An Introduction to Vorlin
copyright © 1992-1996 by Richard K. Harrison

1: Overview

Vorlin is a planned language (which might also be called an artificial language, a universal language, or a constructed language, depending on your taste in terminology). The first published version appeared in March, 1991. Since then, the design has been improved in several ways. The main goal of the design is still vor, our word for "a compromise between technical and aesthetic criteria," in other words, the avoidance of extremism in the design of things.

Extremism in the design of things is widespread today, and ranges from the aggressive self-indulgence of the most maladjusted artists to the petulant inflexibility of the most maladjusted techno-nerds. Somewhere toward the middle of that continuum is a region called vor, in which we will find an elegant way of doing things, a style that combines engineering and aesthetics. Vorlin is my attempt to find that middle ground in the realm of artificial languages.


2: Sounds and Symbols

Simplicity and regularity are desirable in the writing system of a language, therefore each grapheme (i.e. each letter or special combination of letters) in Vorlin represents only one phoneme (distinctive element of sound), and each phoneme is represented by only one grapheme.

alphabet

Vorlin uses the English alphabet, also called the Latin or Roman alphabet. This character-set was chosen because it is used in a variety of languages all over the world, therefore it is likely to already be familiar to most potential users of Vorlin.

pronunciation

Vorlin's rules of pronunciation are simple and have no exceptions. There are no silent letters. Each written symbol represents one sound, or rather a narrow range of very similar sounds that will all be interpreted by a listener as the same element of speech.

The following table explains the phonemes represented by each Vorlin letter. The English equivalents which are given here refer to American English, not British English.

A word about q. Several artificial languages have used "q" to represent the "ng" sound, because "q" resembles the phonetic symbol for this phoneme. Vorlin users may choose to write this letter either as "q, Q" or as the phonetic symbol and its upper-case counterpart, shown below:

[illustration]

Computer fonts designed for the Sami language (formerly called Lapp) contain both the upper-case and lower-case versions of this character, but not associated with the q key on the keyboard. The lower-case character can also be found in all IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) fonts.

Whether we use the Roman letter q or the phonetic symbol is strictly a matter of font selection, which is an issue of individual choice. Personally, I write this letter as the phonetic symbol when I am using pen and paper, but I use the letter q on a typewriter or computer.


schwa buffering

Occasionally a hard-to-pronounce consonant pair, such as sz or pd, will occur in a compound word. (A consonant pair that is easy for an English speaker to pronounce might be difficult for a native speaker of Russian or Chinese, and vice versa.) In that case, it is permissible to insert a schwa between the two consonants. ("Schwa" is the brief, blurry-sounding vowel heard at the beginning of the English words about, ago, around. It is represented by an upside-down e in the International Phonetic Alphabet.)

stress and intonation

If a word ends with a vowel, stress the next-to-last syllable. For words ending in consonants, you may either stress the final syllable or stress all the syllables equally.

A declarative sentence may have a level or gradually falling tone contour. An interrogative sentence may have a level or rising tone contour. The intonation of individual phrases within a larger sentence is likely to vary from one person to another, reflecting each speaker's native language. Make a distinct pause at the end of each sentence.

punctuation

An interrogative sentence should end with a question mark (?). Other types of sentence may end with a period (.), exclamation point (!) or colon (:). The exclamation point indicates a high level of emotional intensity. The colon indicates that the sentence in question introduces or invokes the next sentence. These four marks can only be used to indicate the ends of sentences, with these exceptions: the period is identical to the decimal point character (as in 3.14159) and is used in dates (e.g. 1991.03.21), and the colon can be used to express times (as in 23:59:59) and mathematical ratios (as in 2:1). The period cannot be used to indicate abbreviations or initials as it is in English.

capitalization

Most Vorlin words are written entirely in lower-case letters. Vorlin does not automatically "capitalize" the first letter of a sentence. Only proper nouns and their derivatives begin with upper-case letters. For example, the proper noun Yovis (Jupiter) and the derived adjectives Yovisa (Jovian) and nonYovisa (non-Jovian) all contain an upper-case letter at the beginning of the proper noun.


