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.