Category: Writing

How are you? What’s up? What am I talking about?

Up to this point, our look at language has focused primarily on the declarative, statements and utterances of fact or conjecture. That’s great, because those make up the largest part of a language, but now it’s time to move on. Why? Because we need to ask questions.

Asking the question

How do we ask a question? In English, you already know the answer, and it’s pretty complicated. Worse, it’s complicated in different ways depending on what kind of question you’re asking. So let’s take a step back.

Questions (interrogatives, if you prefer the more technical term) are, at their core, requests for information. We don’t know, so we have to ask. We’ve already met a couple of cases where we didn’t know something, like the subjunctive mood, and “interrogative” can indeed count as its own mood. But questions are a little different, because they are directed at the listener with the intention of receiving an answer.

If you think about it, you’ll find that questions fall into a few different categories. One is the yes-no or polar question; as its name suggests, this kind expects one of two answers: an affirmative (“yes”) or a negative (“no”). Examples of polar questions in English might be “Are you going with us?” or “Did you see that?” For English, yes-no questions are marked by “inversion”, where the verb (or an appropriate auxiliary, like do) is moved to the front of the sentence, and that’s fairly common in its relatives and neighbors, such as German and French. It was even more common in the past, as anyone reading Shakespeare or the King James Version of the Bible would know.

Another kind of question is usually known as the wh-question, after its most distinctive feature in English. These are the ones that request a specific bit of information like identity, location, or reason, asking things like “Who are you?” or “Where are we going?” In our language, they employ one of a handful of question words (“who”, “what”, “where”, “when”, “why”, and “how”), that most often appear the beginning of a sentence. This type of question also has inversion, but only after the question word has moved into place.

Alternative or choice questions make up a third type. “Do you want grape or orange?” is an example showing how this one works. Options are presented, with the expectation that the answer will be among them. This one allows, even begs for, an answer in the form of a simple stating of the preferred choice. This sort of elliptical response (a sentence consisting solely of “Grape,” for example) is very common, especially in speech, no matter what the formal grammar of a language might say.

Tag and negative questions, the last two of the major types, are similar to each other in that they both presuppose an answer, but they go about it in different ways. Negative questions use a negated form of a verb, as in “Aren’t you coming?” Tag questions, on the other hand, are formed as indicative statements “tagged” by an additional interrogative bit at the end: “You’re coming, aren’t you?” Strictly speaking, these are both polar questions, in that they invite a yes/no response, but the prototypical yes-no question (“Are you coming?” in this example) has a more neutral tone. Negatives are asked from a position of expecting a negative reply, while tag questions work more for confirmation or even confrontation.

Keep asking

English, again, is pretty complicated when it comes to questions. Polar and wh-questions use inversion, while wh-questions add an interrogative word into the mix. Tag questions basically have their own set of interrogative words (“you know”, “isn’t it”, and so on) that go at the end of a sentence, turning a statement into a question. All in all, there’s a lot to worry about, and other languages have their own systems.

There is one universal, however, and that is intonation. Nearly all known human languages, mo matter how they form polar questions, have a specific way of marking them. The intonation, or pitch level, of yes-no question sentences always rises from beginning to end. In English, it’s even possible to have this as the sole indication of a spoken interrogative, as in the statement “you’re coming” versus the question “you’re coming?” Some other languages, such as Spanish, only allow this method, as opposed to the inversion usual in English. (Question marks serve essentially the same purpose in these cases, but for the written form of the language.)

Looking around the world, you’ve got a few other options, though. You can add an interrogative mood marker to the verb, as in Turkish and others; this is probably going to be more common in languages where verbs already have a lot of marking. Another option is an interrogative particle, which can go just about anywhere. Polish has czy at the beginning of a question, which Esperanto lifted directly as ĉu. Japanese has the sentence-ending ka (phrases ending in “…desu ka?” are known to every lover of anime), fitting its hardcore head-finality. Latin puts nē in a kind of “second” position, after the questioned part; it also has the similar num for negative questions and nonne for positives.