3: The Shapes and Sources of Words

general design principles

Most Vorlin words are not immediately recognizable "at first sight" to the speakers of any particular natural language or group of languages. This is part of the cultural neutrality designed into the lexicon. It is also a way of reducing the influence of "false friends" (pseudo-cognates) and helping to prevent incoming words from bringing along too much of their idiomatic baggage. Vorlin tries to find a middle ground between the fairness but difficulty of memorization that a completely random or a priori vocabulary would have, and the unfair ease of memorization for a minority of people that exists in most a posteriori planned languages.

Although you will not recognize Vorlin words at first sight, you will probably find that their a posteriori heritage makes them easier to remember than randomly-generated words would be. This is especially true if you already have some familiarity with the world's major languages and if you take the time to read the etymologies of Vorlin words as you encounter them. Nobody could be expected to guess that bom means "tree," but knowing that this word is inspired by German Baum and Dutch boom can aid in memorizing the word.

Vorlin adopts most of its words from Germanic, Slavonic, Latinate and Sinitic languages. I would have preferred to include a little material from even more language families, but most other language families either contain relatively few CVC(VC) roots or they have phoneme inventories that are very different from Vorlin's.

A few of Vorlin's words are newly invented a priori constructions, and a few are taken from other artificial languages and extinct natural languages.

constraints

The following constraints on morpheme design make it easy to determine the boundaries between morphemes within a compound or derivative word, and also reduce the frequency of hard-to-pronounce consonant clusters. (A "morpheme" is a building-block from which words are made; for example, the English word undoubtedly consists of four morphemes: the prefix un-, the verb doubt, the suffix -ed and the suffix -ly.)

All nouns have the form CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant), CVCVC, or CVCVCVC. Suffixes begin with a vowel or semivowel. Most conjunctions, personal pronouns, interjections, and other grammatical particles are CV, SV, CSV, CVV or CVHV (where S = semivowel "w" or "y" and H = "h").

As a general rule, 3-letter nouns refer to broad, generic concepts and high-frequency ideas; 5-letter and 7-letter nouns refer to less frequent items and very specific concepts such as particular substances and phenomena.

The constraints listed above do not apply to "proper nouns" such as the names of cultures and individual humans.


4: Nouns and Pronouns

number and definiteness

Unlike English, Vorlin does not mark nouns for the quality known as definiteness. (English does this with the definite article "the" and the indefinite article "a, an.") The rules that govern the usage of articles vary from language to language, and are sometimes a great difficulty for people whose native languages do not have articles. (Many languages, including Russian and Chinese, do not have articles).

Vorlin also does not mark nouns for singular / plural status. (Chinese, Indonesian, Japanese, and many other natural languages also do not mark this distinction.)

Thus, the Vorlin word ful might be translated into English as "bird" or "the bird" or "a bird" or "birds" or "the birds," depending on context. Of course, Vorlin allows more precision when it is needed: you can say yun ful = one bird, men ful = more than one bird, tan men ful = these birds, and so forth.

possession

Possession is indicated by placing the particle es after the possessor and before the possessed. Erik es hus = Erik's house. Possession in Vorlin indicates that a thing is an intrinsic part of the owner (e.g. "Erik's hand"), or ownership by law or custom (e.g. "Erik's car"), or usage or consumption (e.g. "Erik's apartment" or "Erik's beer"), or some very similar concept.

Possession in English has a broader range of meanings. For example, it means "created by him" in the sentence "I enjoyed reading his book," and it means "done to him" in the sentence "his assassination was a great tragedy." These other relationships should be expressed by the appropriate prepositions (e.g. par and dal) in Vorlin.

pronouns

The personal pronouns are:
ya : I/me
ti : you
ku : he/him/she/her

Add -s to form possessives: yas (my), tis (your). (The possessive forms of the personal pronouns are used quite frequently, so it seems desirable that they be monosyllabic. Think of this -s suffix as a contracted form of the particle es.)

