Category: Writing

Let’s make a language – Part 5a: Verbs (Intro)

Last time around, we talked about nouns, the words of people, places, and things. This post will be the counterpoint to that one, because we’re going to look at verbs.

Verbs are words of action. They tell us what is happening. We might walk to the bathroom or drive to the grocery store, and verbs are the words that get us there. But they can also help describe what we are (“to be”), what we possess (“to have”), and what we do (“to do”), along with many other possibilities. Where a noun is an object or an idea, a verb is an action or a state of being.

Just like nouns, every conlang is going to have verbs (except those specifically designed to avoid them, and they do exist). And just like nouns, they have a lot of grammatical baggage. In inflectional languages, verbs will likely have a variety of forms (think of Latin’s verb conjugations). Isolating languages, by contrast, might have verbs that are constant, but they may be able to string them together in such a way that they can create the same shades of meaning. As before, the type of conlang you want to make will influence your verbal structure, but the basic idea of “verb” will remain the same.

Parts of a verb

Where the different categories for nouns are largely concerned with identifying a specific instance of something, verbal categories are more focused on the circumstances of the action in question. The most widely recognized of these include transitivity, tense, aspect, mood, and voice. Below, we’ll look at each of these in turn.

First, though, we need to decide what kind of word the verb will be. This will depend on your conlang, and it will follow the same general pattern as the noun. Isolating languages won’t have a lot of verbal morphology, relying instead on a lot of adverbs, adjectives, and preposition-like phrases, or just more than one verb in a phrase (“serial” verbs). More polysynthetic languages, on the other hand, will tend to concentrate a lot of information in the verbal word itself; agglutinative conlangs will likely have a series of affixes, leading to long words, while inflectional types will instead have fewer affixes each with more permutations.

Second, we need to know a little bit about verbs in relation to nouns. A typical sentence in most languages will have a single verb that acts as the “head”. For our running example, we’ll use the ridiculously simple English sentence the man drives a car. Here, drives is the verb, and you can see why it’s considered the head. Change the verb, and the whole meaning of the action changes as a result. If we say pushes instead, then the man probably ran out of gas. Say steals, and now he’s a thief.

Verbs, like people, have arguments. Here, the term “argument” just means a phrase that’s directly connected to the verb in some way. Our example has two arguments: a subject (the man) and a direct object (a car). If you remember when we were talking about noun case, well, that’s what some of the cases are for. The nominative and accusative (or ergative and absolutive, if you swing that way) basically represent the two main arguments of a verb, subject and object, while the dative indicates the indirect object. (Other cases, like the ablative, aren’t for verbal arguments, so we’ll mostly ignore them here.)

Transitivity

The idea of transitivity isn’t one that most people think about after high school English classes, but it’s central to the construction of a verb. A transitive verb has two arguments (subject and direct object), while an intransitive verb has only one. That would be simple enough, except for the exceptions.

Few languages directly mark transitivity. Some, like English, almost ignore it. Mostly, though, there might be a special verb form to temporarily change transitive to intransitive, or vice versa. Something like this can be seen in Spanish, where a number of intransitive-looking verbs actually have a direct object, typically a reflexive pronoun like se.

If that wasn’t bad enough, there are a few verbs that don’t really fit in the transitive dichotomy. The most important of these is give, which (in many languages) takes not two but three arguments. (This is where the dative comes into play, if the language has one.)

And then there are the “impersonal” verbs, which effectively have zero arguments. Weather verbs are the most common of these. Where English uses a dummy subject (it’s raining), Romance languages can just say the verb itself (Spanish llueve).

Tense

Tense describes when an action takes place in relation to outside events. Obviously, there are three main possibilities: past, present, and future. Not all languages use these, though. English, technically speaking, only has a grammatical distinction between past and present; the future tense is just a present-tense verb preceded by the auxiliary will. And this is a fairly common arrangement. Others prefer having three explicit tenses, while a few (such as Chinese) don’t really mark tense at all on the verb.

So, when we have tense at all, past and present are usually in, and future slides in there occasionally. What else is possible? Well, a few have the opposite distinction as English, marking the past and present the same, but future differently. Another option is to add tenses, splitting either the past or future into more than one. Plenty of real-life languages do this, although probably not any you’ve ever heard:

  • Cubeo (an Amazonian language) is one that has a “historical” past tense used for events long ago.
  • The Bantu language Mwera has a tense specifically for “today”.
  • The language of the Western Torres Strait Islanders, known as Kala Lagaw Ya, is said to have six tenses, with a present, “near” and “far” versions of past and future, and a “today” past tense.
  • A few languages, mostly in Africa, have special verbal forms for “yesterday” and “tomorrow”.

In our example, we’re talking in the present tense, but we can change it to the past by saying the man drove a car. That doesn’t tell us when he drove it, only that he did at some point before now.

Aspect

Where tense is concerned with an absolute fixing in time of an event, aspect tells us more about the “internal” structure. Is the action complete? Is it still ongoing? Did it just start? These are the questions aspect answers, and it turns out that there can be a lot more of them than you might think.

The first distinction, the most basic and most common, is between events that are complete or ongoing. In linguistic terms, these are the perfective and imperfective, respectively. Taking our example sentence (we’ll need to switch it to the past tense for this, but bear with me), we have the perfective the man drove a car versus the imperfective the man was driving a car. As you can see, the later fixes the “reference point” of the sentence inside the action, while the perfective version looks at the act of driving from the outside.

There are dozens of aspects, but most languages don’t directly mark more than a handful. Perfective and imperfective are common, but they’re sometimes mixed with tense, too. That’s the source of the English perfect and pluperfect, which are kind of like crossing the past tense and perfective aspect, but the result can be treated as any tense: the man has driven/had driven/will have driven a car.

Wikipedia has a long list of aspects seen in various languages, but remember that many of these are restricted to just a very few languages.

Mood

Mood (or “modality”, a more technically nuanced term) talks about how a speaker feels towards the event he’s talking about. Is it a statement of fact? A command? A wish?

Moods probably aren’t marked quite as much as tense and aspect, but a few of them cross paths with those two in some languages. The subjunctive mood (which can be used for hypotheticals, opinions, desires, etc.) shows up in English, although it’s starting to disappear in the spoken language. In Romance languages, though, it’s still going strong. Imperatives, marking commands, are found in most languages, and they often have their own morphology.

The other moods don’t show up on verbs quite as often. Some languages have an optative mood specifically for hopes and dreams, wishes and desires. Arabic has the jussive, which is a kind of catch-all mood like the subjunctive. A few languages have a special mood marker for questions, for conditions, and for events that the speaker thinks are likely to occur.

As English doesn’t really have morphology for moods, our only change to the example sentence is the subjunctive that the man drive a car, which sounds overly formal, maybe even archaic.

Voice

Voice is a way to describe the relation between the verb and its arguments. The active voice is the main one, and it means that the subject is the main “doer” or agent, while the direct object (if there is one) is the “target” or patient.

