spectrum. An English adjective has no special plural form; indeed, it doesn’t change much at all. At the other end, we can imagine adjectives that are allowed to completely take the place of nouns, where they are inflected for case and number and everything else, and they function as the heads of noun phrases, perhaps with a suffix or something to remind people of their true nature. Languages like this, in fact, are the norm, and English is more like the exception.

Predicates

Predicate adjectives (the technical term is actually “predicative”, but I find it a bit clumsy), by contrast, seem more like verbs. In English, as in many languages, they are typically the objects of the copula verb, the equivalent of “to be”. They’re still used to modify a noun, but in a different way.

Again, as with attributives, we can ask, “How verb-like are they?” There’s not too much difference between “the man is eating” and “the man is hungry“, at least as far as word order is concerned, but that’s where the similarities end in English. We can’t have a predicate adjective in the past tense (although we can have a copula in it), but other languages do allow this. For some, predicates are verbs, in essentially every aspect, including agreement markers and other bits of verbal morphology; others allow either option, leaning one way or the other. Strangely enough, the familiar European languages are strict in their avoidance of verbal adjectives, instead preferring copulas.

If a language does permit adjectives to take on the semblance of verbs, then what parts of it? Are they conjugated for tense? Do they have agreement markers? Is every adjective a potential verb, or are only some of them? This last is an interesting notion, as the “split” between verbal predicates and nonverbal ones can be based on any number of factors, a bit like noun gender. A common theme is to allow some adjectives to function as verbs when they represent a temporary state, but require a nonverbal construction when they describe inherent qualities.

Comparison

Since adjectives describe qualities of a noun, it’s natural to want to compare them. Of course, not all of them can be compared; which ones can is different for different languages. In English, it’s largely a matter of semantics: “most optimum”, among others, is considered incorrect or redundant. But most adjectives are comparable. This isn’t the case with every language, however. Some have only a special set of comparable adjectives, and a few have none at all.

Some languages offer degrees of comparison, like English’s “big/bigger/biggest” or “complex/more complex/most complex”. In these cases, the second of the trio is called the comparative, while the third is the superlative. (I don’t know of any languages that have more than three degrees of comparison, but nothing says it’s impossible. Alien conlangers, take note.)

Looking ahead

Determiners are a special class of word that includes articles (like “a” and “the”), demonstratives (“this” and “that”), possessives (“my”, “his”), and a few other odds and ends. They work a bit like adjectives, and older grammars often considered them a subset. But that has fallen out of fashion, and now they’re their own thing. I mention them here partly as a taste of things to come, and as a good lead-in for next time. I’ll talk much more about them in the next theory post, which covers pronouns, since that’s what they seem most like to me.

At this point, we’re done with the “grind” of conlanging. So far, we’ve covered everything from the sounds of a language, to the formation of words, and the three big grammatical categories of noun, verb, and adjective. Sure, we could delve deeper into any of these, and entire textbooks have been written on all of these topics, but we don’t have to worry about that. We can deal with the details as they arise. There’s plenty more to come—we haven’t even begun to look at pronouns or prepositions or even adverbs—but the hardest part, I feel, is behind us. We’re well on our way. Next, we’ll take a look at adjectives in Isian and Ardari, and you’ll get to see the first true sentences in both conlangs, along with a large selection of vocabulary.

After the rather long post last time, you’ll be happy to know that describing the word order for our two conlangs is actually quite simple. Of course, a real grammar for a language would need to go into excruciating detail, but we’re just sketching things out at this stage. We can fill in exceptions to the rules as they come. And, if you’re making a natural-looking conlang, then they will come.

Sentences

The sentence level is where Isian and Ardari diverge the most. Isian is an SVO language, like English; subjects go before the verb, while objects go after. So we might have e sam cheres ta hu “the man saw a dog”. (By the way, this is a complete sentence, but we’ll ignore punctuation and capitalization for the time being.) For intransitive sentences, the order is simply SV: es tays ade eya “the children are laughing”. Oblique arguments, when we eventually see them, will immediately follow the verb.