Unlike nouns, these three pronouns are assumed to be singular unless marked as plural. Add men (which means "more than one") to create the plurals menti (you plural) and menku (they/them). It is possible to say menya (we/us), or you might prefer the less ambiguous option of saying the equivalent of "you and I" or "they and I" or "you and they and I." Other numeral-words can be used in the same way: triku "the three of them; those three persons."

"Is that it?"

Vorlin, like many other languages, does not have a single word corresponding to all uses of the English pronoun "it." This is because "it" has many different functions: sometimes it signals the presence of an impersonal verb (e.g. "it is raining"), sometimes it refers to something that has already been mentioned, sometimes it refers to something that is about to be mentioned (e.g. "it seems strange that you are laughing"), and sometimes it is shorthand for "the most important thing" as in the political proverb "it's the economy, stupid." Vorlin does not have impersonal verbs; we say the equivalent of "rain is falling" instead of "it's raining." In referring to something which has already been mentioned, you can repeat the noun which names that thing (which is not a great burden, since the most common nouns in Vorlin are only one syllable in length).


5: Verbs

Vorlin creates its verbs by attaching the suffixes -i and -o to nouns. The suffix -i is intransitive and means "to engage in the specified process or activity." The suffix -o is transitive and means "to do process X to Y," a concept which can be further sub-divided into "perform action X upon Y" or "impart quality X to Y" or "have relationship X toward Y."

the uses of -o

From the point of view of an English-speaking person, the meaning of o varies somewhat depending on the noun (or other root-word) to which it is attached.

When the root-word refers to an abstract quality, o means "impart the quality to something else." rod (redness) + o = rodo (to redden something, to make something red)

As a metaphorical extension of the above principle, o can mean "apply the named substance to something else." sal (salt) + o = salo (to salt something). Note: fumo (to smoke something) means "apply smoke to something," as in "to smoke turkey meat." fumo cannot mean "extract smoke from something" as in the English expression "to smoke a cigarette."

When used with a noun that refers to a relationship, o means "have the relationship toward something." sen (lack, absence) + o = seno (to lack, be without)

When used with a noun that refers to an activity or process, o means "do the process or activity to something." vid (vision) + o = vido (to see)

As an extension of the previous item, when the noun refers to an emotion, o means "feel that emotion toward..." Vorlin is much more consistent about this than English and other unplanned languages, so be careful when translating terms of emotion into Vorlin. (Rather than saying "that interests me" or "she makes me angry," a speaker of Vorlin generally takes responsibility for his/her own emotions and says the equivalent of "I do fascination to that" or "I do anger to her.") fob (fear) + o = fobo (to be afraid of, to fear)

the uses of -i

The suffix i is most often used to indicate intransitive activities such as sedi "sit," lopi "run," sofi "sleep," and so forth. In general, i is not attached to nouns which refer to substances, objects, and other tangible things.

wi

Vorlin does not have a single verb corresponding to the English copula "be, is, am, are." English "be" expresses several different ideas: existence, location, equivalence, membership in a category, etc. Each of these ideas is represented by its own noun-converted-to-verb in Vorlin: haji means "exist," loko means "be located at...," etc.

Vorlin's verb wi creates words that correspond to English copula-plus-adjective expressions (e.g. "the sky is blue"). These words correspond to the stative verbs found in some other languages. wi must be immediately followed by an adjective, as in tan buk wi guta = this book is good.

For all practical purposes, the wi-plus-adjective combination is a single lexical item, an intransitive stative verb. You might be wondering why we don't write these items as a single word; in fact, we have experimented with forms like gutawi instead of wi guta. The shift in stress that would be required by the current rules of pronunciation (e.g. "gutáwi") seems undesirable, and writing these phrases as single words would complicate the rules of morphology and syntax.