The passive voice is a common alteration. Here, the subject and object switch places. The object becomes the subject, but it’s still the patient. The former subject is demoted to a prepositional phrase (or the language’s equivalent), or it’s dropped altogether. In our English example, we would have a car was driven. (Passives in English, incidentally, have an air of formality to them. It’s popular in business specifically because it de-emphasizes the subject, which minimizes liability.)

Some languages have a middle voice, where the subject is a little bit of both agent and patient. English doesn’t have this, but it can almost emulate it: the car drove. Obviously, in that sentence, the car isn’t driving something. In a sense, we’re saying that it’s driving itself, but that’s not exactly the middle voice, either. That would be the reflexive, which appears in a few languages.

Other moods include the antipassive (where it’s the object that gets dropped, instead of the subject), the applicative, and the causative. None of these are really present in the languages we’re most familiar with, but they pop up all over the world.

Odds and ends

All this, and we still haven’t touched on things like the infinitive, the gerund, and other miscellany. Well, this post is already getting pretty long, so we’ll look at those as they come up. They’re mostly concerned with larger phrases, anyway, and we haven’t even started on those.

Next time, we’ll look at how Isian and Ardari make their verbs. Along the way, we’ll cover some of the bits left out of this post, like grammatical concord. After that, our next topic will be word order, which means we can finally make a sentence in each of our conlangs.

Writing inertia

It’s a well-known maxim that an object at rest tends to stay at rest, while an object in motion tends to stay in motion. This is such an important concept that it has its own name: inertia. But we usually think of it as a scientific idea. Objects have inertia, and they require outside forces to act on them if they are to start or stop moving.

Inertia, though, in a metaphorical sense, isn’t restricted to physical science. People have a kind of inertia, too. It takes an effort to get out of bed in the morning; for some people, this is a lot more effort than others. Athletic types have a hard time relaxing, especially after they’ve passed the apex of their athleticism, while those of us that are more…sedentary have a hard time improving ourselves, simply because it’s so much work.

Writers also have inertia. I know this from personal experience. It takes a big impetus to get me to start writing, whether a post like this, a short story, a novel, or some bit of software. But once I get going, I don’t want to stop. In a sense, it’s like writer’s block, but there’s a bit more to it.

Especially when writing a new piece of fiction (as opposed to a continuation of something I’ve already written), I’ve found it really hard to begin. Once I have the first few paragraphs, the first lines of dialogue, and the barest of setting and plot written down (or typed up), it feels like a dam bursting. The floodgates open, and I can just keep going until I get tired. It’s the same for posts like this. (“Let’s make a language” and the programming-related posts are a lot harder.)

At the start of a new story, I don’t think too much. The hardest part is the opening line, because that requires the most motivation. After that, it’s names. But the text itself, once I get over the first hurdles, seems to flow naturally. Sometimes it’s a trickle, others it’s a torrent, but it’s always there.

In a couple of months, I’ll once again take on the NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) challenge. Admittedly, I don’t keep to the letter of the rules, but I do keep the original spirit: write a novel of 50,000 words in the month of November. For me, that’s the important aspect. It doesn’t matter that it might be an idea I already had but never started because, as I said, writing inertia means it’s difficult for me to get over that hump and start the story. The timed challenge of NaNoWriMo is the impetus, the force that motivates me.

And I like that outside motivation. It’s why I’ve been “successful”, by my own definition, three out of the four times I’ve tried. In 2010, my first try, I gave up after 10 days and about 8,000 words. Real life interfered in 2011; my grandfather had a stroke on the 3rd of November, and nobody in my extended family got much done that month. Since then, though, I’m essentially 3-for-3: 50,000 words in 2012 (although that was only about a fifth of the whole novel); a complete story at 49,000 words in 2013 (I didn’t feel the need to pad it out); and 50,000 last year (that one’s actually getting released soon, if I have my way). Hopefully, I can make it four in a row.

So that’s really the idea of this post. Inertia is real, writing inertia doubly so. If you’re feeling it, and November seems too far away, find another way. There are a few sites out there with writing prompts, and you can always find a challenge to help focus you on your task. Whatever you do, it’s worth it to start writing. And once you start, you’ll keep going until you have to stop.

Irregularity in language

No natural language in the world is completely and totally regular. We think of English as an extreme of irregularity, and it really is, but all languages have at least some part of their grammar where things don’t always go as planned. And there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s a natural part of a language’s evolution.

Conlangs, on the other hand, are often far too regular. For an auxlang, intended for clear communication, that’s actually a good thing. There, you want regularity, predictability. You want the “clockwork morphology” of Esperanto or Lojban. The problem comes with the artistic conlangs. These, especially those made by novices, can be too predictable. It’s not exactly a big deal—every plural ending in -i isn’t going to break the immersion of a story for the vast majority of people—but it’s a little wart that you might want to do away with.

Count the ways

Irregularity comes in a few different varieties. Mostly, though, they’re all the same: a place where the normal rules of grammar don’t quite work. English is full of these, as everyone knows. Plurals are marked by -s, except when they’re not: geese, oxen, deer, people. Past tense is -ed, except that it sometimes isn’t: go and went. (“Strong” verbs like “get” that change vowels don’t really count, because they are regular, but in their own way.) And let’s not even get started on English orthography.

Some other languages aren’t much better. French has a spelling system that matches its pronunciation in theory only, and Irish looks like a keyboard malfunction. Inflectional grammars are full of oddities, ask any Latin student. Arabic’s broken plurals are just that: broken. Chinese tone patterns change in complex and unpredictable ways, despite tone supposedly being an integral part of a morpheme.

On the other hand, there are a few languages out there that seem to strive for regularity. Turkish is always cited as an example here, the joke being that there’s one irregular verb, and it’s only there so that students will know what to expect when they study other languages.

Conlangs are a sharp contrast. Esperanto’s plurals are always -j. There’s no small class of words marked by -m or anything like that. Again, for the purposes of clarity, that’s a good thing. But it’s not natural.

Phonological irregularity

Irregularity in a language’s phonology happens for a few different reasons. However, because phonology is so central to the character of a language, it can be hard to spot. Here are a few places where it can show up:

  • Borrowing: Especially as English (American English in particular) suffuses every corner of the planet, languages can pick up new words and bring new sounds with them. This did happen in English’s history, as it brought the /ʒ/ sound (“pleasure”, etc.) from French, but a more extreme example is the number of Bantu languages that borrowed click sounds from their Khoisan neighbors.

  • Onomatopoeia: The sounds of nature can be emulated by speech, but there’s not always a perfect correspondence between the two. The “meow” of a cat, for instance, contains a sequence of sounds rare in the rest of English.

  • Register: Slang and colloquialism can create phonological irregularities, although this isn’t all that common. English has “yeah” and “nah”, both with a final /æ/, which appears in no other word.

Grammatical irregularity

This is what most people think of when they consider irregularity in a language. Examples include:

  • Irregular marking: We’ve already seen examples of English plurals and past tense. Pretty much every other natural language has something else to throw in here.

