I think all languages need one word that means some extremely specific thing, and it will always be written and said the same, no matter their writing system and phonetics. Make the word something like "That feeling you get in you left pinky toe when a gay giraffe licks you, interrupting you eating a hamburger."
My conlang's word(s) for that is: Kilunajika Lefena Dokalos Tikamurna, literally meaning 'Hating to leave bed morning' and I made up Kilunajika for that. It can be shortened to Kiledotik
@@Biblaridion Wow. I didn't know about that. The closest word I could come up with is tiredness. I have this all the time. I am not a morning person. I hate to be forced out of bed too early. At worst I feel like I have been hit by a truck. I do know that the perfect antonym for this is insomnia. I have insomnia a lot as well. I like to say up late at night, and my mind is busy. I hate being forced to go to bed at this time, because I can't sleep. It feels like torture. It is funny how things can get thier own names.
I watched this series once and barely understood anything. Now I'm watching it again while making a conlang myself, the hype I'm getting from just making up words and putting them together is unbelievable
When coming up with root words, something that I find *exceedingly* helpful is onomatopoeia. Instead of declaring "X word = rock", you could instead try describing the qualities of a rock, phonetically, the way an early speaker of your language might, e.g. "tiku" could mean "rock" by way of your early speakers describing the sound of rocks hitting each other. Similarly, words like "pata" could emulate slashing and therefore mean "water", and "foha" could emulate the sound of wind and therefore mean "sky". There's also the idea of "bouba vs. kiki". Basically, words with lots of P, B, O, and A sounds tend to feel "rounder and softer" when used together, compared to words that have K, T, I, and E sounds, which tend to feel "harder and sharper" when used together. Therefore, "obu" could refer to something large, round, and lethargic, such as a boulder or a tree. Meanwhile, "teki" could refer to something small and sharp, like an animal's claw.
Hey, that is a really good idea. I will definitely use it. Also, can I ask how did you connect the sounds with letters? Did you just think of a sound and asign it a letter, or did you just use the sound symbols?
@@ivoivanov8307 That's called romanization and it's explained in the previous video. Idk if you need this knowlege after 1 year, but I'll leave it here anyway.
Basically. Slightly more fiddly around the edges here and there, from memory, but that's the basics of it. Certainly most failed "Yoda-speak" comes from failing to do that properly. (Noticeably, Yoda will take "will" in "will go" as the primary verb with "go" as part of its object, rather than treating "will go" as one verb, or "go" as the verb and "will" as a modifier. Basically, its a bit fuzzy on how much of the verb phrase is or is not part of the object phrase.)
@@bonbonpony "go you will" is something anybody would recognize as Yoda-speak, but it isn't correct technically. The correct OSV would be "you will go", but that sounds like plain English. "Will" is a modifier, not a verb in itself.
1:30. They're so rare you needed a fictional language just to represent the first one properly, and presumably couldn't even find three for the last one.
One correction: Latin, while preferring SOV, actually has free word order, like many other synthetic languages. For example, the sentence "Felix loves Julia." can be stated in Latin in any of the following ways, all having pretty much the same meaning: "Felix Iuliam amat." - by far the most common pattern (SOV) "Felix amat Iuliam." - quite common "Amat Felix Iuliam." - very poetic :) "Iuliam Felix amat." - a bit less common, but completely valid (answers the question "Whom does Felix love?") And the two other permutations are possible, though perhaps sounding a bit contrived (still, quite usable in poetry, where rhyme and meter justify not following the usual word order). This is possible because the accusative case suffix -am in "Iuliam" clearly states that she is the direct object of the sentence, while "Felix" is the subject, being in the nominative case. Contrast this with analytic languages, like English, where there are no case endings and changing the order of words completely changes the meaning ("Dog bites man." vs "Man bites dog.").