Ardari is a little different. Instead of SVO, this language is SOV, although it’s not quite as attached to its ordering as Isian. Most sentences, however, will end with a verb; those that don’t will generally have a good reason not to. Using the same example above, we have konatö rhasan ivitad “the man saw a dog”. Intransitives are usually the same SV as Isian: sèdar jejses “the children are laughing”. We can change things around a little, though. An Ardari speaker would understand you if you said rhasan konatö ivitad, although he might wonder what was so important about the dog.

Verb phrases

There’s not too much to verb phrases in either of our conlangs, mostly because we haven’t talked much about them. Still, I’ll assume you know enough about English grammar to follow along.

For Isian, calling it “order” might be too much. Adverbs and auxiliary verbs will come before the head verb, but oblique clauses will follow it. This is pretty familiar to English speakers, and—with a few exceptions that will pop up later—Isian verb phrases are going to look a lot like their English counterparts.

Ardari might seem a little bit more complicated, but it’s really just unusual compared to what you know. The general rule for Ardari verb phrases (and the other types of phrases, for the most part) is simple: the head goes last. This is basically an extension to the SOV sentence order, carried throughout the language, and it’s common in SOV languages. (Look at Japanese for a good example.) So adverbs and oblique clauses and all the rest will all come before the main verb.

Noun phrases

Because of all the different possibilities, there’s no easy way of describing noun phrase order. For Isian, it’s actually quite complex, and almost entirely fixed, again like English. The basic order is this:

• Determiners come first. These can be articles, numerals, or demonstratives. (We’ll meet these last two in a later post.)
• Next are adjectives, which can also be phrases in their own right.
• Complement clauses come next. These are hard to explain, so it’s best to wait until later.
• Attributive words are next. This type of noun is what creates English compounds like “boat house”.
• After these comes the head noun, buried in the middle of things.
• After the head, some nouns can have an infinitive or subjunctive phrase added in here.
• Prepositional phrases are next.
• Lastly, we have the relative clauses.

That’s a lot, but few noun phrases are going to have all of these. Most will get by with a noun, maybe an adjective or two, and possibly a relative or prepositional phrase.

Ardari isn’t nearly as bad. Once again, the head is final, and this means the noun. Everything else comes before it, in this order:

• Demonstratives and numerals come first. (Ardari doesn’t have articles, remember.)
• Attributive adjectives and nouns are next, along with a few types of oblique phrases that we’ll mention as they come up.
• Relative, complement, postpositional, adjectival, and other complex clauses, go after these.
• The head noun goes here, and this is technically the end of the noun phrase.
• Some adverb clauses that modify nouns can appear after the head, but these are rare.

For the most part, the order doesn’t matter so much in Ardari, as long as each phrase is self-contained. Since it’s easy to tell when a phrase ends (when it gets to the head noun/verb/adjective/whatever), we can mix things up without worry. The above is the most “natural” order, the one that our fictitious Ardari speakers will use by default.

Prepositions

Isian has prepositions, and they work just like those in English. Ardari, on the other hand, uses post-positions, which follow their noun phrases, again another example of its head-final nature. (The “head” of a prepositional phrase is the preposition itself, not the head noun.) We’ll definitely see a lot of both of these in the coming weeks.

Everything else

All the other possible types of phrase will be dealt with in time. For Ardari, the general rule of “head goes at the end” carries through most of them. Isian is more varied, but it will usually stick to something approximating English norms.

Looking ahead

Next up is adjectives, which will give us a way to make much more interesting sentences in both our fledgling conlangs. We’ll also get quite a bit more vocabulary, and possibly our first full translations. (We’ll see about that one. They may be left as exercises for the reader.)

Beyond that, things will start to become less structured. With the linguistic trinity of noun-verb-adjective out of the way, the whole world of language opens up. Think of everything so far as the tutorial mission. Soon, we’ll enter the open sandbox.

We’ve looked at nouns and verbs in isolation, and even in a few simple phrases. Now it’s time to start putting things together, using these small parts as building blocks to create larger, more complex utterances. To do that, though, we need to set a few ground rules, because there’s a big difference between a jumble of words and a grammatically correct sentence. We must have order.

