The Dailies. August 24, 2022
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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2 thoughts on “The Dailies. August 24, 2022”
So the other day my mind was wandering as I went for grocery shopping and I found myself coming up with words for a new conlang. I decided the language in question was Naqlikar, which I named years ago as one language among many on the North-East Continent. All I knew about it before the other day was that its speakers primarily lived on the eastern part of the North-East Continent and that /q/ stood for a fricative. I have now decided the fricative in question is [tɕ] in most dialetcs but /tʃ/ in some others.
Now I know more! stands for the phoneme /j/ and an accent signifies where the stress is if it’s a more unexpected one. The default stress is on initial syllable, but exceptions are common.
The people speaking the language are called the Naqlikam in plural form.
Singular: Naqlika.
In transliteration, circumflex signals a long vowel, an apostrophe stands for a glottal stop, the letter
Naqlikar is a V2 SVO language like most Germanic languages and indeed my own Swedish. This is the first conlang I’ve made that has been V2, though.
Note: When the object of a phrase is a pronoun and not a noun, the syntax changes and becomes more fixed SVO instead of V2; the object pronoun is before the verb in most contexts.
There are no grammatical genders.
Adjectives are usually put after the noun it describes, but not always – more like French than like Beldreeni in this regard.
Nouns have case endings but the ending -e, for direct object/accusative case in the singular, is often left out in speech. This has likely been a major factor behind the syntax getting a more fixed structure than it had historically. If the noun ends with a vowel, the ending is -ne, but this is often ignored in speech too. The equivalent form for the plural is -us, which often gets realized as [s] and sometimes gets left out entirely.
I don’t know about the genitive yet. The indirect object/dative case is marked with the ending -ma, which is also used for the locative case (after a preposition); for a typical dative meaning, though, a combination of both -e and -ma are used.
The present and past tense of verbs interplay between singular and plural forms in interesting ways, but I will talk more about this in a later post – maybe tomorrow.
For now, here’s a handful of Naqlikar words:
akan (v) walks (present, singular)
aqél (n) boy, pl. aqélem
gimigan (v) tells (sing)
hôp (n) fish; pl. hôpem when it’s in use
hôpas (n) fisherman)
humi (pron) I; accusative hume; dative hume-ma; locative humi-ma
ifun (pron) you; accusative fune, dative fune-ma, locative ifun-ma
môja (n) village, plural môjam
pia (n) man, plural piam (I think)
ponón (v) teaches (sing); plural ponóndas.
ponónas (v) teacher, plural ponónasam
sajki girl; plural sajkim
tsu woman; plural tsubem
uhôpan (v) fishes (singular)
jôin (v) sees, watches (singular)
A few sentences:
Ponónas jôin aqéle. The teacher sees the boy.
Sajki uhôpan The girl fishes.
Uhôpan jôin môjane. The fisherman sees the village. -In speech, many varieties would say this as: Uhôpan jôin môja.
Uhôpas akan môja-ma. The fisherman walks to the village.
Ponónas ifun-ma akan. The teachers walks [home] to you. Note that the verb comes last here because the prepositional object is a pronoun!
To be continued!
Edit: Continued here
Oooooh, nice! I love all the detail going on here! I also like the evolution in progress on cases, etc.