Thats correct. Classical Sanskrit is also word order free. रामः विद्यालयं गच्छति। ( Ram goes to school) विद्यालयं रामः गच्छति ( to school Ram goes) गच्छति रामः/विद्यालयं विद्यालयं/रामः (this is a bit uncommon.) Actually that double dot( : ) indicates the subject in male nouns and the dot on top (.) Represents the object. So the order isnt that necesary. This gives Sanskrit a freedom and is very well suited for poetry. PS- The double dot and the top dot arent only indicators but have distinct sound of their own . There r vowels. The double dot is aspirated sound like (ha) while the dot is (am).
But Sanskrit paid a heavy price for this (atleast in my opinion) . As a result the language is frighteningly inflectiony(if thats the word) . It has a LOT of inflections. There r 8 noun cases. 3 numbers and 3 genders. There is a different suffix for every noun case of every gender of every number.
@@saikiariyan1464 Well so do most Slavic languages, plus the slightly different inflection for animacy and definiteness in certain cases and genders. It doesn't seem to have done them any harm, they're pretty live and kicking.
This is the episode the loses me- the previous two episodes were just right in terms of complexity, but _this_ episode, goodness. A bunch of complicated concepts are suddenly thrown at me like I'm expected to know what everything means already.
That's because modern English is a mix of several different languages with different rules. It's basically a Frankenstein language made of body parts taken from corpses of other dead languages :q
1:31 *laughs in czech* In this language, you can use almost all of the possibilities depending on what information is important in the sentence. Člověk (S) vidí (v) zvíře (o) - "default", commonly used order Zvíře (O) vidí (V) člověk (S). - It is important that the man is the one who sees it. Člověk (S) zvíře (O) vidí (V). - It is important that he *sees* it. Zvíře (O) člověk (S) vidí (V). - I'm not really sure how to explain this one. But I personally use it when I'm being sarcastic or trying to correct someone. I just find this interesting.
"Free" No language provides absolute liberty in this regard. Nor does any, to my knowledge at least, not use word order to express some category of its POS.
Fun fact: in spanish the order of subject, verb and object doesn't matter. For example with the sentence "The man sees the mountain", we can write it as: SVO: El hombre ve a la montaña. SOV: El hombre a la montaña ve. OSV: La montaña el hombre la ve. OVS: La montaña la ve el hombre. VSO: Ve el hombre a la montaña. VOS: Ve a la montaña el hombre. Hombre = man ve = sees montaña = mountain el/la = the (when before a noun) There are some diferences depending on how you rearange the words, for example, adding the preposition "a" to indicate the object, or adding the pronoun "la" (before the verb).
These videos are awesome. I've been trying to create a language for years now and all my attemps were total failures. With these videos I think I finally have all the tools I need to at least get to something decent. I created a fictional world and I'm trying to add a fully fonctional language for the inhabitants of this world. Basically it's for celestial people who live in clouds (similar to angels) and descend to the world beneath the clouds (earth) and expend their territory to an island under their initial city. I chose my sounds, word order, grammar basics....everything but I'm stuck on one simple thing: Root words. I just can't find out how to make simple words that don't look like some already-existing languages and that sound natural for my "angels". For exemple if I want to create the word for "fire", in my mind it feels like it should start with an "F", like many other languages (fire, feuer, feu,...) so I'm stuck on that idea and try to create a word that follows that pattern. Same for water, I have the word "aquatic" in my mind (or aqua, agua, eau... in some languages that I know) and I feel like I have to make a word containing (or starting with) an "A". Or with a "N" for night/nuit/noche/nacht... How do you mix up your letters and decide "that is the word I'll choose for "fire" or "night"" even if it sounds totally different from what your mind is used to for that particular concept?
I can't say I've ever had this issue, but I would recommend having a firm idea of what you want the language to sound like (I often come up with phonological forms for words based on how well they sound with the words I've already created), and if all else fails, you could try using an online word generator like Awkwords.
One thing I do is I’ll still have the “f” for fire, but if you switch up the vowels and order and end up with something like “rofen” it’s not as obvious
My conlangs have words for "finding it hard to get out of bed in the morning". Here they are: Qwiqwiqwëdaq uses "Æt'tli". Môhru uses "Niqq". Rrarrarar uses "Tamalquiqiqnoqiqqnoqiqngq". Ngweni uses "Tld".