You have a few different options for going about this. Personally, I like to take a “top-down” approach, starting at the level of sentences and working my way down. Others prefer the “bottom-up” approach, where you work out the rules for noun phrases, verb phrases, and so on before putting them all into a sentence. Either way is fine, but the bottom-up fans will have to wait to apply the lessons of this part, since we haven’t even begun to cover adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and all the other little bits of a language. (We’ll get to them soon, I promise.)

The sentence

Obviously, the biggest unit of speech where grammar rules actually come into play is the sentence. And sentences can be divided into a few different parts. Pretty much every one of them, for example, has a verb or verb phrase, which we’ll label V. Transitive sentences also have a subject (S) and an object (O); both of these are typically noun phrases. Intransitives, as you’ll recall, only have one argument, which we’ll also call the subject. There are also oblique phrases, which are sort of like an adverb; these will come into play a bit later, where we’ll label them X, following the convention in WALS Chapter 84. Some other kinds of phrases, like prepositions, quoted speech, and conjunctions, don’t really factor into the main word order, so we’ll look at them as they come up.

Given a basic transitive sentence, then, we have three main parts: S, V, and O. A simple count should show you that there are six possibilities of ordering them, and every one of those six is attested by some natural language in the world. The SVO order (subject-verb-object) is certainly familiar, as it’s the one used in English. SOV shows up in a number of European languages, and it’s also the main order in Japanese. The others will likely sound “off” to you; OSV and VOS, for example, are utterly alien to Western ears, which is why they were used to make Yoda sound alien.

In terms of statistics, SVO and SOV are about even around the world, SOV having a slight edge. The two of them together account for somewhere around 80% of all natural languages. VSO is a distant third, at about 10-15%, but you’ll no doubt recognized some of those: Arabic, Welsh, Irish, and Tagalog, among many others. These three, a total of over 90% or the world’s languages, all have one thing in common: the subject comes before the object.

The rest of the possibilities, where the object comes first, are much rarer, and many of those languages also allow a more common subject-first ordering. Of the three, VOS is the most common in the WALS survey, with such examples as Kiribati and Malagasy. OVS, the mirror image of English, is listed as the main form in eleven languages, including such notables as Hixkaryana and Tuvaluan. OSV, in their survey of over 1,300 languages (about a quarter of the world’s total), only shows up as dominant in Kxoe, Nadëb, Tobati, and Wik Ngathana, and I couldn’t tell you a single thing about any of them.

Conlangs have a slightly different distribution, owing to the artistic differences of their authors. According to CALS, the conlang counterpart to WALS, SVO has a narrow edge over SOV, but VSO is much more common than in the real world. The object-first trio also makes up a bigger percentage, but it’s still vastly outnumbered by the subject-first languages.

It’s certainly possible for a language to have no main word order for its sentences. This tends to be the case (pardon the pun) in languages that have case systems, but it’s also possible in caseless languages. There are even a few languages where there are two major word orders. German is an example of this; it’s normally SVO, but many sentences with more complex verb phrases often push the main verb to the end, effectively becoming SOV.

Now, in intransitive sentences, things can change a little bit. Since there’s no real object, you only have two possibilities: SV and VS. SV, as you might expect, is vastly more popular (about 6:1). But the distinct minority of VS languages also includes many of the ergative languages, which are normally SOV or SVO. Ergative languages often treat the subject of an intransitive verb like the direct object of a transitive one, so a VS order almost makes sense.

Noun phrases

Moving on, we’ll go down a level and look at those subject and object phrases. Since we haven’t quite made it to adjectives and the like, this will necessarily be a bit abstract. In general, though, noun phrases aren’t exactly like sentences. They have a head noun, the main part of the phrase, and a bunch of potential modifiers to that head. These modifiers can go either before or after the head, and their order (relative to each other) is often fixed. For example, English allows a noun phrase like the three big men, with an article, numeral, and an adjective all preceding the noun. No other permutation of these four elements is grammatically correct, though. We can’t say the big three men; the big three is okay, but then three becomes the head noun.