passive voice equivalents

The feeling which English expresses with the passive voice of verbs can be expressed in Vorlin by replacing the subject with man as in man pelo ya, "I got pushed, I was pushed, somebody pushed me." (The phrase ya wi pelita has a different "feel" and would not be the best translation of "I was pushed.") You might recognize man as the "null pronoun" from the German phrase man spricht Deutsch which means "German is spoken (here)." This connotation of man also corresponds to the "unspecified they" in English sentences such as "they don't make cars like that any more."

tense

Vorlin's verbs are not conjugated or inflected to indicate tense. When the time of an occurrence is relevant but not obvious from context, it is indicated by adverbs and adverbial phrases equivalent to yesterday, recently, soon, five years ago, etc. Especially handy for this purpose are the adverbs pe "previously, in the past," ce "currently, now, presently" and fe "in the future." Excessive use of these three adverbs is bad style.

serial verbs

Verbs can be chained together in the following manner: ya vilo horo ganant = I want (to) hear the singer. Several verbs can occur in a phrase: ya vilo hobo lifo ku = I want (to) cease (to) love him/her, I want to stop loving him/her. The final verb is either transitive or intransitive, according to its meaning; the initial verb(s) will normally be transitive: ti vilo sedi ma? = do you want to sit down?


6: Adjectives, Adverbs and Numerals

adjectives

Adding the suffix -a to a noun creates an adjective meaning either "characterized by" or "pertaining to." Examples: ful = bird, fula = avian; gut = goodness, guta = good; son = sound, sona = sonic.

The suffix -a by itself is brief but ambiguous; if you need more precision, you have other options. The suffix -oz means "having a larger than usual amount or heavier than normal concentration of"; -uc means "having an ordinary amount or typical concentration of"; and -iz means "having a smaller than ordinary amount or thinner than average concentration of." (These words ending with -oz, -uc, -iz are adjectives.)

Additionally, you can use -tefa to indicate that X pertains to Y, -hava to indicate that X "has" or "is furnished with" Y, or -sena to indicate that X lacks or "is without" Y. (-tefa, -hava, -sena are contractions of tefenda, havenda, senenda.)

Examples:

lin : language
lintefa : pertaining to language(s)
sal : salt
salsena : saltless, devoid of salt, "salt-free"

bom : tree
boma / bomtefa : arboreal, pertaining to trees
bomhava : tree-ed, having tree(s)
bomsena : tree-less, devoid of trees
bomoz : having a large quantity of trees, a dense tree population
bomuc : having an ordinary concentration of trees
bomiz : having a sparse tree population, having few trees

When used with color words, -iz means "very much diluted in white," for example, roda = red, rodiz = pink.

adverbs

Adding -e to a root-word forms an adverb. The -e suffix has a meaning similar to "in the manner of" or "using a method involving..." It is somewhat similar to the English suffix -ly. Examples: gut = goodness, gute = well; mal = badness, male = poorly, badly.

demonstratives

Demonstratives (words like "this" and "those") are a special class of words. They behave like adjectives, but if there are several adjectives in a phrase, the demonstrative will "float" to the beginning of the phrase.

Like Japanese, Old English, and many other languages, Vorlin's demonstratives have a three-way distinction: tan "this, these" refers to something near the speaker, tin "that, those" refers to something near the addressee (the person to whom the speaker is talking), and tun "yonder" refers to something which is relatively distant from both the speaker and the addressee. Note that the sequence of vowels in tan, tin, tun is the same as in ya, ti, ku.

The interrogative demonstrative, corresponding to "what?" or "which one?" is kwa.

numerals

The basic cardinal numerals are:

For the sake of discussion, we will call the numerals dek, bak, kil, milon, gig "powers-of-ten words." Prefixing a numeral-word ranging from 2 to 9 onto a powers-of-ten word indicates multiplication. Therefore, dusdek means "twenty," sepdek means "seventy," etc. Note that dek by itself means "ten;" it is not necessary to say *yundek.