Chinese, among others, takes a different approach, sometimes referred to as A-not-A. Here, the polarity is redefined in the form of an alternative question: a rough translation might go something like, “Is he there or not?” (“He is/is not there?” comes closer to the original, at the expense of being horrible clunky.) Another option, more likely to be found in colloquial speech rather than formal grammar, is through liberal use of tag questions or something like them.

Tag questions themselves are likely to be marked only by the tag and its intonation, as above. Wh-questions, on the other hand, have potential for more variation in their formation. Many languages use question words like those in English, and they are commonly moved to the front of a sentence, functioning as their own question particles. That’s not the case everywhere, however; although it has a specific connotation in English, we can still ask, “You want what?” (Unlike polar questions, intonation isn’t a guide here. English continues to use rising pitch for wh-questions, but Russian, for instance, doesn’t.)

The answer

Asking a question is one thing. Answering it is quite another. And answers to questions have their own grammar and syntax beyond what a normal statement would require.

Very many languages, maybe even all of them, allow a speaker to omit quite a bit when responding to a question. “Yes” and “no” can be sentences all by themselves in English, as can “si” in Spanish or “non” in French. Not every language, though, has equivalents; some instead repeat part of the question in a positive or negative form. Still others have two versions of “yes” and “no”, with one pair used for answering positive sentences, the other for negatives. (Even those that don’t can vary in the meaning of “no” when it answers a negative question. Does that create a double negative? It does in Japanese, but not English.)

Beyond polar questions, how much of a reply you need often depends on what you’re being asked. In general, a lot of languages allow you to express only the most specific part of a phrase under question: “Where are you going?” can be answered by “Home.” A fuller answer would be “I’m going home,” but the short form is perfectly acceptable in speech, and not only in English.

Further questions

So that’s it for questions in general. Next, we’ll look at the very specific question of, er, questions in our conlangs.

Now that we have the theory out of the way, adverbs—whether words, phrases, or clauses—aren’t going to be too bad, for either Isian or Ardari. We already got a glimpse of them in both languages, back in the Babel Text, but now it’s time to see them for real.

Isian

As always, we start with Isian. As you may recall, Isian adjectives normally can’t appear without a head noun. Well, now they can, and that’s how we make most adverbs.

In Isian, we use postpositions, and the postposition hi is our go-to for adverbs. It’s the equivalent of English -ly, Spanish -mente, and so on, making adverbs out of adjectives. Examples might include ichi hi “beautifully” (from ichi) or bil hi “well” (from bil “good”, with no stem change like in English). Couldn’t be simpler.

We can fit these into sentences by placing them just about anywhere. Just before or just after the verb phrase are the most common, though. An example might be sha seri ichi hi “she sings beautifully”, which could also be written sha ichi hi seri.

Little hi can also work for phrases, with almost the same meaning. Take the sentence mi doyan hi cheren im “I see him as my brother”. Granted, it’s a little on the metaphorical side, but it illustrates the point. (You can write this one as cheren im mi doyan hi if you like, but that way emphasizes the object “him” rather than the adverbial phrase.)

For full clauses, we need a little bit more grammar. First, we have the general conjunction ha, which introduces adverbial clauses. In certain informal situations, we don’t have to put it in, but it’s mandatory otherwise. Second, since Isian uses postpositions, it also has “clause-final” conjunctions. Thus, the words that would translate as “before”, “after”, and so on appear at the end of the phrase, not the beginning, as in English.

These two rules cover most of what we need to know, and we can already make quite a few clauses. Here’s a couple of examples:

• is hamas ha is inamas pane, “they ate before they went to sleep”
• mit las an wasanda ha is likhas mida todo, “we couldn’t go because they wouldn’t let us”
• em cosata ha cheren es abradi terta, “I came to see the mountains”

For all subordinate clauses like this, Isian’s default is independent. Dependent clauses are only allowed in a few cases, namely those of purpose or cause. (Desire or wanting, using the verb doche, allows dependents, too, but that’s not really an adverbial.)

