The Dailies. August 25, 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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5 thoughts on “The Dailies. August 25, 2022”
I think I’m going to try something new on writing a grammar / dictionary for each language I can actually use as a reference work, but it’ll be a chunk to properly set them up.
So a nominative noun paradigm (the most common) for what I’m working titling Courtly:
So basically, for anything in what I shall now dub the First Declension, you just need to know the singular indefinite specific and the definite plural and you know how the rest of the paradigm goes with very few exceptions.
I think there are a couple irregular singular definites, but most of those are conditioned phonologically and it’s a non-issue. The two genders, ar. and sa., are extremely regular once you know which allomorph of the plural it’s using, and gender is only differentiated in the plural.
That said, actually done yesterday and today, I’m working on noun cases and will put together a bigger paradigm soon.
Gender is differentiated in the non-singular, sorry. Plural and collective both.
Pardon me for my ignorance, but what does it mean semantically for a noun to be nondefinite but specific vs nondefinite but nonspecific?
No worries! So basically, in English everything is definite or indefinite with articles, excepting proper nouns, which are inherently definite. When in doubt, I ask myself which article would I use and is it referring to a specific person?
So in this case, let’s take the word saro (ndef sp), saroim (ndef nsp), and saroi (def), referring to a person that’s for all intents and purposes, this fantasy world’s version of an omega male.
Separately, what made them easier for me to tell them apart in usage was the zero (in Courtly) copula construction:
This is the page I use to keep them straight in my head mostly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specificity_(linguistics).
Truthfully, it feels absolutely incorrect in crosslinguistic likeliness that the specific would be less marked than the nonspecific, but every time I was using the words, it would feel wrong until I separated them in the indefinite. The definite doesn’t differentiate by specificity, but does differentiate plural and collective (unlike indefinite). It just felt right, so I went with it.
Very well explained! Now I understand – I think!
Thank you!