  • Gender differences: I’m not just talking about the weirdness of having the word for “girl” in the neuter gender. The Romance languages also have a curious oddity where some masculine-looking words take a feminine article, as in Spanish la mano.

  • Number differences: This includes all those English words where the plural is the same as the singular, like deer and fish, as well as plural-only nouns like scissors.

  • Borrowing: Loanwords can bring their own grammar with them. What’s the plural of manga or even rendezvous?

Lexical irregularity

Sometimes words just don’t fit. Look at the English verb to be. Present, it’s is or are, past is was or were, and so on. Totally unpredictable. This can happen in any language, and one way is a drift in a word’s meaning.

  • Substitution: One word form can be swapped out for another. This is the case with to be and its varied forms.

  • Meaning changes: Most common in slang, like using “bad” to mean “good”.

  • Useless affixes: “Inflammable means flammable?” The same thing is presently ongoing as “irregardless” becomes more widespread.

  • Archaisms: Old forms can be kept around in fixed phrases. In English, this is most commonly the case with the Bible and Shakespeare, but “to and fro” is still around, too.

Orthographic irregularity

There are spelling bees for English. How many other languages can say that? How many would want to? As a language evolves, its orthography doesn’t necessarily follow, especially in languages where the standard spelling was fixed long ago. Here are a few ways that spelling can drift from pronunciation:

  • Silent letters: English is full of these, French more so. And then there are all those extra silent letters added to make words look more like Latin. Case in point, debt didn’t always have the b; it was added to remind people of debitus. (Silent letters can even be dialectal in nature. I pronounce wh and w differently, but few other Americans do.)

  • Missing letters: Nowhere in English can you have dg followed by a consonant except in the American spelling of words like judgment, where the e that would soften the g is implied. (I lost a spelling bee on this very word, in fact, but that was a long time ago.)

  • Sound changes: These can come from evolution or what seems like sheer perversity. (English gh is a case of the latter, I think.)

  • Borrowing: As phonological understanding has grown, we’ve adopted a kind of “standard” orthography for loanwords, roughly equivalent to Latin, Spanish, or Italian. Problem is, this is nothing at all like the standard orthography already present in English. And don’t even get me started on the attempts at rendering Arabic words into English letters.

In closing

All this is not to say that you should run off and add hundreds of irregular forms to your conlang. Again, if it’s an auxlang, you don’t want that. Even conlangs made for a story should use irregular words only sparingly. But artistic conlangs can gain a lot of flavor and “realism” from having a weird word here and there. It makes things harder to learn, obviously, but it’s the natural thing to do.

Let’s make a language – Part 4c: Nouns (Ardari)

For nouns in Ardari, we can afford to be a little more daring. As we’ve decided, Ardari is an agglutinative language with fusional (or inflectional) aspects, and now we’ll get to see a bit of what that entails.

Three types of nouns

Ardari has three genders of nouns: masculine, feminine, and neuter. Like languages such as Spanish or German, these don’t necessarily correspond to the notions of “male”, “female”, and “everything else”. Instead, they’re a little bit arbitrary, but we won’t make the same mistakes as natural languages when it comes to assigning nouns to genders. (Actually, we will make the same mistakes, but on purpose, not through the vagaries of linguistic evolution.)

Each noun is inflected not only for gender, but also for number and case. Number can be either singular or plural, just like with Isian. As for case, well, we have five of them:

  • Nominative, used mostly for subjects of sentences,
  • Accusative, used mainly for the direct objects,
  • Dative, occasionally seen for indirect objects, but mostly used for the Ardari equivalent of prepositional phrases,
  • Genitive, indicating possession, composition, and most places where English uses “of”,
  • Vocative, only used when addressing someone; as a result, it only makes sense with names and certain nouns.

So we have three genders, two numbers, and five cases. Multiply those together, and you get 30 possibilities for declension. (If you took Latin in school, that word might have made you shudder. Sorry.) It’s not quite that bad, since some of these will overlap, but it’s still a lot to take in. That’s the difficulty—and the beauty, for some—of fusional languages.

Masculine

Masculine nouns in Ardari all have stems that end in -a. One example is kona “man”, and this table shows its declensions:

kona Singular Plural
Nominative kona kono
Accusative konan konon
Genitive kone konoj
Dative konak konon
Vocative konaj konaj

Roughly speaking, you can translate kono as “men”, kone as “of a man”, etc. We run into a bit of a problem with konon, since it could be either accusative or dative. That’s okay; things like this happen often in fusional languages. We’ll say it was caused by sound changes. We just have to remember that translating will need a bit more context.

Also, many of these declensions will change the stress of a word to the final syllable, following our phonological rules from Part 1.

Feminine

Feminine noun stems end in -i, and they have these declensions (using chi “sun” as our example):

chi Singular Plural
Nominative chi chir
Accusative chis chell
Genitive chini chisèn
Dative chise chiti
Vocative chi chi

The same translation guides apply here, except we don’t have the problem of “syncretism”, where two cases share the same form.

Neuter

Neuter nouns have stems that can end in any consonant. Using the example of tyèk “house”, we have:

tyèk Singular Plural
Nominative tyèk tyèkar
Accusative tyèke tyèkòn
Genitive tyèkin tyèkoj
Dative tyèkèt tyèkoda
Vocative tyèkaj tyèkaj

A couple of these (genitive plural, vocative) are recycled from the masculine table. Again, that’s fairly common in languages of this type, so I added it for naturalism.

Definiteness

Unlike Isian, Ardari doesn’t use separate words for its articles. Instead, it has a “definiteness” marker that can be added to the end of a noun. It changes form based on the gender and number of the noun you’re attaching it to, coming in one of a few forms:

  • -tö is the general singular marker, used on all three genders in all cases except the neuter dative.
  • -dys is used on masculine and most neuter plurals (except, again, the dative).
  • -tös is for feminine plurals.
  • Neuter nouns in the dative use -ö for the singular and -s for the plural.

The neuter dative is weird, partly because of a phonological process called “haplology”, where consecutive sounds or syllables that are very close in sound merge into one. Take our example above of tyèk. You’d expect the datives to be tyèkètto and tyèkodadys. For the singular, the case marker already ends in -t, so it’s just a matter of dropping that sound from the “article” suffix. The plural would have two syllables da and dys next to each other. Speakers of languages are lazy, so they’d likely combine those into something a bit less time-consuming, thus we have tyèkodas “to the houses”.

New words

Even though I didn’t actually introduce any new vocabulary in this post, here’s the same word list from last week’s Isian post, now with Ardari equivalents. Two words are a little different. “Child” appears in three gendered forms (masculine, feminine, and a neuter version for “unknown” or “unimportant”). “Friend”, on the other hand, is a simple substitution of stem vowels for masculine or feminine, but you have to pick one, although a word like ast (a “neutered” formation) might be common in some dialects of spoken Ardari.