To construct a dependent clause, all you need to do is use the infinitive form of the verb, which is the bare verbal stem (or 3rd-person singular present, which has the same form) preceded by cu. Thus, we might have cu chere “to see” or cu lenira “to read”. From there, the clause mostly follows English rules, except that the conjunction goes at the end, if it’s there at all.

Of our examples above, only the third can be rewritten as a dependent: em cosata cu chere es abradi. The first indicates time, which isn’t allowed to be “deranked” in this fashion, while the second has different subjects in the main and subordinate clauses. (Like English, we only get to use the infinitive version when the subjects would be the same.)

Ardari

Ardari, curiously enough, starts out easier than Isian: adjectives can be used as adverbs directly. They don’t inflect like this; they’re just…there. An example is ti ojet ajanga “she sings sweetly”.

Strictly speaking, Ardari doesn’t have simple adverb phrases, so we’ll skip ahead to the clauses. For this conlang, there’s a distinction in those. “Purpose” clauses (along with “wants” and perception, though these aren’t adverbial in nature) are always dependent, but everything else is normally independent.

These two groups are distinct in their position, as well. Dependents always precede the head verb, while independents are allowed to follow it, one of the few flaws in Ardari’s head-final nature. But independent clauses can be moved around freely, even fronted, like in English.

If that weren’t bad enough, adverbial clauses of time can appear in either form. In speech, it’s considered better to use the dependent form unless you absolutely need them at the beginning of the sentence. Writing prefers independents, mostly at the end of the sentence.

Okay, but how do we do it? For the independent clauses, there’s almost nothing to do. Put the adverbial clause after the main one, then put the appropriate conjunction at the end: my syne zejman anyerodyill salmotya byu, “I’ll give you these because I love you”. Since Ardari is otherwise head-final, the simple fact that something follows the verb is a sign that we have an adverbial clause.

Dependents are a little harder, but not much. As with Isian, we need an infinitive verb. For Ardari, it’s the verb stem followed by ky: dyem ky “to buy”, ivit ky “to see”. This goes at the end of the clause, followed by the normal conjunction: my fèse dyem ky chinod, “I went to buy food”.

Of course, there’s a slight problem of ambiguity that could crop up here. Because these clauses appear before the verb, with nothing to mark them off as special, we don’t really know when they start. In practice, though, it’s not that bad. Context helps. (Plus, it’s natural. No language is fully regular and unambiguous.)

Now, knowing all of this, we can get back to adverbial phrases. Ardari handles them like they were a special kind of dependent clause, using the infinitive form of the copula, èll ky: zall èll ky “like this”. (Perhaps in the future, this might evolve into an adverb-making suffix -èlky. Who knows?)

That’s it

Once again, it’s harder to describe something than to put it into action. That was the case with relative clauses a few weeks ago, and it’s the case today. But now we have adverbs, which fills in just about the last box in our list of parts of speech. Almost any kind of statement is possible now.

Next time, we’ll look at questions. Not the kind you certainly have, but the kind speakers of a language will be asking. We’ll see how they’re made and how we can make them.

As we move into Act II of our language-making show, let’s pick up one of the loose threads from last week’s Babel Text: adverbs. When I say “adverb”, though, I’m not just talking about words like English “hardly” and “badly”, but any word or phrase that changes and refines the meaning of a verb. That includes certain phrases that we can call adverbial or subordinate clauses. We’ll see what those are in just a minute, but we should first back up and think about the very idea of an adverb.

The forgotten one

Adverbs, broadly speaking, are to verbs what adjectives are to nouns. They modify the meaning, allowing us to express finer distinctions. Verbs, remember, represent actions, so adverbs are what we use to tell how an action happens. Examples like “she sings happily” or “the clouds are hanging menacingly” show the most familiar of these adverbs.

