Alright, now that we have the phonology of the proto-language down, we can start to create some words.
But before we go crazy coining words left and right, we have to have an understanding
of how to organize them into phrases.
For the purposes of testing grammar and constructing simple sentences, we’ll coin
just a few basic root words.
Root words are those that are not derived from any other word.
These are normally simple, irreducible concepts.
At this point in the process, word creation is not our primary concern, so you’ll only
need a handful of very basic words.
The most important ones to get down are the pronouns, plus a few basic nouns and verbs.
Now that we have some words, how do we put them together?
How can we take these words and form the sentence: “the person sees the animal”.
Well, assuming there are no articles or complex morphology at this point, we need to establish
a default word order.
Any sentence will consist of three primary roles: the subject, the verb, and the object.
All known natural languages distinguish these three roles, but the order in which they come
in the sentence is actually quite variable.
Languages that put the subject first are by far the most commonly represented, but verb-initial
languages are not unheard of.
Languages with a default word order that puts the Object first are extremely rare.
And there are even some languages that have a free word order, relying on mechanisms other
than word order to mark roles, but we’ll come back to that later.
I’m going to give our sample language a default word order of Subject Object Verb, an extremely common word order,
meaning to say “the person sees the animal”, we’d say it like this.
What about if you use an adjective, to say something like “the big animal”?
Well that depends whether your adjectives are derived from nouns or from verbs.
In some languages, adjectives are simply nouns that are interpreted as adjectives through
plain juxtaposition.
In some languages, the adjective may actually be a verb
Many languages have adjectives that are recognizably distinct from nouns or verbs, but they ultimately
derive from one of these two, or perhaps even from both of them!
For our language, let’s say that adjectives evolved from nouns.
If that’s the case, our phrase “the big animal” will evolve from the meaning of
“the big thing the animal”, so if we wanted to say “the person sees the big animal”
would come from “the person the big thing the animal sees”.
In this type of construction, “the big thing”, even though it’s a noun will be interpreted
as an adjective because it comes before another noun.
If we switched the order, “the person the animal the big thing sees”, then "the big thing"
will now be interpreted as the object and animal as an adjective.
So, for our language we have noun-like adjectives that precede the nouns they modify.
It’s a similar story with Prepositions, or more correctly, Adpositions.
In English we call them prepositions because they come before the noun.
However, it’s equally likely that they will come after the noun, and therefore get called
postpositions.
Again, which one will depend on whether they are derived from nouns or from verbs.
In languages like the Mayan languages, adpositions are transparently related to nouns.
In others, adpositions can be seen to relate to verbs.
For our language, we’re going to use adpositions derived from verbs.
So, a verb like ‘to sit’ could be used to mean that a subject is stationary and located
at or near the object, so a phrase like “the man the rock sits” could over time take
on the interpretation of “the man is at/on the rock”.
And since in this language, the verb always comes last, this means our adpositions will
follow the nouns they modify, so we know we’re going to be working with postpositions.
Lastly, let’s talk about possession.
Every possessive phrase has a possessor and something that is possessed, sometimes called
the possessum or possessee.
Most languages will treat the possessor like an adjective, as it describes the quality
of the possessee.
Because of this, languages tend to order the possessor and possesee in the same way they
order the adjective and the noun respectively, and since we already know our adjectives come
before our nouns, so will our possessors come before our possesees.
And voila, we have our basic word order patterns that will dictate how our sentences will be
put together.
This word order is actually fairly common across the worlds languages: it’s identical
to the word order of Japanese, Turkish, Manchu, and Tamil, but this isn’t a coincidence.
Languages tend to fall into one of these two basic word order patterns: head-initial and
head-final.
A head is basically the component of a phrase that carries the most meaning.
So for example, if you have a phrase like “the big animal”, we’re talking about
an animal, not about the quality of being big, so animal is the head and big is the dependent.
Notice that in our word order, all the heads in every instance come after their dependents,
and is therefore our language is exclusively head-final.
While its very common for a language to follow these patterns exactly, it doesn’t have to.
Just take a look at English: Our verbs come before our objects and we have prepositions
before nouns like a head-initial language, but our adjectives and possessive pronouns
come before our nouns like a head-final language.
History and happenstance can do a lot to mess with a languages word order, so don’t feel
obliged to follow either of these basic patterns 100%.
As long as you have a historical explanation for any deviations, you should be fine.
So, we’ve now outlined all the basic aspects of our syntax and can form proper sentences.
Now we need to think about how combining these words can be used to express more subtle meanings.
Join me next time where we start to construct some simple grammar.