The other three combinations, OSV, VOS, and OVS, are much rarer among natural human languages, for some reason, but that doesn't keep you from using them in a conlang. A constructed language (sometimes called a conlang or clong) is a language whose phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, instead of having developed naturally, are consciously … So an ambiguity in your grammar isn't always a problem — your conspeakers might have some rule for resolving it, or avoiding it, or they might not even notice it. In grammar, tense is a category that expresses time reference. Jeff Burke has written this description of polysynthetic languages: Polysynthesis is a grammatical phenomenon most famously present in many North American Indian languages; the Algonquian and Iroquoian tongues are the most well-known. A lexicon refers to the vocabulary of a language and is near-synonymous with a dictionary. Unit 9. Usually, there's a marking word between the phrase and what it modifies — so that a preposition goes on a phrase after what it modifies (as in English), and a postposition goes on a phrase before what it modifies. Wm Annis. Theoretically any order can be used, but some are more common than others. In SVO languages, some kinds of modifiers may come before what they modify, and other kinds may come after (as in English, which usually puts adjectives before nouns, but modifying phrases and clauses after). An alternative is the approach J. Randolph Valentine takes in his Nishnaabemwin Reference Grammar: Gii-gshkitoon wii-nsaaknang Maanii shkwaandem. Mary was able to get the door open. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. It happens because a sentence can be read in two different ways, and it happens because one language doesn't even try to specify something that another language goes to a lot of trouble to pin down. A polysynthetic language is characterized usually by verbal inflections to the point that word order is largely free. For example, an adjective in English usually comes before its noun, so "red brick" is a building material with a certain color, rather than a color typical of that building material (which in English is called "brick red"); but in Spanish, an adjective usually comes after its noun, so "rojo ladrillo" — word by word, literally "red brick" — is a brick-like shade of red. Tense []. While a website is currently in the works, you can download a grammar and lexicon of the Okuna language in .pdf format here. "John cut down that tree" may be inflected different ways depending on whether the speaker saw John do it, has heard so, or is simply supposing so from evidence. Polysynthesis []. Caseinflection is perhaps the most important inflection that a noun has, and all conlangs will have to deal with it to some extent. A final thought on grammatical ambiguity. Tense is the time at which the action of a verb happened, such as past, present, or future. In nouns, morphology may show case, gender, and number. It is used extensively in languages like Greek, Latin, Finnish, and Hungarian. – and … This is a phenomenon where a noun becomes, in essence, an inflection on a verb. Other general terms in use for conlangs in the past, but less popular in recent years, include "artificial language" and … Polysynthetic languages take this concept further and inflect the verb for details about the object as well. It is common in North American Indian languages. Cheyenne, an Algonquian language spoken in southern Montana and Oklahoma, also marks subject and object on the verb, but does so differently; instead of a fusional marker, it uses a prefix for subject and a suffix for object. A Simplification of English Spelling, Grammar, and Lexicon By Jack Eisenmann = Intro = Informative Video Conlang Wiki Page = References = Vötgil Guide Translator Sorted Word List Language PDF Quick Reference … The document includes a brief reference grammar, a list of vocabulary and some example sentences at the end. Case is a way of inflecting a noun to show syntactic roles in the sentence: subject, direct object, indirect object, etc. Mohawk makes heavy use of incorporation, as in: This translates as 'It-is-a-good-shirt', where the noun root atia’tawi (a word that can be used to refer to basically any upper-body garment) is present inside the verb. So, borrowings are limited, and are changed to fit Ạnglic's phonology. And this will definitely have to be four parts, now, in order to fit everything in that I want to. ke- is, then, akin to noun case and verb conjugation fused into a single marker and attached to the verb. CONTENTS 1. grammar terminology semantics tense-aspect-mood. … I first began working on Gomain in early 2002, long before I started studying … PolyGlot by Draque (Conlang creation software with dictionary, auto conjugation functionality, grammar guide, and recordable sound examples); Word generators Online. Both .pdf's may be downloaded below: The Okuna Reference Grammar … The language may be agglutinative or fusional. A constructed language (conlang) is meant to … I… Here are some properties of words that you might choose to show in your morphology. In verbs, morphology often shows tense, mood, aspect, and voice, and sometimes person, number, and evidentiality. Even closely related languages may differ greatly in their grammar. In addition, it is frequent for polysynthetic languages to incorporate nouns. Modifying phrases and clauses are usually marked by special words: English uses a preposition at the start of a modifying phrase, while other languages may use a postposition at the end of the phrase, and still others bound both sides of the phrase with a circumposition. I was amazed by its grammar book which had about 739 pages. Different properties may be shown by separate affixes, but they don't have to be; it's common in natlangs for a single affix to show a certain combination of properties, like "past second-person plural", or "masculine accusative singular". Witness: Literally translated, this means 'A-man, I-saw-him'. … Sometimes a property of a word can only be one way, like she that's always feminine (though this doesn't happen too much in English).