So we’ll have to do things a little different for this section. Instead of showing all the possible orderings of all the different parts of a noun phrase, we’ll look at each one individually.

• Articles: Articles are a little weird. If they’re separate words, they’re often the first part of a noun phrase. If they’re suffixes or similar, then they’re last. And then you have something like Arabic, where the article is a prefix that attaches to both the nouns and adjectives in a phrase.

• Adjectives: The topic of the next part of this series, adjectives are the main modifier words. English is actually in a minority by having its adjectives precede nouns, but it’s a sizable minority: about 25%. Noun-adjective languages make up about 60%, and there’s also a group that allows either possibility. But this tends to run in families. All the Germanic languages like adjectives first, but the Romance ones are the other way around.

• Demonstratives: These are words like this in this man. Here, it’s too close to call. (Seriously, WALS has it as 561-542 in favor of demonstratives after nouns.) Again, though, it’s very much a familial trait. The only following-demonstrative languages in Europe are a few Celtic languages and Basque, which is always the outlier. Most of Southeast Asia, on the other hand, likes their demonstratives to be last.

• Numerals: The “number” words are another close split, but not quite even. Call it 55-45, with following numerals having the lead. However, you could say this is due to politics. Africa, Asia, and New Guinea, with their vast numbers of languages, tip the scales. Europe, with its large, united, national languages, is universally numerals-first.

• Genitives: This means any kind of possession, ownership, kinship, and a few other categories, not necessarily the genitive case. Genitives tend to come before nouns, again around 55%. English is among the rarities by having two different versions, one on either side of the divide: Jack’s house, the home of the brave. This one is actually somewhat related to sentence order; VO languages tend to have noun-genitive ordering, while OV languages are more likely to be genitive-first.

• Relative clauses: We won’t be covering these for a long time, but we can already see where they’ll go. Overwhelmingly, it turns out, they go after the noun. It’s possible to have them before the noun, though, and there’s one example in Europe. (Guess which one.) It’s more common in Asia, except the Middle East. Some Native American languages even do a weird thing where they put the head noun inside the relative clause. You’ll have to look that one up yourself, or wait until the big “relative clauses” post in about three months.

Other phrases

There aren’t too many options for other phrases. Verb phrases have the option of putting adverbs before or after the head verb, the same as adjectives and nouns. Adjectives themselves can be modified, and they then become the head of their own adjective phrase, with its own order.

One case that is interesting is that of prepositions. These are the little words like in or short phrases like in front of, and we’ll see a lot more of them soon. They’re actually the heads of their own type of phrase, known in English as the prepositional phrase. And in English, they precede the rest of that phrase: at the house, in front of the car.

Well, that’s not the only option. You can also put the preposition at the end of its phrase, and this is more common in the world’s languages. Of course, then the name “preposition” doesn’t make much sense, so these are called postpositions. They’re not common in Europe, except in the non-Indo-European parts (Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian, and—naturally—Basque). Most of India likes them, though, as do Iran, Georgia, and Armenia. They’re also popular among the many languages of South America.

Conclusion

Basically, any time you have more than one word, you have word order. Some languages don’t make much of a fuss about it. Cases let you be free in your wording, because it doesn’t matter where an object goes if it always has an accusative suffix on it. French and Spanish allow some adjectives before the noun (e.g., grand prix), even though most of them have to follow it. And poets have made a living breaking the rules. Conlangers, really, aren’t much different.

But rules can be helpful, too. If every sentence ends with a verb, then you always know when you’ve reached the end. (There’s a joke about a German professor in here, but I don’t remember all of it.) For conlangs, word order rules become a kind of template. I know my language is VSO, for example, so I can look at real-world VSO languages for inspiration. Those tend to have prepositions, so my language will, too, because I want it to feel natural. Auxiliary languages are even more in need of hard and fast rules about word order, and they will certainly want to follow the observed connections.

In the next post, we’ll look at how Isian and Ardari put their sentences and phrases together. Then, it’s on to adjectives, the third jewel in the linguistic Triple Crown.