In naming integers larger than ten, we create a compound word, starting with the multiple of the largest powers-of-ten word and working our way down to the hundreds, tens, and units. These words are written with spaces after each powers-of-ten word. Examples: 11 = dek yun, 21 = dusdek yun, 365 = tribak sordek pen, 7654 = sepkil sorbak pendek fir.

fractions

Fractions are formed by the suffix -yet : tri firyet = three fourths, 3/4; fir sepyet = four sevenths, 4/7.

serial numbers

Serial numbers, such as the name of a year or a telephone number, can be spoken digit by digit, but some people prefer to group the digits into pairs; thus the year 1957 is called yun nin pen sep or dek nin pendek sep. The zero-symbol is called nul. If 217040 is a telephone number or other serial number, it will be pronounced dus yun sep nul fir nul or dusdek yun sepdek firdek.


7: Prepositions

Most of Vorlin's prepositions are derived from nouns by means of the suffix -u. Creating prepositions in this manner might help to prevent Vorlin's prepositions from developing the high degree of polysemy and idiomatic usages which afflict the adpositions of most natural languages.

Vorlin prepositions ending in -u can often be loosely translated into English transitive verbs in their active participle form: desu = "departing, leaving," loku = "being located at." Thinking of them in this way can help you to correctly translate English prepositions into Vorlin; for example, to translate the word "with," you must first determine whether it means "having" or "accompanying" or "using."

The -u device was originally intended for use only with nouns that indicate relationships such as location. Some observers have said that any noun which can take -o should also be able to take -u, if we are going to be consistent.


8: Compounding and Derivation

compounding

In the formation of compound words, the most significant root-word comes last, and is preceded by its modifiers. For example, ful (meaning "bird") and hus ("house") combine to form fulhus ("birdhouse," which would normally be interpreted to mean a man-made dwelling-structure for birds); ful plus gan (which means "song") produces fulgan ("birdsong," the song of birds) or ganful ("songbird," a bird associated with singing). Generally speaking, the final noun indicates the broad concept, and the preceding noun(s) modify or restrict its meaning; together they create a single lexical unit that can eventually (through ongoing usage) come to acquire a very specific denotation.

The exact relationship between the items in a compound is somewhat variable (e.g. fulgan means "the singing which is done by birds," and ganful means "a bird whose most note-worthy characteristic is singing."). I know there are some people who object to this variability. However, this is how compounds work in the human languages to which Vorlin is most closely related. For those who are extremely concerned about precision, it is possible to add a preposition to a compound in order to reduce its ambiguity, e.g. parfulgan = parfula gan = gan par ful = song done-by bird(s).

derivational affixes

Vorlin has several affixes that allow words with related meanings to be systematically created. Here are some of the most frequently used affixes:

am

The suffix -am indicates a small, discrete, coherent collective entity composed of several individual specimens of the item named by the attached morpheme. mur = a wall, muram = a building; vod = a word, vodam = a sentence.

et

The suffix -et indicates a significantly smaller variant of the item mentioned by the attached morpheme. This suffix can only refer to a smaller physical size or some close metaphorical equivalent to that concept; it does not refer to reduced intensity of an action or lower density of a thing. muram = a building, muramet = a shed, booth, etc.

od

The suffix -od indicates a significantly larger variant of the item mentioned by the attached morpheme. This suffix can only refer to a larger physical size or some close metaphorical equivalent to that concept; it does not refer to increased intensity of an action or higher density of a thing. manod = a giant.

im

The suffix -im indicates the smallest recognizable particle of the thing mentioned. salim = a grain of salt, vatim = a droplet of water, talim = a phoneme (the smallest recognizable particle of speech). -im generally refers to something that can be recognized by a normal person without the use of special instruments; that's why vatim does not mean "a molecule of water."

opposites

polar opposites

The opposite meaning of a word (if a binary opposite would make any sense) can be formed by adding the prefix kan-. Thus guta means "good" and kanguta means "bad," fula means "avian" (pertaining to birds) so kanfula would be a nonsense word and would not be used in normal communication. Do not equate kan- with English "un-." There is nothing equal to kan- in English, although it is somewhat similar to contra- in the medical term "contra-indicated," and anti- in "anti-matter."

Some commonly-used root-words have been given separate opposites. For example, mala has the same meaning as kanguta. These opposites prevent monotonous over-use of kan- and increase the brevity of common words.