Of course, there’s always more to the story. Not all adverbs really modify verbs. Some in English, for instance, modify whole sentences. Grammar pedants don’t like it, but that’s what has happened with words such as “hopefully”. And English also has words like “manly” that look like adverbs but fill the role of an adjective.

And then there are languages that don’t actually have a separate collection of adverbs at all. Many of these have no problem allowing an adjective to modify either a noun or a verb; in the latter case, it functions like an adverb, even though there’s no indication that it is one.

(If that weren’t enough, there is another way of defining adverbs: as grammatical words that don’t fit into any other category. That’s a negative definition that isn’t exactly helpful to those making their own languages, but it’s useful to know. Some languages do see adverbs this way, as a closed class of words separate from the other parts of speech, with the more common “adverbs” being derived regularly from adjectives.)

Really making

The largest group of adverbs (or what would be called adverbs) in most languages includes those derived from adjectives and meaning something like “in an X way” or simply “like X”. In English, we can make most of these with the -ly suffix: “real” becomes “really”, etc. Plenty of other languages have their own counterparts that are very similar in use, including Spanish -mente and Japanese -ku, to name only two.

Another common option is, well, nothing at all. Adjectives in many languages can be used directly as adverbs. In these cases, they might not be inflected as usual for case or number (since they won’t be modifying a noun), and they likely won’t appear in their customary position. But those would be the only ways you could tell the difference.

Every other word derivation is possible, too. You can have suffixes, prefixes, extra words before or after, and just about anything else you can think of. For widely-used adverbs, irregularities might arise, especially if the adjective itself already has them. English good is one example, forming the adverb well, to the consternation of schoolchildren everywhere. (The regular goodly also exists, but it has a much different connotation.)

Finally, adverbs aren’t necessarily always derived from adjectives. Words like “soon”, for example, are only adverbial. (It’s not a coincidence that most of the ones you can think of have something to do with time.) It’s perfectly possible to make an adverb from a noun or even a verb, as well. But these probably aren’t going to be made into a simple word; we need a phrase.

As an adverb

When one word just won’t do, adverbial phrases come to the rescue. What are they? Well, it’s right there in the name. An adverbial phrase is nothing more than a phrase that acts like an adverb. (Coincidentally enough, that last sentence perfectly illustrates my point: “like an adverb” is, in fact, an adverbial phrase!)

In English, many adverbial phrases are essentially prepositional phrases used as adverbs. They’re more likely to use “temporal” prepositions like before or when, since those don’t make as much sense for nouns, but anything is possible.

Grammatically speaking, the same is true. If a language allows them, adverbial phrases tend to take the same form as prepositional (or postpositional or whatever) phrases. It’s easy to see why, as the adverbial function only generalizes the idea of prepositions.

Because the clause

The adverbial clause, on the other hand, is a totally different animal. Here, we’re not talking about a little noun phrase, but a whole clause. It could be an entire sentence (an independent clause) or only a fragment unable to stand alone (a subordinate clause). Either way, it also works as an adverb, so it’s a good idea to look at it here.

The key difference between adverbial phrases and clauses is that a clause has a predicate. It’s usually a verb, but some languages only require something with a verbal meaning. (A language with a zero-copula construction, for example, could conceivably have a subordinate clause with only a subject and an object.)

Some of these verbs will be inflected like any other verb in the language. Take, for instance, this English sentence: “It started raining while I was walking home.” The marked part is the adverbial clause, and you can see that, except for the conjunction while, the clause could stand on its own as a sentence.

Now, on the other hand, let’s instead say, “I saw the rain while walking home.” This time, we still have a predicate (walking home), but it can’t stand alone. The special form of the verb, walking instead of walk, is our cue for this.

In English grammar, we call the first example an independent clause, while the second is a dependent one. Some linguists instead refer to them as balanced and deranked clauses, respectively. Either way, the difference between them is clear: one can be “broken out” into its own sentence, while the other can’t.

Counting the ways

Adverbial clauses come in a few different categories. Each has a different meaning and a different set of conjunctions that connect it to the rest of the sentence.