No offense but the third one sounds like it was derived from the sound one makes in bed when they realize they have awoken and proceed to warp their body as they spread out over the whole mattress
Wow, you started with some quite complex syntactic structures right away. There are simpler ones that are more natural to start with when creating a new language, like noun phrases (adjective + noun), prepositional phrases (preposition + noun phrase), possessives, plural forms, thinks like that. Verbs and tenses are usually the most complex and most evolved structure in a language. And the subject-predicate structure is like the most top-level one.
6:27 technically speaking, Latin is only really rigid in prepositions. SOV is preferred, but look at any Latin literature and you’ll find OVS, SVO, and even VSO pop up, along with too much hyperbatonning. Possession happens through case marking and is treated roughly equally as Adjectives. It’s beautiful.
But same thing for Turkish too. In poetry you can write in any order including verb is not at last. But in normal text verb is at last .other words including subject can change (and must change otherwise it s weird in meaning of emphasis). the word which is closest to verb means it s emphasised. Bunu=this kim=who yaptı=did Who did this= bunu kim yaptı? (True) Kim bunu yaptı (wrong) (kim is not name of person it means who). Bunu Joe yaptı = joe did this.(true) joe bunu yaptı (wrong).) Only maybe a new Turkish learner can make such mistake, because he will think SOV order way.
@@PimsleurTurkishLessons I don't know Turkish but in Latin you'll find free word order outside of poetry Sallust taught me that (famous Roman historian who wrote stupidly complex sentences)
Russian is really a free word order language. Sometimes if you jumble up the words too much it would sound a bit unnatural or too bookish, but most of the times it really doesn't matter. It could slightly shift the emphasis, but the determining factor is the way you pronounce the sentence.
For my language, I’m having the adjectives be prefixes or suffixes instead of different words. And wether or not it is added to the front or back of the word determines wether it is positive or negative.
"Any sentence will consist of three primary roles: the Subject, the Verb, and the Object." Not an intransitive sentence, or a zero-copula sentence. And the distinction between Subject and Object, or between Nouns and Verbs doesn't always follow the way we think about it (see Ergativity, Active-Stative language, zero-copula, using nouns as verbs meaning "to be (a) _" or "to act like a _")
Important note to everyone who wants to make their own language/conlang. Consider the nouns' gender and semantic classes before creating root words. I didn't and had a really hard time turning things around. 😭
I'm on this stage i think. Language: Chegz! Fegza cha chef afech echack? Agza, Fa chef afech echack. Fegza cha gzecha chef afech efeck? Agza! Chachegz! Chechagz. English: Hello! Do you have some eggs? Yes, I have some eggs. Do you also have some herbs? Yup! Thank you! You're welcome.
Korean is a neat case here; its default word order is SOV, and as you'd expect its adjectives come before nouns and prepositions after-but it's also transparently clear that the adjectives are verb-like (ignoring compound words/phrases where the initial noun acts as an adjective, they really are just verbs that conjugate somewhat differently) and the postpositions are noun-like (acting kinda like possessees).
@PowderSnom animal = enimol, person = fwarson wow, some nice original words you got there, totally not copied from the language I'm speaking in right now
I'm gonna say that the historical reason for my language's inconsistencies (SOV that has prepositions and adjectives after nouns) is that its prepositions are derived from nouns and its adjectives were derived from verbs. But it's good to know that languages can be weird and that's ok.
1:40 Classical Sanskrit also had a free word order for language as a whole but different dialects were bound to different word orders and were still mutually intelligible without any difference.
I spent about an hour and a half puzzling with the random sounds I had come up with and like and trying to turn them into usable pronouns. Took a while, but DAMN I love the way I did it. Has really sad implications for my world and those that use the language. And now I'm calling it for today as my brain is hurting.