  • sword: èngla
  • cup: kykad
  • mother: emi
  • father: aba
  • woman: näli
  • child: pwa (boy) / gli (girl) / sèd (any or unknown)
  • friend: asta (male) / asti (female)
  • head: chäf
  • eye: agya
  • mouth: mim
  • hand: kyur
  • foot: allga
  • cat: avbi
  • flower: afli
  • shirt: tèwar

Let’s make a language – Part 4b: Nouns (Isian)

Keeping in our pattern of making Isian a fairly simple language, there’s not going to be a lot here about the conlang’s simple nouns. Of course, when we start constructing longer phrases (with adjectives and the like), things will get a little hairier.

Noun roots

Isian nouns can look like just about anything. They don’t have a set form, much like their English counterparts. But we can divide them into two broad classes based on the last letter of their root morphemes: vowel-stems and consonant-stems. There’s no difference in meaning between the two, and they really only differ in how plural forms are constructed, as we shall see.

Cases

For all intents and purposes, Isian nouns don’t mark case. We’ll get to pronouns in a later post, and they will have different case forms (again, similar to English), but the basic nouns themselves don’t change when they take different roles in a sentence.

The plural (with added gender)

The plural is where most of Isian’s noun morphology comes in. For consonant-stems, it’s pretty simple: the plural is always -i. From last week, we have the nouns sam “man” and talar “house”. The plurals, then, are sami “men” and talari “houses”. Not much else to it.

For vowel-stems, I’ve added a little complexity and “naturalism”. We have three different choices for a plural suffix. (This shouldn’t be too strange for English speakers, as we’ve got “-s”, “-es”, and oddities like “-en” in “oxen”.) So the possibilities are:

  • -t: This will be the most common marker. If all else fails, we’ll use it. An example might be seca “sword”; plural secat.

  • -s: For vowel-stems whose last consonant is a t or d, the plural becomes -s. (We’ll say it’s from some historical sound change.) Example: deta “cup”; plural detas.

  • -r: This one is almost totally irregular. Mostly, it’ll be on “feminine” nouns; we’ll justify this by saying it’s the remnant of a proper gender distinction in Ancient Isian. An example: mati “mother”; matir “mothers”.

As we go along, I’ll point out any nouns that deviate from the usual -i or -t.

Articles

Like English, Isian has an indefinite article, similar to “a/an”, that appears before a noun. Unlike the one in English, Isian’s is always the same: ta. It’s never stressed, so the vowel isn’t really distinct; it would sound more like “tuh”.

We can use the indefinite when we’re talking about one or more of a noun, but not any specific instances: ta sam “a man”; ta hut “some dogs”. (Note that we can also use it with plurals, which is something “a/an” can’t do.)

The counterpart is the definite article, like English the. Isian has not one but two of these, a singular and a plural. The singular form is e, and the plural is es; both are always stressed.

These are used when we’re talking about specific, identifiable nouns: e sam “the man”; es sami “the men”.

More words

That’s all there really is to it, at least as far as the basic noun structure. Sure, it’ll get a lot more complicated once we through in adjectives and relative clauses and such, but we’ve got a good start here. So, here’s a few more nouns, all of which follow the rules set out in this post:

  • madi “mother” (pl. madir)
  • pado “father” (pl. pados)
  • shes “woman”
  • tay “child” (pl. tays)
  • chaley “friend”
  • gol “head”
  • bis “eye”
  • ula “mouth”
  • fesh “hand”
  • pusca “foot”
  • her “cat”
  • atul “flower”
  • seca “sword”
  • deta “cup” (pl. detas)
  • jeda “shirt” (pl. jedas)

Faith and fantasy

Religion is one of those things that, as an author or game designer, you have to treat very carefully. The risk of offense is too great, especially in the politically-correct, offense-first world of today. It’s easy to fall into a trap of pigeonholing real-world religions. “Evil, Arabian-looking bad guys that act like Muslims” is practically a genre trope at this point; two examples that I’ve read include the Fanim of R. Scott Bakker’s Prince of Nothing trilogy and the Krasians of Peter V. Brett’s Demon Cycle. “Evil, hierarchical church that looks Roman Catholic” isn’t exactly uncommon, either.

But that’s not really the subject of this post. Sure, the popular religions in the world are the way they are, and they’re easy to relate to, easy to understand, because we see them every day. But different cultures, especially in different worlds than our own, are going to have different ways of looking at religion, faith, philosophy, and the supernatural. And their beliefs will shape their society, just as ours, historically, have shaped our own.

Of God and gods

In the West, there are three major religions: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. In addition, there are a number of others that have significantly less popular appeal. The East, conversely, gives us the trio of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Shinto, along with a host of minor faiths. (And by “minor”, I mean they have fewer followers, not that they’re less important or less valuable.) And, of course, we also have the “non-religions” of atheism and agnosticism, as well as a number of systems of belief that might better be grouped under “philosophy”.

Even the largest of religions is not monolithic, however. Christianity has a whole spectrum of sects (“denominations”), and many Americans have become familiar with the major divisions of Islam (Sunni and Shia). Some can even spot the difference between some of the different sects of modern Judaism (Orthodox, Reform, etc.). We know comparatively far less about the other side of the world, though; most people in the US probably think of all Buddhists as Zen, for example.

In fantasy literature, religion—when it is mentioned at all—usually only gets a passing nod. There might be the occasional oath, prayer, or swear, but a story where the beliefs of the people are not the focus often ignores those beliefs. And that’s fine. If it’s not an important worldbuilding detail, then there’s probably not much reason to put it in.

Conversely, games, especially tabletop role-playing games, make religion an integral part of the story. D&D (and its offshoots, like Pathfinder) has lists of deities, each with their own domain, and these almost always function like the pantheons of old, except with added benefits for certain believers. (In D&D, for example, clerics and paladins usually must follow a deity, and they receive divine blessings and spells in return.) In a way, despite there being a very detailed summary of religion, it’s abstracted away into a game mechanic.

And again, there’s nothing wrong with that. Players shouldn’t be forced to study theology just to play a game. But fantasy, both literature and gaming, has a problem understanding the link between religion and society, and that link was a very real, very important part of the period of history favored by fantasy.

One to many

We all know the “origin stories” of the major Western religions, whether creation, crucifixion, or revelation. But all of these, as well as those less-familiar faiths of the world, had a major impact on the development of society. The Middle Ages, that favorite era of fantasy literature and games alike, was shaped by religion. In many ways, you could even say it was defined by religion.

When fantasy posits a pantheon (like D&D), that actually breaks the world for their other main assumption: the feudal monarchy. Feudalism, serfdom, the divine right of kings, knighthood, and all those other conceits of medieval Europe are based on a thousand years of Christianity.

“The end is coming soon, so get ready,” goes the common Christian refrain, and that’s largely been true since the 30s. No, not the 1930s, but the 30s, as in 30 AD. Christianity has always had a strain of the apocalyptic—the last book of the Bible is, after all, supposed to be a vision of the End of Days—though it has waxed and waned through the ages. In the medieval period, it was mostly waxing. Plague, famine, pestilence, and war were facts of life, especially for the lower classes, and there wasn’t much they could do about it. “The meek shall inherit the earth” was the closest thing to hope for the future that many people had.