Here are the primary types of clauses, each with a brief definition and an example sentence. We’ll use them later. In the examples, the conjunction that introduces the adverbial clause is emphasized, and the clause itself is everything that follows.

• Purpose: the purpose of an action; “I went home so that I could take a shower”

• Time: when something happens, relative to some other time or event; “the boys played in the sand when they went to the beach”

• Reason: the reason why something happens; “I can’t come because I am sick”

• Place: the position or location of an action or event; “they like it where they live”

• Manner: the way something is done; “this book wasn’t written how I would have liked it”

• Condition: a possibility or consequence, an “if-then” situation; “bad things will happen if you go out in the storm”

There are a couple of others, but they work about the same. Clauses indicating results are similar to those of reason, and concessions are pretty close to conditions. Comparisons are worthy of their own topic, which will come a bit later.

Any of these clauses, though, can be used as adverbs. In English, as you can see above, they often follow the verb, like an object; this isn’t absolutely necessary, and any one of them can be rearranged to put the adverbial clause at the front.

Note, too, that they’re all independent. Taking that away isn’t quite as easy, and it doesn’t always work. It does in some cases, though, as long as the subject of both clauses is the same. We could say, for example, “I went home to take a shower“, creating a dependent clause. Mostly, English prefers “balanced” clauses, to use WALS terminology, permitting “deranked” as an occasional option. (In terms of style, dependent clauses sound slightly more formal or less “personal”, at least to me.)

Constructing the clause

While the general definition of an adverbial clause isn’t that dependent on a specific language, how they’re formed is. For English, as you can see, you first need a conjunction. Then, you have the clause itself. For dependent (or deranked, if you prefer) clauses, the verb appears as either an infinitive or a gerund, depending on what you’re trying to say; either way, it’s not the usual inflected form that you’d use in a “proper” sentence. Independent (balanced, hence the name) clauses have fully inflected verbs, although that isn’t saying much in English.

But how do you do it in a conlang? Well, that truly depends. They’re probably going to look a lot like prepositional phrases, however you do those. Verb-final languages will likely end an adverbial clause with the conjunction, and the clauses themselves will tend to be farther forward in the sentence. SVO or VSO languages would go the other way, more like English.

But this kind of phrase isn’t a core part of a sentence, so there’s nothing to stop it from “floating”. Adverbial clauses can show up anywhere. English allows them at the front, in the back, and even in the middle. Of course, you can be strict, too, if you like. You aren’t going to see many adverbs at the end of a Japanese sentence, after all.

Next up

Next week, we’ll look at how Isian and Ardari tame these monstrous clauses. Then, it’s time to answer something you’ve probably asked once or twice: how do we ask a question?

We’re taking a bit of a week off this time. Don’t worry, there’s more to come later on, but today is the first day of the new year, a time to take a break, a time to reflect on the 366 days to come. (2016 is a leap year, remember.) We’ve gone through ten parts of this series already, and we’ve come a long way. But there’s still a longer way to go, although the pace for this year won’t be quite as hectic.

So, to celebrate this new year of conlanging, here’s what we’re going to do. Today, you’ll get to see the first significant text in each of our two languages, Isian and Ardari. That text is the Babel Text, the first nine verses of Genesis 11. Sure, it’s a religious writing, but that’s okay, because we’re not interested in it for its theology, but for its linguistics.

Babel

The Babel Text is one of those “classic” tests of a conlang. It really has it all, grammatically speaking: tenses, moods, aspects, and all those different kinds of clauses. (Some of them we haven’t seen yet, but we can deal.) Plus, the story itself is about language, the Biblical account of the making of the world’s languages. Essentially, it’s a fable, one originally meant to be told orally. We’ll write it here, though, since that’s easier.

If you want to play along at home, you can use whichever version of the text you like. I’ve gone with this one, derived from the NRSV:

1. Now the whole earth had one language and the same words.

2. And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there.

3. And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar.

4. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.”

5. The LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built.

6. And the LORD said, “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.

7. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.”

