Category: Writing

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.

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.

The nouns of our conlang Ardari, you might recall, were quite complex. So you’ll be happy to know that the verbal morphology, by contrast, is actually fairly simple. That doesn’t mean it’s less capable of expressing the full range of description, nor does it mean that everything is entirely straightforward. It’s just a little easier to figure out than the nouns, that’s all.

The shape of a verb

Where Ardari nouns had three main classes, verbs effectively have two. A verbal stem can end in either a consonant or a vowel, and the vowel stems are typically verbs with an intransitive meaning. This isn’t always true, of course, but it will be a fairly effective rule of thumb. There aren’t any genders or cases to worry about, no definite markers or plurals or anything like that. Just two main classes, and they share the same basic conjugation pattern.

We’ll use the same two example words from last time, but they’ll be the Ardari stem forms brin- “walk” and tum- “eat”. See the hyphens? That means that these aren’t words in their own right. They can’t stand alone, but we’ll see how to turn them into proper words.

Concord

Like Isian and many natural languages, Ardari requires agreement markers on its verbs. They’re a bit odd, though, mainly because there are two sets of them, and they don’t exactly mean what you think. First, let’s take a look at them.

As you can see, the forms change for person and number, but also for “agent” and “patient”. These are more technical terms than the usual “subject” and “object”, and for good reason. They don’t quite match up. For transitive verbs, it’s simple: the subject is the agent and the object is the patient. So we can say konatö fèse tumada “the man eats food”. (Verbs usually come at the end of a sentence in Ardari, by the way.)

Intransitive verbs are a little different. For many of them, the same rule applies: the subject is the agent. This is true for our example: brino “I walk”. But some are different. This class of irregular verbs consists mainly of those with less “active” meanings, like minla- “stand”. For these, the subject takes the patient concord markers: minlama “I stand”. Most of these are verbs just like “stand”, in the sense that they’re kind of “static”. I’ll point out those few that act like this as we meet them, but it’s one more thing to watch out for. Fortunately, they’re pretty easy to spot, as they’re mostly the stems that end in vowels.

Also, there’s a special concord marker -y. This is used in two main places. First, Ardari uses this for “weather” verbs, where English would have a dummy “it” as subject, as in luvy “it’s raining”. Second, any transitive verb can take it to make a passive-like construction: fèsetö tumyd “the food was eaten”, using the preterite tense marker we’ll see in a second.

Tense and aspect

Ardari has a total of seven classes that are effectively combinations of tense and aspect. Each of them (except the present, which is considered the default) has its own suffix, and that suffix goes after the concord markers above. The choices are:

• -s: A present “progressive” that indicates an ongoing action: fèse tumodas “I am eating food”.

• -d: The preterite, which is effectively a past tense, but always implies a completed action: fèse tumodad “I ate food”.

• -dyt: Usually a past tense to reference actions that were ongoing at the moment in question: fèse tumodadyt “I was eating food”.

• -jan: Implies that an event began in the past: fèsetö tumodajan “I began to eat the food”. (The technical term is inceptive.)

• -ll: A basic future tense: fèse tumodall “I will eat food”.

• -lyët: Used for speaking of events that will end in the future: fèsetö tumodalyët “I’m about to finish eating the food”. (Technically known as a cessative.)

Mood markers

In Ardari, a change in mood is handled by a separate set of suffixes that follow the tense markers. These include:

• -u (-ru when following a vowel): A simple negation marker: brinaru “he doesn’t walk” or brinasu “he isn’t walking”. This can replace the final vowel of most of the other mood markers.

• -ka (-ga when following voiced consonants): A subjunctive, mostly used for various types of phrases we’ll see later.

• -afi (-rafi after a vowel): A conditional mood that states that another action depends on this one: brinarafi “if I walk”.

• -je: An imperative, for giving commands or orders, but also used to express a desire, hope, or even a call to action: tumje “let’s eat”. (When combined with the negative marker, it becomes -ju, and it’s technically called the prohibitive.)