The intensive, moderative, and attenuative particles can be added to bi-polar items in order to express finer gradations of meaning; the resulting words usually do not have exact equivalents in English: gutoz has a meaning similar to English "excellent," gutuc = "moderately good," and gutiz = "slightly good, not bad but not wonderful."

unary opposites

To indicate unary opposites and/or simple negation, use non as a prefix: nonfula tir = non-avian animal(s).


9: Building Sentences

the basics

In simple sentences, the word order is SVO (subject, verb, object). A simple intransitive sentence can have SV or VS syntax. Adjectives and adverbs appear before the words which they modify; prepositional phrases generally appear after the items which they modify.

Some people fear that a relatively fixed word order will somehow interfere with the development of poetry and other forms of literature. A quick look at English and Chinese, which have been producing fine literature with relatively fixed syntactic rules for several centuries, should be sufficient to dispel that misconception. (In English, the use of unusual syntax to move rhyming words to the ends of phrases is the hallmark of embarrassingly bad poetry.) "A person unacquainted with language forms might conclude that a language with a simple structure would lead to a dreary style. This is far from true. Every structure, in the hands of an artist, lends itself to beautiful effects." - Kenneth L. Pike

A declarative sentence can be turned into a question simply by inserting the word ma at the end. ti horo ya ma? = Do you hear me? The answer consists of the main verb from the question, with or without the negative particle non. horo. = Yes, I hear you. non horo. = No, I do not hear you.

The presence of an interrogative word (such as the equivalent to "where?" or "what?") does not cause a change in word order.

definition of a sentence

There are 3 main types of valid sentence in Vorlin: the vocative phrase, the fragment, and the full sentence.

vocative phrase

A vocative phrase gives the name or description of the person who is being spoken to, or attracts the attention of the person being spoken to. English examples: a phrase like "dear Mister Jones" at the beginning of a letter, or "hello, Elizabeth" at the beginning of a conversation. In Vorlin, a vocative phrase must begin with a vocative particle; this may optionally be followed by one or more noun phrases, such as name(s). A vocative phrase may optionally end with a sentence-final particle. Examples:

yo! = Hey! You there! Yo, dude!
yo Migel ma? = Miguel? (Is that you?)
laho Migel. = Hello, Miguel.
yo her Cmiht kwi Yóhan: = Mister Johann Schmidt:

fragment

A fragment consists of an adjective phrase, or an adverb phrase, or an interjection, or a modal particle, or a numeric phrase, or a prepositional phrase, or a noun phrase. (The term "noun phrase" means a noun plus any items such as adjectives, demonstratives, or numbers that modify the noun.) A fragment may optionally end with a sentence-final particle. Fragments are rare in formal writing and are common in casual conversation.

guta! = Good!
pen ma? = Five?
ne! = Don't do it!

full sentence

A full sentence must contain a verb phrase, and any sentence containing a verb phrase is classified as a full sentence. A full sentence may optionally begin with one or more modal particles. A full sentence may optionally include adverb phrases or prepositional phrases at the beginning that modify the whole sentence. The next optional item is the noun phrase which is the subject of the verb. Next comes the mandatory verb phrase. If the verb is transitive, it may be followed by the direct object, and this may be followed by the beneficiary. Toward the end of the full sentence we may optionally include one or more adverb phrase(s) and/or prepositional phrase(s) that modify the verb phrase. At the very end of the sentence we may optionally include a sentence-final particle.

Two or three full sentences can be chained together using appropriate conjunctions, as in "if ... then ... else ..." sentences or "whereas ... therefore ... " sentences. In theory it might be possible to link an unlimited number of sentences in this way, but people often get confused or require a lot of extra "processing time" if more than three sentences are involved.

apposition and parataxis

The term "apposition" refers to a phrase in which two nouns are adjacent, refer to the same entity, and do not have a conjunction or preposition between them. English examples are "the playwright Shakespeare" and "John the baptist." Apposition is not permitted in Vorlin. The special preposition ze, meaning "which I further specify as ...", is used to deal with these situations: bur ze Orlando = the city (of) Orlando, Djan ze kurnik = John the doctor. These phrases have a 'topic-comment' syntax, i.e. the thing being discussed is mentioned first, followed by ze and the comment (further specification).