8. So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city.

9. Therefore it was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of all the earth; and from there the LORD scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.

So that’s what we’re working with. (Yours, of course, may be different.) Now let’s see how it looks in our made-up languages.

Isian

First off, here’s the full text translated into Isian:

1. Nec hi, e sota sata fanas yan sangoy wa es ilir beti.

2. Ad ha is mishas si way keres, is cosas ta abe e Shinar tor i, ar is dalegas.

3. Ad is kis lan es, “Cosa, ad tinte gados, ar becre sota hi sim.” Ar is fanas gadocat sencat afich, wa arcay empan afich.

4. Toc hi, is kis, “Cosa, ad oste lan ir ta eblon, wa ta farin ke ey poy e timirot i, ar tinte ni lan ir. Loydaro mit hade par nos basagima e fayan e sata o sos.”

5. E Domo esto cosas ha i chere e eblon wa e farin ke ostec im nakhit at terta.

6. Ad e Domo kis, “Chere, is e yan cudisa, ar sota sim o fana yan sangoy, ar ne yahi e cu nawe ed ke te im is o. Anocal ke is wachi cu te nec nos e arisosan im ir.

7. Cosa, esto wasa, ar golbata si sangoy til ni, ha is an nos noyta le gonas terta.”

8. Teti, e Domo hade basagis sim til fo e fayan e sata o sos, ar is tarcas cu oste e eblon.

9. Teyno, i par pasa Babel, ha e Domo golbatas til e sangoy e sota sata o todo; ar e Domo basagis til fo e fayan e sata o sos.

Grammar

Most of the grammar is what we’ve already seen. Some of it, though, is new, particularly the adverbs. We’ll get into the details in later parts but here’s a preview that tells you all you need to know to get through the text:

• Isian adjectives (and some nouns) can be changed into adverbs by putting hi after them. This works much like the English suffix -ly: ichi “beautiful” becomes ichi hi “beautifully”.

• Adverbs usually go before their verbs, but they can also be moved to the front of a sentence.

• A whole prepositional phrase can be used like an adverb by putting ha before it.

• Conjunctions are close to their English counterparts. They’re simple little words that link sentences; in the Babel Text, for example, we have ad and ar, both roughly meaning “and”, but with slightly different connotations. Again, we’ll give them a closer look later on.

We get our first tastes of word derivation here, too:

• The suffix -cat, when attached to a noun, changes the meaning to that of a material: gado “a brick”; gadocat “brick”.

• One way to make an adjective into its antonym is by the prefix/suffix pair a-an. We see this in arisosan “impossible”, which is actually derived from risos “possible”.

• Finally, the suffix -nas can convert a verb into a kind of “abstract” noun: go “to speak”; gonas “speech”.

We’ll see a lot more of derivation in later parts of the series.

Vocabulary

Isian	English
abe	a plain
ad	and then…
ar	and (conjunction)
arcay	tar (or bitumen)
arisosan	impossible
basagi	to scatter
bet	word
cudisa	people, group
domo	lord
empan	mortar
esto	down, downward
farin	tower
gado(s)	a brick
gadocat	brick (material)
golbata	to confound
gonas	speech
hade	away
ilir	same
keres	while
loydaro	otherwise
misha	to move
nakhit	mortal
nec	now
noyta	to understand
pasa	to call by a name
sangoy	language
sencat	stone (material)
si	east
tarca	to stop doing
teti	so, because of this
terta	so as to…
teyno	therefore
til	there
timiro	heaven
toc	then
tor	a land
wa	and (noun phrase)
wachi	to desire, wish
yahi	only
yan	one

Ardari

Now, let’s switch to Ardari. Again, here’s the full text:

1. Lokhi omaritö jane kolrachevi sun lagrelltös nyas perodjyn.

2. Ysar sälltö tov tapsined ky vi, Chinare me dablan wi mokiti lim tonedjyn, ysar jeren wizèledjyn.

3. Lataj ry isedjyn, “Tonje, tyolton grätje, ajon warhan sechaje.” Gwanan bòte tyoltanvi, pyuryse bòte pamöre peredjyn.

4. Drä isedjyn, “Tonje, präzdanvi, qa me khaj èlyasòndös wi kombran lataj da mollje. All grätje, sinran omarini sòletö ori oprös utuweryll.”