If you replace the strict belief in God (whose eternal good was countered by the increasing influence of the Devil) with a nebulous—if effectual—pantheon, then things change dramatically. Get rid of the Church, the Pope, and all the other trappings of medieval Christianity, and all of society will develop differently.

Changing the game

In medieval Europe, the Church had supreme power, and all of it was centered on the Pope. He could make kings (or break them), crown emperors, canonize martyrs, or call crusades. His announcements of doctrine, the papal bulls, were regarded as nothing less than official interpretations of scripture. And he had one ultimate, terrifying weapon: excommunication.

All that it did was ban a person or group of people from Communion, effectively ostracizing them from the Church. But in a world where the eternal soul was seen as infinitely more important than its mortal frame, this was enough to turn even the most hardened of hearts. Rebels, heretics, willful kings, and political enemies all faced the threat of excommunication, and almost every one of them quailed in the face of such a punishment. Rebellions could end entirely once word came from Rome that their leaders had been cast out of the Church, no longer able to receive the blessings of Christ and thus condemned to Hell for all eternity. Even whole cities (such as Florence) were put under that threat simply to scare their rulers into complying with the Church’s wishes or dogma.

Besides the Church’s chief weapon (I’ll spare you the Monty Python jokes) and its total control of doctrine, it also changed Europe by bringing in its own social structure. Monasteries, hermitages, nunneries, convents, and abbeys all had their roles to play, and they were all part of the Church. And these weren’t always what you’d think from movies. Monks could be rich, nuns literate, and hermits not always loners living in caves. One of them even got elected as pope: Celestine V, who quit after a few months. (Every other pope from 1294 onwards ruled until he died or was cast out, until Benedict XVI not long ago.)

The Christian church and faith was the single largest influence on the development of the Middle Ages. Because of it, the Black Death was asserted as a sign of coming Armageddon, as was the famine that preceded it, and the Mongol horde that may have brought it. Without the church, the culture of monasticism wouldn’t have been so prevalent, nor would the orders of crusading knighthood, such as the Templars, Hospitallers, and the Teutonic Order exist.

Indeed, even the period’s systems of economy and government are indebted to Christianity. Feudalism lasted as long as it did mostly because people were taught that it was the natural order of things. Serfs were born to be serfs, and nobles to be nobles, and there were shelves full of books explaining all the ways you could see how that was true. Nobles, for instance, were taller, heavier, and healthier. Nobody bothered to note that this was because of nutrition and the often harsh working conditions of the peasantry. Rather, it was taken as part of the divine plan.

The realm of fiction

Fantasy likes to take the feudal society of Europe (especially the later, post-plague society where feudalism began to falter) and make it its own, without taking along the religious aspect that made it possible. In essence, you could say that medieval, feudal Europe came about because of Constantine, the emperor of Rome who converted himself and then his empire to Christianity.

Without a strong, central Church, you lose most of the foundations of the setting. If every city or nation can make its own doctrine, then you have very little world unity and shared culture. With more than one deity to worship, with no fixed scripture proclaiming the end of the world and the promise of a utopic afterlife, then there is no motivation for serfdom, for the glory of crusade.

Even technology is affected by the change in faith. Cathedrals, the defining monument of the Middle Ages, were built because of religion. Sure, a polytheistic culture might build great temples, and they would likely come to many of the same discoveries about building, but would they have the same styles? Likely not. They certainly wouldn’t be laid out in the shape of a cross, like the European cathedrals.

Some areas might become more advanced if you lift the strictures of Christianity. Machinery that could aid in work was often overlooked, simply because there were always more laborers to throw at a problem. The science of astronomy was held back by the belief that the stars were the realm of God, thus unknowable to man. And how would banking develop if the Christian constraints on usury didn’t exist to create a niche (and a stereotype) filled by Jews?

Magic, of course, is an obvious addition to any fantasy world, but it also existed (not really, but in people’s minds) in the Middle Ages. It’s something that was well-known, but totally forbidden. Fireball-wielding mages would have to be fit into the religious world-view, and where would they go? The sorcerers of the aforementioned Prince of Nothing series are excommunicated by default, but it’s easy to imagine a setting where the wizards are seen as messengers or even avatars of God or the gods.

Like so many other topics in worldbuilding, a few decisions change the outcome completely. Monotheism, logically speaking, probably leads to one of the same outcomes as it did in our world. Polytheism is reflected in ancient Rome and even modern India, as well as most fantasy. A lot of other ideas require more thought. If God is everywhere, in everything, then who needs temples or churches? If the world is full of spirits that inhabit every living thing, how can you eat and still live with yourself? (Yes, that means an animist world could have even stricter dietary laws than Islam. Think of Hinduism’s sacred cows.)

The length of time that a religion has existed will also play a role in a society’s development. The older something is, the more likely it is to change. Faiths fracture, sectarianism grows, especially if there is no central authority. A polytheistic culture is prone to develop “local” gods; Athena, patron of Athens, is a good example. New religions exist in a state of flux, as everyone vies for the right to be considered orthodox, often with disastrous consequences for those that lose. (How many Gnostics do you know?)

Rituals, prayers, and even the calendar can also be affected. The word “holiday” literally means “holy day”, and that’s where the oldest of them come from. Christmas and Easter are the ones everybody knows, although few know that they’re replacements for “pagan” holidays celebrating the winter solstice and the vernal equinox. But Lent and Ash Wednesday were far more important in the Middle Ages. All Saints’ Day, another pagan substitution, has become so marginalized that we celebrate the night before it instead: Halloween. Different religions, though, will have their own holy times: Ramadan, Hanukkah, and so on. As for prayers, who do you pray to when you have a hundred gods to choose from? Who is the one to memorize all the appropriate rituals?

End of this day

As always, there’s a lot to think about, and your choice is one of how deep to go. Obviously, if religion isn’t a major part of your world, then there’s not too much you have to do. But religion might be a significant part of your characters’ world, and it might show in the way they act, think, talk.

Faith and logic don’t always have a lot in common, it’s true. This is one place where the latter makes the former possible. It’s not your faith you’re worried about. Presumably, you’ve already decided that, and it shouldn’t have any bearing on your created world. Logically working out the beliefs of your world and their effects, though, can make for a deeper immersion into your story. It might even make some people think.

Let’s make a language – Part 4a: Nouns (Intro)

A noun, as we learned in school, is a person, place, or thing. Of course, there’s more to it than that. Later in our education, ideas and abstract concepts get added in, but the general notion of “noun” remains the same. All natural languages have nouns, and they almost always use them for the same thing. How they use them is where things get interesting.

The Noun Itself

Nouns are going to be words. In fact, they’re probably going to be the biggest set of words in a language, owing to the vast array of people and objects and ideas in the world. The most basic nouns (i.e., the ones we’re discussing today) are represented by a single morpheme, like “dog” or “car”. Later on, we’ll get into more complicated nouns that are built up (derived) from other words, but we’ll keep it simple this time.

