March 8, 2025 (log)

I am in the early stages of creating a conlang, which is a term for "constructed language". Some popular conlangs include Klingon, Esperanto, and Toki Pona. Here are the grammar rules I have come up with thus far.

I am sharing here a very rough draft. I plan to draft up a lexicon and stress-test the language, adjusting as I see fit. This is basically my first draft. I would also like to post the disclaimer that I am no linguist, just a nerd.

Phonemes

Vowels

a e i o u w

Consonants

sh zh ll h n ng v f k s d b r l m

Sounds

special sounds: sh as in "shard", ng as in "singer", zh as in "measure", ll is borrowed from Welsh or Klingon, g is always hard, r is always a flap of the tongue or rolled. "ng" is a consonant and can be used at the beginning of a word.

Inflection

Noun declension

There are eight grammatical cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, locative, and instrumental. Nominative is the inflection for the subject of the sentence; genitive is the inflection for a possessive noun; dative is the inflection for an indirect object; accusative is the inflection for a direct object; I am unsure how I want to do the ablatives; locative is the inflection for a location; instrumental is the inflection for the instrument by which an action is performed.

Animate versus inanimate

Animate versus inanimate (living versus nonliving) is not required grammatically but can be added for greater specificity, by inclusion of an infix -an- or -in- immediately before the case suffix. This is easy to remember for us English speakers because "an" is short for animate and "in" for inanimate. Hopefully this is easy enough. I might just do away with this alltogether.

Adjectives

Adjectives match the number and case, follow the same declension rules, and are placed beside the noun they modify. I don't yet know if this is pragmatic.

Tenses

The tense are:

Present // actions currently happening: "I sing"

Past // actions that have been completed, regardless of other factors: "I sang"

future // actions that have not occurred but will take place: "I will sing"

Imperfect // actions that were happening or habitual in the past: I was singing

Future progressive // actions that will be ongoing: "I will be singing"

Suffixes are used for the past tenses, and prefixes are used for future tenses. If the verb has person and number, the suffix becomes an infix, and the person suffix comes after.

Verb person and number

Suffixes are used at the end of verbs to communicate person and number. If the verb of question is in a tense other than present tense, these suffixes come after the tense suffixes; the tense suffixes become infixes. The suffixes are:

Miscellany

Syllables

Syllables are consonant-vowel (CV).

Articles

Nouns do not have gender; however, a gender can be assigned to the noun with either the articles "fe" oir "vi". For example, "lwpws" means "dog", but "fe lwpws" is "female dog".

The indefinite article has one form and is not declined: "an"

The definite article has two forms. "w" is used before consonants, and "wr" is used before vowels.

Superlative

is the similar to latin: the "issim" infix.

Conjunctions

I pretty much borrow from other languages.

"and" --> "et"

"in order to" --> "ut"

"neither/nor" --> "nec/neque"

"but" --> "sed"

"or" --> "au"

"yet" --> "iet"

things left to be done

• Figure out how I want to decline the verb "to be" (a very important fundamental thing that I haven't bothered to mess with yet. I might just steal from latin.) 
• Figure out pronouns. 
• Make the Stupid lexicon. 
• Fix anything I fucked up or botched because I'm not a linguist.
• Probably a bunch of other shit I can't think of in this moment.