The term "parataxis" refers to two phrases or sub-sentences appearing side by side without an intervening conjunction to indicate how they are related. English examples are "I know she loves me" and "if you visit my house, I'll show you my garden." In Vorlin (as in many other languages), parataxis is not permitted, and one must say the equivalent of "I know that she loves me" or "if you visit my house, then I'll show you my garden."

relative clauses

A relative clause is a certain type of phrase that modifies a noun. An English example is "that modifies a noun" in the previous sentence. In English, a relative clause must always occur after the noun which it modifies; approximately half of the world's languages put relative clauses before the modified noun. An example, from Mandarin Chinese:

Ni gei wo de zhè zhi-bi fei-cháng hao.
you give me DE this pen extraordinary good
(This pen that you gave me is very nice.)

In the example, the particle de essentially converts the phrase "you gave me" into a modifier that appears before the noun, almost as if it were an ordinary adjective.

Vorlin also places relative clauses before the nouns to which they are attached. The relative clause must begin with wel and end with da. Here are a few examples, followed by literal, semi-literal, and free translations into English.

ne libo wel non kuno libo ti da diq.
Don't love wel not can love you da thing.
Don't love an unable-to-love-you-ish thing.
Don't love a thing that cannot love you.

wel havo roda bar da linhajiksant loko mikanbom.
wel have red beard da language-creator be-located-at tangerine-tree.
Have-red-beard-ish language-creator is-at tangerine tree.
The redbearded conlanger is over by the tangerine tree.

A certain amount of syntactic chaos in English is caused by the fact that a noun can be followed by relative clauses and/or prepositional phrases, which in turn can contain more relative clauses and/or prepositional phrases. By placing the relative clause in front of its noun and explicitly marking the beginning and end of the phrase, Vorlin avoids a lot of these entanglements.

A relative clause in Vorlin must contain a verb. If the subject of this verb is not specified, we assume that the noun which the clause modifies is the subject of the verb. For example, in the specimens given above, diq is the subject of the verb phrase non kuno lifo, and linhajiksant is the subject of the verb havo.

However, it is possible for some other noun or pronoun to serve as the subject of the verb within the relative clause. For example:

wel tis kat fajo da ful pe gute gani.
wel your cat eat da bird (past) well sing.
Your-cat-eat-ish bird did well sing.
The bird that your cat ate used to sing nicely.


10: Names and Borrowings

If an artificial language is going to be useful for real communication, it must be able to cope with human names, deal with specialized terminology, and provide names for plant and animal species (even the obscure ones). These are difficult issues in language design, and no single style of handling these matters will satisfy everyone. A willingness to compromise is helpful.

proper nouns

A proper noun (sometimes called a "proper name") is the name of a particular person, city, ethnic group, mountain or other geographical feature, corporation or other business entity, or other highly individuated entity. (Actually, pedants can argue for hours about the definition of this term, and there is considerable variation among natural languages in the handling of proper nouns. Vorlin will develop its own definition as usage increases.) Proper nouns begin with upper-case letters.

Human names are written in the following style:
fra de_la_Roza kwi Marina (= Ms. Marina de la Rosa)
her Cmiht kwi Yóhan (= Mr. Johann Schmidt)

The following rules govern the handling of human names:

This system is a hybrid of the Occidental and East Asian naming protocols, with kwi added to reduce ambiguity. The system works well for names written in the Roman alphabet consisting of a family name (or something similar) and individual given name(s). However, some cultures have very different ways of formulating names. If members of those cultures begin to use Vorlin, we will try to adopt any suggestions they offer for elegant ways of dealing with their names.