5. Tsoratö qa sèlokynar molledadyt präzdantövi kombrantö ivit ky tèghdaradjyn.

6. Tsoratö isad, “Ivitje. Ysar jane banöladan èllejyn, ysar me laz jane kolrache perejyn, zalman qa aghell me sòto ky èlla. Duqom qa agh ky märyke ysar da urburdosdill.

7. Tonje, tèghdarje, ysoj kolrache jeren kamrulje, lataj me simënda rejvetell kyus.”

8. Èlladjyn Tsoratö ysar jeren tov omarini sòletö ori utuweradid kyus, ysar präzdantö moll ky uq.

9. Yse Babèle filtyda, Tsoratö omarini kolrache jeren kamruladjyn, jeren tov Tsoratö ysar omarini sòletö ori utuwerad byu.

Grammar

Ardari looks much different, doesn’t it? Much more complicated, too. As with Isian, we haven’t really gone over all the grammar bits you need, so here’s a primer:

• Ardari lets you use most adjectives directly as adverbs, with no changes needed.

• Nouns, noun phrases, and some adjectives instead require you to follow them with èll ky. (This is the infinitive form of èll- “to be”.) An example would be kone èll ky “like a man, manly”.

• “Subordinate” clauses are complicated enough that the full story will have to wait. Some of them let you use a bare verb stem followed by ky, like above, and you use them as a postpositional phrase before a sentence’s head verb. Others appear mostly as normal, but they follow the verb. (This is the only way Ardari lets you put something after the main verb of a sentence.)

Ardari’s words also tend to have more subtle shades of meaning, and these don’t always line up with their English translations:

• nyas means “now”, but only as an adverb
• drä, meaning “then”, connotes a time long in the past
• jeren “there” is used for things very far away; closer things instead use pren
• oprös normally works as an adjective meaning “other”; as an adverb, its meaning becomes “otherwise”
• kyus denotes an effect or implication
• èllad literally means “it was”, but it’s also used to introduce a subordinate clause
• filt- “to know as” is a ditransitive verb, like “to give”

We’ll see conjunctions later on, but we have two here. They’re suffixes, not bare words, so you might not have even noticed. They both mean “and”, but -vi is used for noun phrases, while -jyn is for verbs. To use them, you suffix them to each head word (noun for -vi, verb for -jyn) except the last one.

And then we have a few regular derivations we can point out:

• -ölad (alternate form -ëlad) creates “mass” nouns for substances, collections, and things like that.

• ur- negates adjectives; urburdos “impossible” is the antonym of burdos “possible”.

• -önda (alternate form -ënda) creates abstract nouns from verbs: sim- “to speak”; simënda “speech”.

Vocabulary

Ardari	English
banölad	a people
bòte	instead of
dabla	land
drä	then
èlyas	heaven
filt-	to know as, call by
ghinyas	therefore
gwana	stone
jan	one
jeren	there (far)
kamrul-	to confuse, garble
kolrach	language
kombra	tower
kyus	so that, because of
lagri	word
lòkh	whole
märyk-	to propose, plan
moki	a plain
nyas	now
oprös	other, otherwise
pamör	mortar
pyurys	pitch, tar
rejvet-	to understand
säll	east
sèlokyn	mortal
simënda	the act of speech
sun	same
tapsin-	to migrate
tèghdar-	to descend
tsor(a/i)	a god
tyolta	brick
uq-	to stop doing
urburdos	impossible
utuwe-	to scatter
warhan	thorough
wizèl-	to settle
zhi	thus, in this way

Conclusion

So there you have it: the first full text in both Isian and Ardari. I hope you’re playing along at home, and you’re close to making your own translation of the Babel Text (or whatever you prefer).