2:33 the first line in Japanese is actually a sentence, not just the noun phrase, in Japanese, the adjectives work like verbs, so in this line its a subject-predicate sentemce. But the second line is on the other hand, its a typical noun phrase like adj + n. The two example are in different situation so I think that's not a good example in your explanation, you can use 暑い天気/変な人、今日は暑い/この人は変だ in the same sentence structure as comparison, that would be better. But still appreciated you make this series, that helps a lot😆
I know your comment is from a year ago, but I think it would be more along the lines of "The person the animal growing sees" since we're wanting to base the adjective for "big" on an action. Kinda like the example of noun-based adpositions in Mayan.
I think it would be something like, "The person the animal that is big/which is being big sees," but I'm not sure. Aside from English I speak some Yurok, and Yurok does something kinda similar (the way my teacher put it when I was in school, it doesn't use adjectives exactly, but instead the thing doing the action described is, well, doing the action described, so if the action is running, it is running; if the action is being sweet, it is being sweet). I'm not a linguist, so if verb-based adjectives are different from straight up verbs, I'm afraid I can't help you much.
I did it!!!! default word order: SOV noun-adjective noun-postposition possessee-possessor sample sentence: "the person sees an animal" taro goju meno lit. man animal see sample sentence #2: "the person sees a big animal" taro goju petu meno lit. man animal big see
Wow. There are so many options for syntax. I like to think of a kind of flow of action in a sentence. It is reminiscent of sentence diagrams. The SVO pattern and the head initial patterns show flow better. So I would like to go with those. The sample sentence works like this. Person the sees animal big the. The subject comes first, because that is where the action starts. Then the verb comes afterwards, because the action flows through it. Having the subject and verb as two words is the bare minimum for constructing a sentence. It may be a good idea to start out writing sentences like this. Here are some examples. Person sees. Dick plays. Jane runs. It is really bare bones, but one has got to start somewhere. It is possible to have one word sentences in English if they are imperative. There is a subject of you that is implied. Here are two examples. Stop. Run. Getting into imperative may be a bit too complicated for starters, so one should postpone that. Some sentences have objects. The object goes last, because that is where the action ends. Person sees animal. There are two kinds of objects direct and indirect. If both appear, than the direct object goes first. It gets the action before the indirect object. Person watches animal for owner. This sentence has watch. It can mean seeing or babysitting something. The animal is what the person watches. So this is the direct object. Doing an action to or for something makes an indirect noun. The person is directly babysitting the animal, and they are doing that to help the owner. The person is not babysitting the owner. So the owner is an indirect object. Then there are words that modify other words. The nouns and verbs are the main vessels which the action flows through. Pronouns replace nouns entirely. Then the modifying words come later, because they lack the flow. The modifying word comes after the noun, so the proximity indicates a connection. Adjectives modify nouns and pronouns. So they go right afterward. This completes the sentence. Person the sees animal big the. Maybe even articles can come afterward. It is really different than what happens in English. Articles are so short and are used so often that they almost loose thier meaning. So they can go in the back, where they are far removed from the action flow. That is why I put the behind big. Both modify animal. Adverbs modify verbs, adjectives and other adverbs. They get the same rule of going after the word they modify. I added adverbs to the sentence. Person the sees carefully quite animal big very the. Carefully, quite and very are all adverbs. This gets complicated as there is a chain of modifiers. Sees-carefully-quite is a chain. Carefully modifies sees, which is a verb. In turn quite modifies carefully, which is an adverb. Animal-big-very-the is another chain. Big is a pronoun. It modifies animal, which is a noun. Very is an adverb. It modifies big. The is an adjective. It modifies animal. Very is after big. This indicates it modifies big. It doesnt modify the. Wow. This is getting really different from English. In English the sentence would go like this. The person quite carefully sees the very big animal.