So we have a morpheme, which we’ll call the root. This root is the core bit of meaning; if we change it completely, we change the whole noun. We can modify the root a little, however, and some languages require us to do this. In English, for example, a noun like dog refers to a single dog. If we want to talk about four of them, we have to write dogs. Similarly, the Latin word aqua, meaning “water”, becomes aquam if it’s used as the object of a sentence.

Most languages that mark these shades of meaning (subject vs. object, one vs. many) do so via suffixes, like the English plural -s. A few work more with prefixes; these are mostly lesser-known languages in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. English is a little weird in having yet another way of marking the distinction of number: sound change, as in words like goose and geese. (It inherits this from its Germanic roots.) Semitic languages, particularly Arabic, take this a step further, but Semitic morphology is a vastly overused element of conlangs, so I won’t discuss it much here.

Isolating languages, on the other hand, don’t really go in for this kind of thing. Their nouns mostly stay in the same form, but they can still represent the same ideas in different ways. If you’re working with a language like this, then the grammatical categories we’ll see in the rest of this post will likely be formed by additional words rather than suffixes or prefixes.

Number

Probably the most basic (and most common) distinction made for nouns is that of number. Not every language has it—aficionados of Japanese know that the correct plural of “manga” is still “manga”—and that’s certainly a valid possibility for a conlang.

Besides an absence of number, what possibilities are there? First, there’s a division between one and many, singular and plural, with the singular taken as the default. That’s very common, and it’s familiar from English and most other European languages. But it’s not the only way. Some other number markings include:

  • A dual number, representing two of something. Arabic and Sanskrit have this, and there are remnants of it in English, with words like “both” and “either”.

  • Marking both singular and plural, each differently, as in Swahili mtoto “child” vs. watoto “children”. In this case, the singular prefix isn’t part of the root.

  • A distinction between “mass” and “count” (or “uncountable” and “countable”) nouns. Mass nouns like English “water”, logically enough, don’t appear in the plural.

  • A category of number specifically referring to “a few” or “some”. This is called the paucal, and it pops up here and there. Usually, it means anywhere from two to ten or so, probably because people have ten fingers.

Some languages mark for two of a noun, and some mark for a few. Three is an obvious next choice, and there are indeed a handful of languages with a “trial” number, but they only use it in pronouns (which are the subject of a later post), not the nouns themselves. Four is right out.

Gender

Gender in language has almost nothing to do with gender in anything else. For many languages, it’s almost completely arbitrary. Sure, the word for “man” might be in the masculine gender, and “woman” in the feminine, but just about anything else is possible. German Mädchen “girl” is neuter, as is Old English wīf “woman, wife”. Irish has cailín “girl” as a masculine noun, while Spanish gente “people” is feminine, no matter what kind of people it’s talking about. Of course, things don’t have to be this confused. A lot of the gender oddities are caused by historical sound changes. Conlangs don’t generally have this problem, although some authors like to add the semblance of such things.

For those languages that have gender, having two of them is common. Usually, that’s masculine and feminine. Some languages instead distinguish between animate and inanimate nouns, though there aren’t too many of these left around. Swedish managed to merge masculine and feminine at some point, resulting in the dichotomy of “common” and “neuter”.

Neuter is a popular third gender; it might be analyzed as an absence of gender, except that some nouns that do have a sex are classified under it, like those examples above. With a neuter gender, sexless items such as inanimate objects often end up there, but they can also fit into one of the others.

Languages can also make more than two or three distinctions of gender. You could have, for example, a language that has four, where every noun is either masculine or feminine, and either animate or inanimate. Some languages (notably the Bantu languages, including Swahili) have a wide variety of categories that might be called gender, though they’re more of a noun “class”.

Case

Anybody who ever took Latin in school knows about case. And they probably hate it. Case is a way of marking the role a noun has in a sentence, such as subject or object. It can also be used to show finer points of meaning, such as those marked in English by prepositions like “in” or “with”.

A lot of languages don’t have case, or only use it in certain places. English doesn’t for its nouns, but does for pronouns (“he”, “him”, “his”), and that’s actually not that rare. Other languages seem to love cases; Finnish has a dozen or so, depending on who’s counting. Generally speaking, it seems that inflectional languages are especially fond of large case systems. Isolating languages make do with something like prepositions. Conlangs can be absolutely anywhere on the spectrum, from caseless languages to the monstrosity of Ithkuil, which has 96. (Granted, Ithkuil is intended to be unrealistic.)

Closing Thoughts

There’s more to nouns than meets the eye, and I’ve only covered about half of it. Wikipedia’s page on grammatical category has a wealth of knowledge about everything above, plus all the stuff I didn’t cover.

What it can’t tell you, though, is which of these categories nouns in your conlang should have. The answer to that depends on a number of factors. For an auxiliary language, you’ll want to be pretty simple. Alien conlangs can (should, even) break the Western mold.

Number is a fairly easy choice, but there’s a hidden complexity in there. (Just look at all the plural exceptions in English!) Gender has its problems, some of them even political, but it also has the potential to make things truly interesting. A matriarchal culture, for instance, might take offense at the idea that “masculine” is the default gender in a language. Cases make a language harder to learn, I would say, but they do feel like they add a “precision” to meaning. It’s possible to go overboard, though. (Actually, studying Finnish grammar isn’t the worst idea for a budding conlanger. It worked for Tolkien.)

The next two posts are going to cover basic nouns in Isian and Ardari, along with a bunch of added vocabulary. Those, combined with the pointers in this post, should be enough to stimulate your own imagination. After that, we’ll move on to verbs, so that we can make our nouns do things.

On magic as technology

I’ve previously written about the idea of magic and technology coexisting, and I touched briefly on some of the ways that a world would be different from our own, if magic truly did exist the way it’s often described in fantasy literature. This week, I’m taking it to 11. We’re going to look at what happens when magic doesn’t just live alongside technology, but either replaces or supplements it.

A world with magical technology shows up in the occasional mainstream setting. Many Final Fantasy games, FFVII and FFXII for example, have a heavy emphasis on magic working as or with technology. D&D’s Eberron setting has a high-magic world where magical implements take the place of technological devices. And, most familiar of all, the Harry Potter series has a number of “industrial magic” instances: messenger owls, phantom quills, etc.

The core conceit

The first thing we have to ask about a magic-as-technology setting is this: how common is the magic? If only a certain few can wield magic at all, it won’t form a major function of the technological progression. But if objects that use magic can be made and then used by those without magical talent, then you have the basis for a “technomancer” guild, where mages can create enchanted objects for the general public. Give everybody the capability for techno-magic, and many people will use it to make things. Some won’t, though, and magic-based “factories” could spring up, offering production lines and volume discounts. It might be a bit like today’s PC market, where most people buy a computer from a big name like Dell, but a select few learn how to build their own. They might pay a little more, but they get a level of customization not possible for the “big boys”.