Starting in the next part, we’ll be filling in the blanks that I had to leave in here. That should keep us occupied for a while. And then we’ll need some more words.

By this time next year, Isian and Ardari should be radically different. It’s my hope that 2017 will open with something far more…intense. By then, our conlangs will be well on their way to general usability. They won’t be complete, mind you, because when can you say a language is complete?

(Editor’s note: I wrote this two weeks ago. It’s only the calendar that put it out on Christmas Day.)

As I said before, I think relative clauses are hard to wrap your head around. Fortunately, once we know the basics, it’s much easier to put them into a conlang. Let’s do that now, with Isian and Ardari.

Isian relatives

Isian relative clauses always appear at the end of a noun phrase. That one’s pretty much the only non-negotiable part of the nominal grammar. But how do we make them? As it turns out, in one of two different ways, depending on what we’re relativizing.

For subjects, Isian uses a simple gap strategy. The only way you’ll know it’s a relative clause is by a special marker ke that goes before the verb. For example, “the man who saw me” translates as e sam ke cheres men. In a sense, ke functions almost like English that, as a complementizing particle, but it’s more tightly bound to the verb than the noun.

A couple more examples, using only old vocabulary:

• es esher ke dalega e sush talar “the girls that live in the blue house”
• ta almerat shes ke barda e ficha shimin “a wise woman who prays at the river”

Everything else that needs to be relativized works differently. (This, by the way, is an example of the accessibility hierarchy in action.) For these, Isian uses a resumptive pronoun. This is just a personal pronoun in the appropriate case and number, and it takes the place of the relativized argument. Changing our first example around, we would have e sam ke chereta im, meaning “the man I saw”. (Literally, this would be “the man I saw him”, which is ungrammatical in English.) Note that ke is still used, but im appears as the object, in a resumptive context.

More examples include:

• e talar ke dalegan em i ed “the house where I live” (or “the house in which I live”)
• lichacal ke rococan em ed “everything I have written”
• es des ke an din fanama des mit “the things we can’t have”

Also, in this type of relative clause, Isian’s normal SVO word order isn’t quite as rigid. Resumptive pronouns can be fronted for emphasis, although they can’t come before ke and the verb. Actually, in these cases, the normal word order almost becomes VSO, with VOS a distinct alternative.

So, that’s the basic outline for Isian relative clauses. Compare that to the length of the last post, and you can see what I mean when I say that they’re hard to understand, but easier to implement. Now, let’s take a look at Ardari.

Ardari relatives

Grammatically speaking, this is one instance where Ardari is actually far simpler than Isian. It uses a full complementizing gap strategy throughout. The relative argument, whether subject, object, oblique, or genitive, is fronted and replaced by qa. The relative clause then slides into the noun phrase just before the head noun.

• Subject: qa tyèketö wi reje sèdardös, “the children playing in the house”
• Object: tura qa grätod ènglatö, “the long sword I made”
• Oblique: qa chès tatyerod astitö, “the friend I danced with”
• Genitive: sli qa me kyure yfilyod nälitö “the beautiful woman whose hand I held”

Postpositions are fronted, but not replaced, so they’re effectively “dangling”, although it’s impossible to end the sentence with one. (This should cause such a conflict in grammar pedants’ minds that it will shut them down for good.) The last two examples above illustrate this, with the postpositions chès “with” and me “of”; the latter is the way to make an Ardari genitive in a relative clause, since qa doesn’t have case forms. Putting these two in a “standard” form would give us astitö chès tatyerod “I danced with the friend” and slini nälinitö kyure yfilyod “I held the beautiful woman’s hand”, respectively.

Conclusion

There’s not much else to say, really. Again, the hard part is understanding relative clauses enough to know how to put them in your conlang. Putting them in turns out to be almost trivial in comparison. Who would have guessed?

Next time, we’ll look at the “other” kind of relative clause, more properly called the “adverbial” clause. Before that, though, next week will be special. See you next year!

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.