It is generally assumed that a word beginning with an upper-case letter is not a combination of Vorlin nouns or other morphemes. For example, if you are reading a Vorlin text and you encounter the word Barker, you should interpret this as a name which consists of a random string of phonemes, rather than assuming that it is a name created by combining the Vorlin nouns bar and ker. Consequently, if you do want to covert a Vorlin morpheme or compound into a name, you should indicate that you have done this by preceding the name with the particle noc. Example: noc Rodbar = "Redbeard."

digraphs and special symbols

Vorlin gives you the option of using some special symbols and digraphs to re-spell names of non-Vorlin origin; we can make an effort to preserve the pronunciation of cultures' and individuals' names rather than their printed appearance. This intention should not be taken to extremes, however, as Vorlin cannot absorb dozens and dozens of additional phonemes (plus distinctions of vowel length, aspiration, tone contour, etc.) solely for such a specialized purpose. From a pragmatic point of view, it seems to reasonable to start by providing symbols to create reasonably good transcriptions of the names used in the language groups that have the largest populations (i.e. Chinese/Sinitic, English/Germanic and Spanish/Latinate).

Here are some of the digraphs and symbols that have been used in transcribing proper nouns. These are not really part of the "official" specification of Vorlin, and whether they will be used or not is a matter for the community of users to decide. (Some people prefer to convert all non-Vorlin phonemes to their nearest Vorlin equivalents, as natural languages tend to do.)

If you are using a Macintosh, you probably are not seeing some of the non-ascii characters correctly. See my browser test page for a check-up.

The use of digraphs introduces some ambiguities. A short dash should be used between characters whenever this is needed to prevent ambiguity. For example, the dash makes it possible to distinguish Li-hu from Lih-u.

If it is typographically possible, acute accent marks should be used to indicate the most heavily stressed syllables of multisyllabic non-Vorlin proper nouns, e.g. Fernández. (These accent marks should be applied to vowels rather than consonants, in hopes of making it easy to transmit Vorlin using the ISO 8859-1 "Latin 1" character set.)

the use of non-Vorlin terms

general nouns

Very narrowly-defined culture-specific items, such as the names of prepared food dishes (e.g. pizza, vichyssoise), articles of clothing (e.g. fez, sombrero), etc. will retain their "original" or "international" names in Vorlin. It would not be practical, and even if it were practical it might not be desirable, to invent Vorlin nouns or compounds to represent such highly specialized terms. So, Vorlin will have a native term meaning "pasta / noodles," but it will use the most international available terms for specific types such as spaghetti, ziti, macaroni, and so forth. (There are dozens of types of pasta).

The following rules govern the handling of such "foreign" terms:

Examples: le pitsa = pizza, le wiski = whisky.

species names

The less-frequently-discussed plant and animal species will be referred to in Vorlin by modified forms of their scientific (also known as Linnean or New Latin) names. The pronunciation of these scientific names varies considerably between the various nations in which they are used, therefore Vorlin will preserve their (internationally standardized) written appearance. These terms must be introduced by special prepositions:

Example: veg famlu Palmaceæ gensu Serenoa specu repens refers unambiguously to a plant which is called "saw palmetto" or "scrub palmetto" in the southeastern United States. In many contexts, veg gensu Serenoa would be exact enough to convey the intended meaning.

Exactly how a Vorlin-speaker should pronounce these quasi-Latin terms is open to discussion. This is a difficult question because the Latin terms contain many digraphs that are not used in Vorlin, including ph, ii, oe, and qu.


Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the following persons for their helpful questions, suggestions, criticisms and/or words of encouragement: Chris Bogart, John Cowan, Edmund Grimley-Evans, Michael Helsem, Bertil Jansson, Shawn C. Knight, Jordi Mas Trullenque, Leo J. Moser, Matt Pearson, Steve Rice, John B. Ross, And Rosta, John Schilke, Mark Shoulson, Evgueni Sklyanin, Mark Tierisch, Fritz Wettstein, Wang Shuxin. The writings of Bernard Comrie, Rick Morneau, Kenneth Searight, and Lancelot Hogben have been major sources of inspiration.


return to VorNet