There can be other things beyond the basics of syntax. I would like prepositions to be between the two objects they connect. I am not sure if that is an adposion or preposision. I would like to use preposition to indicate possetion. There would be a word between posessor and possesee. It is like the word of, but it is a special word used just for possesion. The possessee always comes first, because it receive the flow of action more directly. Proper English would have this. The man's dog. I would have the syntax like this. Dog of man the. I would even like to use this for pronouns that are possessors. English modifies like this. His dog. I would have the syntax in two possible ways. Dog of he. Dog of him. The difference is that he is a subject and him is an object. I don't want to make such distinction. I can just use the context of the syntax to determine whether the pronoun is a subject or object. I am thinking about dropping gender entirly. So it would be like this. Dog of it. Funny enough in English it can be used as a subject or object. It makes perfect sense in context anyway. A man is very masculine in a biological sense. However I think it is plausable to ignore that completely in a grammatical sense. It is not meant to be a dehuminizing way, expecially when speakers of a language are used to having gender neutral words. In English, male animals get thier gender ignored all the time. It makes sense. In most animals it is difficult to tell the gender. There are some easy ones, like lion, deer and peafowl. However the easy ones are the exception, not the rule. I may be biased as an English speaker, but I think ignoring genders of humans and animals makes more sense than giving genders to inanimate object. Genders don't even work for plants very well, since most are hermaphrodites. The only plant I know that could be separated to he and she is the ginkgo. There are words that are classified as verbs, but they don't do much. The main example is the verb to be. I wonder if subject and object can still apply. The action is just a state of being and that is it. Sometimes the obeject is an adjetive that describes the subject. I wonder if the adjetive can be used as an object or should it be reworked somehow. There is an example. I'm a nut. Maybe I is the subject, am is the verb and nut is the object. I have this particular sentence in mind, because the song is in my head. It is so catchy.
@@_skysick_ No, as a speaker of Mandarin I am certain that there should not be a 的 de at the end. Actually, I don't even think the phrase in the video is correct; I've never even heard of it as a complete sentence. I'd interpret it as 她漂亮的 tā piàoliang de "Her beautiful (unwritten possessee)," which is an incomplete sentence, or just simply a typo of 她漂亮 tā piàoliang, a more informal way of saying 她很漂亮 tā hěn piàoliang "She is (very) beautiful."
@@_skysick_ The Mandarin example is straight up wrong. "True adjectives" in Mandarin all function as stative verbs so to say "X is adjective", you just say "X adjective", no verb needed. However, Mandarin also phonologically dislikes monosyllabic words so sometimes the adjectival copula 很 (normally meaning "very" but in this case doesn't actually mean anything) is added before the adjective. 很 has to be used with monosyllabic adjectives but often gets used with polysyllabic adjectives anyway (to the point where not using 很 sounds a bit improper nowadays). 的 functions as a complementizer when added to an adjective, meaning that the "adjective的" construction must appear in a noun phrase, i.e. there has to be a noun after it.
looks like youve got some inspiration from tamil - aalu also means person here, and maa means great (or sometimes big too). also, only modern spoken tamil has a default word order of SOV (even that is kind of flexible) - ancient and medieval tamil , the tamil we use in formal occasions or to write, has a extremely flexible word order - SOV, SVO, VSO, VOS, OSV, OVS all are possible. its just that colloquilly we normally use SOV
I love this series so much, it's so useful! Would you do a series please on writing ConLangs with culture and people/animal names in mind? So many incredible fantasy series have good people names and dragon names and its so difficult especially if you're making a language from scratch
I'm now making a conlang I'm calling Puranki. (Pronunciations are the same as the IPA symbols.) It has a VSO word order and follows all of the common head-initial traits. "li" means "see," "puranki" means "person," and "ma-a" means "animal." "li puranki ma-a." (The person sees the animal.) This series has been really helpful for me while I'm creating this language! ^^
My language, Aeri, is Head-Initial in that the Verb comes before the Object. Everything else (Adjective-Noun, Noun-Postposition, Possessor-Possessee) is Head-Final. Also, CZcams is yelling at me for Postpositions and Possessees. I guess the English version of youtube was designed to be used by Head-Initial speakers rather than Head-Final speakers. Also, I just want to say thank you for making these videos, they're really helping me with creating Aeri.