Knowing how many magically-aware people we have, we can move on to the second question: how does magic work? I don’t mean in general, but only in comparison to science. If magic and technology work in basically the same way, and they can affect one another, then you have a “magitech” setting where the two almost merge (e.g., Final Fantasy). “Technomancy” is more of a situation where magic replaces tech (e.g., Harry Potter). Both of these have their ups and downs, but we’re not here to debate them today. They both have one thing in common: the notion that magic works in a predictable, testable, repeatable fashion. In other words, magic is scientific.

Branching off

When, in the course of history, was “scientific” magic discovered? The farther back you put this defining event, the less the final result will look like our world. Humans have an amazing capability to adapt new things to their use, and magic would be no different.

Take our own world, for instance. If magic had come into being, say, on December 21, 2012, the world as we know it would be largely the same. (I actually had an idea for a story based on this very topic, years ago, but I never got around to making it.) Three years isn’t that much time, after all. We’d probably just be seeing the first stirrings of a magical revolution right now.

Move the magical zero-hour back, though, and things begin to happen. Anywhere within an average lifetime, and the world doesn’t change enough to be unrecognizable, but you get lots of fun what-if questions. What if Osama bin Laden had access to magic in 2001? What if NASA had magical air-recycling in the 70s? What if the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were magically-enhanced? Or, for that matter, what if the Japanese had magical defenses against them?

Beyond a lifetime, the possibilities start to get too much. World War I is just now at the edge of living memory, but imagine if it was the first magical war. The body counts might have been even higher, the damage to the land far worse. Or things could have been changed for the better. Who knows? Wars are the easiest to speculate about, but any historical event could have gone differently if magic had been involved. And then everything would change.

Once you go back far enough, and once magic gets powerful enough, civilization itself turns out differently. If you have magical means of sending messages across miles, who needs radio? Magical copying can eliminate the need not just for electronic copiers, but for the printing press, too. If running water can be provided by a spirit of a river that anyone can tame, then why would you ever invent the aqueduct?

Not just invention, but every facet of life can be changed through the proper application of magic. Travelers could move about at night with magical illumination sources. A “ray of frost” spell is going to be a big boost to the study of heat transfer. “Flesh to stone” can take the place of mausoleum statues. The list goes on ad infinitum, because there’s nothing that wouldn’t be different in a world full of verifiable, technical magic. Even literature wouldn’t be immune. Sword-and-sorcery fantasy in such a world would probably be more of a satirical, comedic genre, or maybe a stylized look at the real world. The true literary heroes might become those who did great deeds without magical help.

How much do you need?

This is a rabbit hole that goes on forever, and it’s easy to get lost in it. For somebody trying to create the illusion of a techno-magic world, I can only offer a little advice.

First, decide on answers to the two questions above. Figure out where magic changes the “natural” order of history (even if you’re making a fantasy world). Work out what kind of magic the people would have access to, and how many of them can use it. The decisions you make here affect everything else, so they’re the most important.

Second, you can “cheat” by saying that just about everything that happened before magic matches up with our world. The precise details won’t be the same, but a world where magic was discovered in Roman times would probably have something resembling a Stone Age and a Bronze Age before that. Basically, any invention from before your branching point gets in for free, and you can work from there.

Third, think about what you need. Sure, it’s fun to explore the different possibilities, the different paths of the butterfly effect, but you do need to remember the needs of your story. Magical, oceangoing ships without sails might be interesting, but people living in a landlocked city-state probably won’t care about them, so a story set there might only mention them in passing, such as a brief phrase dropped in a traveler’s tale.

Fourth, use logic. That’s the whole point of technological magic, that it works the same as science. Wands of magic missile can replace guns, sure, but if they’re easy (and cheap) enough to make, then they would replace guns just about everywhere. Probably bows, too. Hunters would use them, and so would assassins. If that changeover is far enough in the past, society might completely forget how to make guns. (And that could make an interesting story hook, if I do say so myself.)

Finally, resist the urge to stagnate. If magic replaces technology, that doesn’t mean that progress stops. No, it just starts going in a different direction. It’s humanity’s unspoken desire to evolve, and the history of civilization is that of people coming together to change their environment to better suit them. That won’t stop simply because magic becomes involved. In many cases, industrial magic might cause things to speed up. If we can make things fly using magic in the High Middle Ages, then Da Vinci, the Montgolfiers, and the Wrights never need to design or build gliders, hot-air balloons, and airplanes. Magical airships, ornithopters, or the like would be a common sight to them, so why bother making something less powerful, less efficient, and more dangerous?

Going deeper

In case you couldn’t tell, I really like these thought experiments. I want to do more of them. I want to follow the rabbit hole deeper. Maybe it’s not everybody’s cup of tea. Maybe you’re satisfied with Generic Medieval Europe With Wizards. That’s fine. I understand that, and sometimes it’s just what I need, too. But I definitely want to keep exploring the intersection of magic and science. I can’t promise it will be a regular, weekly thing, but I’ll put them in every now and then.

Let’s make a language – Part 3b: Language Types (Conlangs)

On the 2D “grid” of languages we saw last week, where do our two conlangs fall? We’ll take each of them in turn.

Isian

Since Isian is intended to be simple and familiar, I’ve decided to make it similar to English in this respect. Isian will have a lot of isolating features, but compound words can be made through agglutination. However, there will be a few fusional bits here and there. We might consider these “legacy” aspects of the language, something like how English still distinguishes subject and object, but only in pronouns.

Most of the morphemes in Isian will be free. Bound morphemes will be a fairly restricted set of affixes, mostly grammatical in nature, but with a few “learned” compounding affixes, analogous to English’s Latin borrowings: pre-, inter-, etc. Owing to Isian’s smaller phonology, a lot of morphemes will be two or even three syllables, but the most common are the most likely to be short.

Ardari

With Ardari, we can be more ambitious. We’ll make it a more polysynthetic language, leaning agglutinative, but with some fusional aspects, too. In other words, Ardari will have a lot of word-making suffixes and prefixes, and plenty of grammatical attachments. Some of those will have a single meaning, while others will come in a fusional set.

Like Isian, though, those bits will tend to be older, even antiquated. It’s a common theme in natural languages: fusional aspects tend to disappear over time. Look at Latin and its daughter languages. Sure, Spanish (and Italian, and French, and…) kept the verbal conjugations. But noun case is all but gone, and French shows us that spoken verbs aren’t exactly untouchable. The same thing happened with English, but long ago. (If you don’t believe me, look up some Old English. We lost our cases, too, but our cousin, German, still has them.)

Since we have more sounds to work with, Ardari will have quite a few more morphemes of a single syllable, but two will still be common, and three won’t be entirely unheard of. On the whole, though, an Ardari text will tend to be shorter than its Isian equivalent, if harder to pronounce and translate.

