Re: Spoken Thoughts ( My second, better formed, non crappy Language)

On Thu, 28 Dec 2000, Eruanno none wrote:

> Needless to say, it being my first attempt, it failed miserably.
> I had no cases,
Nothing wrong with that. My current project Igassik (name to be changed
soon) has no case distinctions. Furthermore, I've done work with a couple
natlangs that have no case.

 no distinction between verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs,
> and what not...
My conlang Telek only distinguishes verbs, nouns, and particles. No
adjectives, adverbs, or adpositions. That isn't unheard of at all in the
natural language sector -- some people even claim there are languages that
only have one part of speech, ie. verbs. (I'm skeptical - I think you
need at least verbs and nouns))

> So far, I have 8 or 9 cases for the noun, with 2 numbers, the aorist ( Greek
> form ) form of the verb, future, past, present, and perfect versions of
> future and past.  I am working on the adjective and soon the adverb.
A healthy inflectional system.

> Here is where you come in ( and I thank you for your time if you have made
> it thus far ).  I cannot decide what I should do about the articles, IE: The
> thing, compared to A thing.
There are a few things you can do.

1) don't have either. Lots of languages don't have either.
2) have the indefinite _a_ but not _the_.
3) have both, like English.

From a different direction, the articles could be:

1) independant words (eg. English)
2) suffixes (eg. Scandanavian langs)
3) prefixes (I can't think of my examples, but I've seen them)
4) make the distinction in the cases (eg. Turkish)

> If I had formed some of my stems/roots, I would form a basic sentance.
> Alas, I have yet to start forming the lexicon, and won't do so until the
> grammar system is complete ( all my last language was just lexicon where it
> was just another English clone ).
I find it useful to develop the lexicon and grammar simultaneously, just
so I can see what my grammar actually looks like. Some things look great
written out in a paradigm, but once they are applied to real words, they
look awful.

So let's see some details on the grammar you're developing.

Marcus