The Dailies. March 18
Did you work on your language today? Create any new rules of grammar or syntax? New progress on a script? New words in your lexicon?
On the other hand, do any excavating or reading or enjoying stuff you’ve already created? Do you have any favorites to share?
How did you conlang today?
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3 thoughts on “The Dailies. March 18”
I finally have verb conjugations for Orklang! In the present tense, at least. I have affixes for person (1,2,3), number (s/p) and for nomadic, sedentary and unmarked which essentially functions as grammatical gender. I haven’t decided how this works w my noun classes yet and which noun classes conjugate which way. Maybe all non-persons are unmarked, or maybe some noun classes function as one thing or the other. We’ll see… ANyway here’s my table:
This is interesting! Is unmarked essentially a third noun class grab bag of everything else? Are there any surprising things in a class because either different semantics than English or its form meaning it got dropped in the matching grammar bucket instead of matching meaning?
I used to hate grammatical gender and classes, but now I love them so much.
So, so far Orklang has 4 noun classes. Basically they’re “things that can’t move”, “things that do move”, “things that must move” and “things that don’t move”. So moving/not moving and voluntary/involuntary”, sorta. And I haven’t decided entirely how that maps onto the verbs… like, are the nomadic/sedentary verbs just for Orks and other living beings with volition, or is it for anything in the moving/inmoving NCs? I still need to decide that. As for the unmarked, the only thing I know for sure it’s for is, essentially, sentients that are neither sedentary or nomadic (culturally, since they’re salient social categories for Orks), so either non-Orks, mixed groups or just “unspecified person who might be from either category”.
I’m leaning toward the unmarked being used for nouns from the two involontary classes but we’ll see.
I haven’t decided exactly what words go where but I do want to make it not-too-logical. So a mountain is “can’t move” and then maybe a river is “must move” but the sun is “choses to move”, or something like that. Like, it’ll tie into which natural entities they think of as having volition or not. And I do want to have some real outliers too but I don’t have enough vocab yet to really have a firm grasp. Actually that reminds me, one of these days I need to sit down and assign noun classes to the vocab I do have.
Sorry if this was a bit rambly, I’m a bit tired-hyper today, hah.