The Words

Now for the moment you’ve all been waiting for. Here’s the first basic vocabulary list for both of our conlangs, including an even dozen words. Obviously, these are going to be loose translations, but we’ll say that they cover the same ground as their English glosses. Also, these are simple nouns and verbs. No pronouns or adjectives yet, because we don’t really know what form they’ll take. (If you’re wondering, the Ardari verbs end in dashes because those are only the roots. We haven’t yet seen how to make the inflected forms.)

English Isian Ardari
man sam kona
house talar tyèk
dog hu rhasa
sun sida chi
water shos obla
fire cay aghli
food tema fès
walk coto brin-
see chere ivit-
eat hama tum-
live liga derva-
build oste moll-

Next Time

In the next post, we’ll take a break from our methodical, studious approach and digress into the wonderful world of nouns. We’ve already got seven of them up there, but we’ll come out with plenty more. After that, we’ll do the same for verbs, and then we’ll start to look at how we can take both of them and combine them into sentences.

Let’s make a language – Part 3a: Language Types (Intro)

The sounds a language contains can go a long way toward giving that language a specific “feel”. But the very structure of the words themselves creates another kind of feel. Think of German, with its immensely long words full of consonants. Compare that to Chinese words, short and to the point, but combined in numerous ways to make new phrases. Latin has tables of declensions, as any student knows, while English gets by with only a few variations in its word forms.

All of this comes under the field of morphology, which is, in essence, a parallel to phonology. Where phonology is concerned with a language’s sound inventory, morphology goes up to the next step: the building blocks of words. Not necessarily the words themselves, as we shall see. But first, we need to meet the morpheme.

The Morpheme

A phoneme, as we know, is the most basic unit of sound distinguished in a language. By analogy, then, a morpheme is the basic unit of grammar. This may surprise some people. After all, aren’t words the smallest part of grammar?

Well, sometimes. Words can be made of a single morpheme, and English has plenty of examples: dog, walk, I. These are called free morphemes, because they can stand alone as words in their own right. In contrast, the English plural ending -s and the past tense suffix -ed can’t be alone. They have to be attached to other morphemes to create a legitimate word, so we call them bound morphemes. Thus, the English sentence I walked the dogs has four words, but a total of six morphemes.

Languages can divide up their morphemes, free and bound, in numerous ways, but they can all be defined in two dimensions. First, how many morphemes are there in a word? Or, to put it another way, what’s the ratio of free to bound?

Isolating vs. Polysynthetic

This distinction is an easy one to think about. Look at English words like predestination or internationalization. They’re big words, and they have a lot of morphemes. “Internationalization”, as an example, has the free (“root”) morpheme nation surrounded by the bound morphemes inter-, -al, -ize, and -ation, for a total of five.

Not every language is like English, though. Many, instead, only really allow one or two morphemes per word, preferring to build their larger “words” as phrases constructed from multiple free roots. The Chinese languages are well-known examples of this style. They, and those like them, are called isolating languages, since their words are “isolated”, or able to stand alone.

The other extreme is exemplified by languages such as those of the Eskimo and Inuit peoples. Here, words can be constructed to mean entire sentences, and they are full of bound morphemes. Not only is the marker for tense stuck to the verb, but verbs and nouns themselves are welded together, and the whole thing becomes a single word. To demonstrate, I’ll copy Wikipedia’s example, the Yupik word tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq, meaning “He had not yet said again that he was going to hunt reindeer.” Wow. (By the way, this is one reason for the linguistic urban legend that the Eskimos have a hundred words for snow. Sure they do, if you count something that means “it’s going to snow tomorrow morning” as a word. But they certainly don’t have that many free morphemes that convey the meaning of “snow”.) Languages like these, where there are often many morphemes in a word, most of them bound, not allowed to stand by themselves, are called polysynthetic languages.

Of course, a language can be in the middle of this spectrum. Isolating versus polysynthetic isn’t a binary choice. English, after all, has plenty of cases of both isolation and (mild) polysynthesis. Indeed, most of the more common languages of the world fall near the muddy center of the continuum. Chinese, of course, is very isolating. English is kind of right in the middle. Turkish and Finnish are quite polysynthetic, though more of a type that we’ll see below. French manages to put one foot in either world, with a highly isolating written language that’s often spoken like it’s polysynthetic.

Conlangs tend to follow their authors’ leanings. Some like the exotic allure of polysynthetic languages, while others choose the stark simplicity of the isolating. Most, though, are somewhere in between, like the native tongues of their creators. Certainly, an auxiliary language shouldn’t be nearly as polysynthetic as Inuktitut. But that same style can definitely give an alien vibe to an otherwise simple language. An isolating style, on the other hand, could conjure up images of the East, or of Pacific pidgins and creoles.

Agglutinating vs. Fusional

For those languages that have them (purely isolating languages need not apply), bound morphemes are often used to indicate grammatical relationships. Again, we can look at English: plural -s, past tense -ed, etc. Most of these have a specific meaning, but not all. On verbs, -s marks the third person, but only the singular version: compare “he walks” and “they walk”. This is the second “dimension” of a language, and it asks, “How much meaning does a bound morpheme have?”

Like above, there are two paths we can choose. With a few exceptions (like verbal -s), English takes the “one morpheme, one meaning” approach. Thus, it’s fair to say that English is an agglutinating language. Turkish is a popular example of taking this to the extreme, as Turkish verbs can have a string of suffixes: one for person, one for tense, and so on. German’s interminable compounds are much the same, but with more “meaning” for each morpheme beyond mere grammatical marking.

At the other end of the spectrum, you have the fusional languages including, for instance, the Romance family. Take the Spanish word amó, which we can translate as “she loved”. We’ve got a root am- (amar in its dictionary form) and a suffix -ó, and that’s it. But we know that it’s in the third person, past tense, and singular. (Spanish doesn’t distinguish gender in verb conjugation, though, so it could equally mean “he loved”.) Three separate meanings “fused” into a single suffix. And we know this by looking at a Spanish conjugation table. Change the person to first, and the word must become amé. Plural instead of singular? You have to say amaron. Want it to be in the future, rather than the past? It’s now amará. Alter any one part, and you need a whole new morpheme.

Like in the first case above, few languages fall on the absolute extremes of the agglutinative/fusional spectrum. English is mostly agglutinative, Spanish mostly fusional, but both have exceptions. The fusional type, though, seems a bit more popular in Europe (as you can see from the number of languages with declensions and inflections and make it stop), meaning that it’s better represented at the top of the chart. But even Europe has its agglutinative sect: English and Finnish, among others. Elsewhere, it really depends.

For conlangs, it still depends. Westerners are familiar with fusional languages, but agglutinating has a mechanical appeal, and it’s definitely a lot easier to work with. Auxiliary languages might be best served by a hybrid approach, where there are mostly agglutinative elements, but a few fusional aspects added where they can simplify things (like English’s verbal -s). (And if you’re making a purely isolating language, you can completely ignore the whole thing!)

Next Time

In the next post, we’ll look at Isian and Ardari and how they fit into the two-dimensional world of isolating and fusional and agglutinating and polysynthetic. The results may shock you! Oh, and we’ll also start making actual words in our two conlangs. Yes, finally.