• -rha: This one’s a little hard to explain, but it implies that the speaker assumes or otherwise doesn’t know for sure that the action has taken place: fèsetö tumadadrha “he ate the food, as far as I know”. (This is very much a rough translation.)

Most of these can be combined. The negative marker works with pretty much all the others, and the “indirect” -rha goes with anything but the imperative. The conditional and subjunctive are mutually exclusive, though, and the imperative doesn’t make sense with anything else. In total, there are 14 sensible combinations:

• (no suffix): indicative
• -ka: subjunctive
• -afi: conditional
• -je: imperative
• -u: indicative negative
• -ku: subjunctive negative
• -afu: conditional negative
• -ju: imperative negative (prohibitive)
• -rha: indicative indirect
• -karha: subjunctive indirect
• -afirha: conditional indirect
• -rhu: indicative indirect negative
• -karhu: subjunctive indirect negative
• -afirhu: conditional indirect negative

These 14 moods, combined with the seven tense suffixes and the 31 possibilities for concord give Ardari just over three thousand forms for each verb, but they’re all so regular and predictable that we don’t have to worry about ever memorizing anything like that. Instead, we can just build up a verb piece by piece. That’s the power of the agglutinative style of language.

Vocabulary

That’s pretty much it for the basics of Ardari verbs. There’s a lot more to them, but we’ll cover everything else in a later post. For now, here are some new words, including all the new verbs I’ve used so far. With the exceptions of minla- and luz-, these are all perfectly regular, even the one for “to be”.

• to be: èll-
• to become: onyir-
• to seem: ègr-
• to stand: minla-
• to have: per-
• to come: ton-
• to go: shin-
• to drink: kabus-
• to laugh: jejs-
• to hold: yfily-
• to hear: ablon-
• to wash: oznèr-
• to cook: lòsty-
• to speak: sim-
• to call: qon-
• to read: proz-
• to write: farn-
• to want: majtas-
• to rain: luz-

Next time

The next post will be about word order, so that we can finally start constructing sentences in our constructed languages. After that will be the third part of the trinity of word categories, the adjective. We’re really starting to flesh out both our conlangs. Pretty soon, we’ll be able to write a whole story in them.

Verbs, as we have learned, are words of action, and we’ll start taking action on them by looking at Isian. As usual, Isian is the simpler of our two conlangs. Its verbs are fairly straightforward, and they shouldn’t be that hard to understand, even for speakers of English and other morphologically lacking languages.

The stem

Like nouns, Isian verbs start with a stem. This can be any verbal morpheme or (as we’ll see later on) a combination of them. For now, we’ll stick with the simplest form: a single morpheme stem representing a “basic” verb.

Most Isian verbal stems end in vowels, though we’ll see that there are a few very important exceptions. Some examples you’ve already met include coto “walk” and hama “eat”, and we’ll use these as our main running examples.

Tense, aspect, and mood

The three main verbal categories of tense, aspect, and mood are often lumped together, mostly because many languages make a mess of them. Isian is little different in this regard. There are four main verbal forms: present tense, past tense, perfect, and subjunctive.

Past and present should be obvious, even if you’re not a linguist. Perfect is a bit like the English pluperfect (“has walked”, “has eaten”); to a first approximation, they’re essentially identical, but we’ll see differences pop up later on. The subjunctive is a bit harder to explain. Fortunately, we won’t be using it much this time around. For now, just know that it can’t be used for the main verb of a sentence.

Now, this doesn’t mean that Isian has no way of talking about events in the future, for instance. But the language doesn’t mark these finer shades of meaning directly on the verb. Instead, it uses auxiliary verbs, much like English. As an example, nos acts as a future tense marker when placed before a verb: nos coto “he will walk”. We’ll see a whole list of the main auxiliaries in a moment, but we need a quick digression first.

