Thursday, May 21, 2015

The Tree Language: Grammar 2 - Pronouns, Nouns, etc.

Grammatical Decisions

As you can see from yesterday, the Tree Language contains quite a lot of syllable markers to indicate things such as verb tense. And so it is what Mark Rosenfelder refers to as an agglutinative language, with all the inflections being suffixes.

Yesterday, I mentioned pronouns, and then I listed them:

Pronouns:

I-female: ˧fY˧ʒʊ
I-male: ˧fY˧ɹʊ
I-male-female: ˧fY˧yʊ
I-female-male: ˧fY˧lʊ
We (family, set, grove): ˧fY˧væ
We (All, forest): ˧fY˧ʃæ
That-one-female: ˧ʃY˧ʒʊ
That-one-male: ˧ʃY˧ɹʊ
That-one-female-male: ˧ʃY˧lʊ
That-one-male-female: ˧ʃY˧yʊ
You-female: ˧vY˧ʒʊ
You-male: ˧vY˧ɹʊ
You-female-male: ˧vY˧lʊ
You-male-female: ˧vY˧yʊ
Those-ones-female: ˧ʃY˧ʃæ˧yʊ
Those-ones-male: ˧ʃY˧ʃæ˧ɹʊ
Those-ones-female-male: ˧ʃY˧ʃæ˧lʊ
Those-ones-male-female: ˧ʃY˧ʃæ˧yʊ

What I didn't mention was that unlike other verb-related syllable markers, these are words on their own. This is due to their length, and the fact that they produce multiple syllables (i.e. whole words) on their own.

But there are other markers in Tree that have to do with nouns. I listed some other yesterday:

Subject Marker: ˧ʝæ
Direct Object Marker: ˧ʝʊ
Indirect Object Marker: ˧ʝɞ 

And here's some others which can be added as suffixes to modify nouns:

Pluralization: ˧wæ
Repetition: ˧wɞ

And here are the conjuctions, which like English, are standalone words:

Additive (and): ˦ʃo
Exclusive (or): ˧vo
Inclusive (and/or): ˨ʃo

And here are the translations of those 'functional' words I mentioned before, the ones that make up 80% of every sentence, but have very little meaning:

of: ˧fo
at: ˧ðo
under: ˧ðɑ
over/above: ˩ðɑ 
it: ˧ðy
on: ˨ðʊ
beside: ˧ðyʊ
toward: ˧ðyɑ
from: ˧ðyɞ
to: ˦θo
away: ˦θɑ
near: ˦θy
far: ˦θʊ
between: ˨ðɑ
up: ˨jɑ
down: ˨jy
in: ˧vɑ
out: ˧vo
into: ˨va 
like: ˧læ
with: ˧vy

Articles:

the: ˧lo
a: ˧lɑ

Other Pronouns: (you can see below that classes of pronouns related to "things" are absent. This is due to the fact that Trees in Omorbia are sentient plants, and to them, everything is alive, so everything is a 'one' rather than a 'thing': someone for something, etc.)

who: ˧ʒʊ
how: ˧ɹʊ
why: ˧lʊ
where: ˧yʊ
when: ˧vʊ
here: ˧fY
now: ˧ʝyɞ
there: ˧vY
then: ˥fʊ
thus: ˥vY
somewhere: ˧ʃY
sometime: ˥ʒæ
somehow: ˨fɑ
someone: ˥ʃʊ
nowhere: ˧fæ
no one: ˩vu
never: ˦ʝY
everyone: ˩ʝʊ
everywhere: ˧væ
always: ˧ʃæ
tomorrow (that is unknowable): ˩ʎyʊ
tomorrow+ (that is knowable): ˥ʎyɑ
yesterday (that cannot change): ˨jyʊ
yesterday+ (that can change): ˦jyɑ
today: ˧ʝyʊ

Sentence Order:

In the Tree Language, the order of sentences is SOV. This contrasts to English, in which the order is SVO. So instead of saying "the bird flew over the house", in Tree it would be "the bird the house flew over." A bit more poetic, a bit more like Yoda-speak. Perhaps I made this decision so that the Tree Language would avoid the pitfall that most first conlangs fall into: that is, as Mark points out, becoming a 'cipher for English'. Is it avoidable?

Of course, there is one other important set of concepts that must be dealt with before I more onto the lexicon. And that is numbers, something I have yet to figure out since I was super impatient to start translating texts and then writing my Omorbian stories. So tomorrow, let's figure them out together!

The Tree Language So Far

Introduction
Phonetics
Phonology
Writing System
Word Building
Grammar 1 - Verbs

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