Okay, now that we've settled on a basic word order it's time to think about how to express grammatical concepts.
A language's grammar is basically a set of rules that determine how meaning is expressed when words come together.
There are lots of different ways this can manifest but one of the most basic points to consider is grammatical number.
How does your language handle plurals?
Some languages like Mandarin are perfectly content to go without any plural marking at all.
Most of the time you can just infer plurality from context and when you can't you can always just specify with adjectives or numerals
Most languages will have an unmarked form of the noun that's interpreted as a singular and a special form marked by a prefix or suffix
That creates a plural interpretation.
This plural marker will likely come from a word that means, all, something like many or or some other quantifying adjective,
but sometimes it gets encoded through reduplication
Repeating all or part of the word to indicate more than one of something.
Some languages like Arabic, Ancient Greek, and Navajo
include a dual number a special noun form that specifies that there are exactly two of something, which as you might expect,
usually evolved from the numeral two.
Some languages have yet further strategies, like paucals for a small number of something,
greater plurals for very large amounts of something, or collectives for all of something. For the sake of simplicity,
Let's say that this language has an unmarked singular and an adjective
That means "many" that when preceding the noun is interpreted as a plural.
How does your language express tenses?
Some languages like Mandarin don't have any tenses at all.
To a European language speaker that might sound entirely nonsensical (if they have no tenses,
how do they express things that happened in the past or future?)
Well, if they need to specify they can just use adverbs or time phrases. This sort of system isn't necessarily that strange.
In Finnish there's no dedicated future tense. They just specify with adverbs.
Hell we even kind of do this in English with the word "will".
On the other hand, some languages like Turkish have as many as 20 separate tenses that break down
temporal distinctions in excruciating detail.
Some languages have a tense that describes a verb that happens
universally, some distinguish things that happen in the recent past versus what happened a long time ago,
some do the same thing for the future, for
hypotheticals, for saying that an action occurred in the past relative to another verb, you name it.
Will include just a couple of basic tenses for our sample language
It's very common that the present tense gets no special marking or construction. If nothing suggests
otherwise, the assumption is generally that the sentence is in the present tense.
A future tense can evolve from loads of different places,
from words that mean "to go", "to stand", "to be", "to want", "to hope", "to need", or from adverbs like "later".
Very often tense marking is encoded via auxiliary verbs,
verbs that modify the meaning of the main verb, often called the lexical verb.
For example, in English we use "have" as an auxiliary verb that means that the action has been completed.
For our tense system, let's say the future tense is marked by using the verb "to go" as an auxiliary,
which is a very common pathway in lots of languages, even English.
It's important to note that a head-initial language is most likely to put the auxiliary verb before
the lexical verb, and head-final languages will put it after.
Since our language is pretty definitively head-final, our auxiliary verbs will come after the main verb at the very end of the sentence.
so a sentence like:
"Person animal see go.", would be interpreted as "The person will see the animal."
As for the past tense,
That's a little bit more tricky to figure out. It's actually pretty unusual for a language to simply have a single dedicated
past tense, without mixing in some kind of a aspectual distinction.
Grammatical aspect is essentially the manner in which the verb happens independent of the time that it happens.
The most basic and common aspectual distinction is Perfective versus Imperfective.
Perfectives present the action as having occurred within a single point in time and may suggest that the action has been completed.
While the imperfective encodes that the action occurs over an indefinite period of time or happens continuously in some way.
The perfective sense may evolve from verbs like 'to finish', 'to have', or 'to come'. In this case,
I'm going to stick with 'to finish'.
Meanwhile, the imperfective may be marked by using the verb 'to be', like it is in English, or just inferred from the unmarked
Form of the verb. I'm actually going to choose the latter for this language.
But wait,
We've already said that the unmarked form of the verb is the present, but now we're saying it's the imperfective, so which is it?
Well, if we really wanted to we could come up with some way to derive some distinguishing morphology for them,
But as it is, this isn't necessarily a problem.
Recall that the imperfective is an aspect, and the present is a tense.
So the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive. At this stage in the process
it's entirely possible for there to be no obvious distinction to be made between the present and the
imperfective. As we've seen, some languages are entirely happy to leave certain tense and coatings up to context,
so don't be afraid of doing the same thing.
Plus this is just the proto-language, so it's more than likely going to change as we evolve the language later.
So for our language,
the perfective is marked by using the verb 'to finish',
the future is marked by using the verb 'to go', and the unmarked form of the verb can be either present or
imperfective, depending on the context. if you're looking to add further complexity,
you could add an inchoative aspect, a habitual aspect, a usitative aspect, or anything else
you can come up with, but for now, we'll leave it at that.
We'll come back to talk about verb morphology in a future video,
but before we finish up, let's talk about valency. A verb's valency essentially refers to whether or not it can take an object.
Some verbs like 'jump' are inherently intransitive, that is, they can only take a subject and never an object.
Whereas other verbs like 'entangle' just seem kind of lacking if they don't explicitly state what the object is.
Many languages will have ways of taking an inherently intransitive verb and
changing it to a potentially transitive verb and vice versa.
These are called 'valency-changing operations', the most notable of which are the Passive and the Causative.
With the passive, we can take a transitive sentence like
"I see you", and turn it into an intransitive sentence: "You are seen by me",
Allowing us to take the old subject and background it, or just get rid of it completely.
What we're left with is a verb that previously had a subject and an object,
but now the object has become the subject and the subject has been deleted.
Passives can evolve from a number of different verbs including 'have', 'take', or as in English, 'to be'.
For our language, we'll use 'take', so a sentence like "I take see the animal" would mean "I am seen by the animal".
Causatives take a transitive sentence and add the sense of 'to cause to perform the verb',
allowing us to add an extra object if we want.
English doesn't have a robust
morphological causative, which is a great shame because causative are really,
really useful for creating new verbs and they're really easy to evolve.
They pretty much always come from the verb 'to cause' or 'command' or sometimes 'to give',
Or as in English, 'to make'. We'll be straightforward and use the verb for 'to cause',
so saying
"I rock animal see cause", would mean "I cause the animal to see the rock".
Alright, that's about it for the basics of grammar.
Now that that's sorted we can start expanding our list of words. Join me next time when we'll talk about how to create words
naturalistically.