Agreement

One wrinkle of Isian verbs is agreement, also called concord. Each Isian verb takes a specific inflectional ending to mark the person and number of its subject. For example, coto can mean “he walks”, but to say “I walk”, we must use coton. There are four different sets of agreement markers, one for each of the three main persons (first, second, and third), while the fourth specifically marks the first-person plural, equivalent to English “we”. (We’ll say that Isian had plurals in the other two persons, but they’re gone now.)

Thus, we have a total of 16 different verbal forms. That’s way more than the maximum five of English (“eat”, “eats”, “ate”, “eaten”, “eating”), but it’s a far cry from the dozens found in Romance languages. It’s a lot, but it’s manageable. And it all fits into a neat table, too:

Here, I used chere “see”, but the endings are the same for all regular verbs. The first column is all the first-person singular, so its English translations would be “I see”, “I saw”, “I have seen”, and something like “that I see”. (Subjunctives are hard.) The same follows for the other columns: first-person plural is “we”, second is “you”, and third can be “he”, “she”, “it”, or “they”.

Auxiliary verbs

Most of the other tenses and aspects and moods are constructed in Isian by using auxiliaries, much like English “is”, “has”, “will”, etc. We’ve already seen the future tense nos, but there are a few more that we can introduce.

• an: A negative marker similar to English “no”: an coto “he does not walk”.

• cal: A mood marker like “should”: cal coto “he should walk”. (Unlike English, Isian can directly use this with the past tense: cal cotos “he should have walked”.)

• mor: Mood marker that indicates the ability to act: mor coto “he can walk”. (In the past tense, it’s more like “could”.)

• sum: Indicates a possibility, like “might”: sum coto “he might walk”.

• ish: Like sum, except that implies “probably not”: ish coto “he might walk (but he likely won’t)”.

Two particular auxiliaries deserve more than a bullet point. First is ade, which actually functions as its own verb, inflecting for person just like any other, but its tenses have different meanings. In the present tense, it marks an “ongoing” aspect, like the English participle: ade coto “he is walking”. (The main verb, of course, can be in any tense: ade cotos “he was walking”, and so on.)

Put ade in the past tense, and it marks the completion of an action: ades coto “he stops walking”. Again, the main verb can change tenses independently.

Using ade in the perfect creates a “past perfect”: adec coto “he had walked”. Here, it doesn’t really matter whether the main verb is in the present, past, or perfect. The meaning is the same.

The other peculiar auxiliary verb in Isian is par, which marks the passive voice. Passives are complex in many languages, but they’re not that hard to figure out here. We can’t use coto here, because it’s intransitive, and you can’t really make intransitive verbs passive, so we’ll use our other example, hama. An active sentence might be hamata e tema “I ate the food”.

To put this in the passive voice, we do three things. First, the old object becomes the subject; the old subject can be ignored or put in as a prepositional phrase, but we haven’t discussed those yet. Second, we add par before the verb. Finally, we change the verb’s conjugation to match its new subject (the former object). Put all this together, and we get the new sentence tema par hamas “the food was eaten”.

Irregular Verbs

Isian does have a few genuinely irregular verbs. One of these, possibly the most important verb in a language, is the “copula” verb, like English’s “to be”. In Isian, it has the infinitive (or dictionary) form tet, but its conjugation looks like this:

Two other, similar verbs that have irregular forms are sedel “to become” and fer “to seem, look”. For these, we have:

If you were actually learning Isian as a real language, you’d probably have to memorize these. Our imaginary Isian schoolchildren would, too.

Vocabulary

Here are a few more verbs that you can play around with. All of these are perfectly regular, following the pattern laid out for chere.

• to have: fana
• to come: cosa
• to go: wasa
• to drink: jesa
• to laugh: eya
• to hold: otasi
• to hear: mawa
• to wash: hishi
• to cook: piri
• to speak: go
• to call: tede
• to read: lenira
• to write: roco
• to want: doche