Latin is somewhat like that (1:33). It has a neutral word order, but two or three other permutations are legitimate to change the emphasis of what is said or written. Since Latin uses words inflected according to case, it's easy, at least in principle, to figure out which words are subject, verb, and object.
2:23 Mandarin is not correct. 她漂亮的 is not a complete sentence and can mean something like "her beautiful ...(something)". If you want to say "she is beautiful" you need to say 她很漂亮 (ta hen piao liang) which literally means "she very beautiful". Anyways, really appreciate that you used Mandarin as an example and great video~
Sure, word order changes happen all the time. Changes from SOV to SVO sometimes happen when some older system of role-marking is lost. The most obvious example is the romance languages: Latin, while having a somewhat free word order, was mostly SOV, but when the case system was lost, the word order shifted to SVO, which has been maintained in French, Spanish, and Italian. I believe the same thing also happened in Old Chinese.
Not quite the same thing, but Greenlandic may end up evolving from an ergative language to a nominative language based on how younger speakers are using it.
2:03 then there is Italian where you can put the adjective wherever you want around the name and it still means the same. Actually it sounds a bit different, just like a difference in the tone would sound different. It's pretty strange. Still, the sentence would mean the same in almost all cases. One could tell something similar about the object, verb and subject order thing, but that's a bit more strict
1:37 modern Iranian Persian has a free word order too! Originally it’s SOV but if you change their positions (which you can) it slightly changes the meaning.
I chose to opt for basically ignoring possession and instead having possession denoted by word order using the verb "to own". I also use VSO order, and verb-like adjectives, so something like "the big man's little dog sees the blue rock" would become; "see (own man big dog little) rock blue" which in English requires at the very least commas where I've added brackets just to get over how jarring it is to see "[verb] [verb]". Oh also my adpositions are postpositions, so the heads thing... I guess I'm kinda head-initial aside from the adpositions, and technically possession doesn't exist as a distinct concept in my conlang so I guess it's native speakers aren't too concerned with ownership but are really concerned with "things" rather than their variation or manner... World building beforehand might have been a good idea but I'm starting to enjoy accidentally limiting the world through the language which exists within it
I love the video, it was very helpful, but I have been trying to find evidence for my school research topic , its on linguistics, and i want to to know where you get your evidence from. Is it from Wikipedia alone?
For example Czech is a language with free word order. pán viděl psa (SVO), pán psa viděl (SOV), viděl pán psa (VSO), viděl psa pán (VOS), psa viděl pán (OVS) and psa pán viděl (OSV) are all possible, meaning "a man saw a dog", although the SVO is the by far most common and the others feel pretty weird, but it's possible because of Czech's different word forms based on the word being object, subject and others (total of 7 in singular and 7 in plural). So "psa" (meaning dog) (which is in the 4. or object word form) is different from "pes" (1. form if it was subject)
Oh this is insane from a newcomer's perspective (Newcomer here...uh...hi there) and very complex,...but it looks like a lot of fun once you actually start doing it.
currently trying to make a conlang based on a few already existing languages, that actually derives from said languages (french, german, a few romance languages)
I am actually working on a bird-people-language right now, which don't have noses and therefor can't pronounce nasal sounds. This video really helps ^^ Gha-arr Shet Tsha-ak tarr Gaat. (The animal the big thing the person he sees) (the person sees the big animal.)
Haven't realised it until this moment but a language I speak, Somali, has a semi free word order, in that the subject always comes first but you can choose what comes next, whether it be the verb or the object.
I don't know how to translate ayuu or uu, they're not words but the glued used to hold together the sentence, depending on the gender of the subject/verb/object. You use ayuu if you want to put the object in the middle, this is SOV. You use uu if you want to put the verb in the middle, this SVO.
Well subordinate clauses are dependent on the main clause, so in absolute head final languages you'd have your main clause come after the subordinate clause(s). This seems incredibly unnatural though, so you'd probably stick to head first for clauses. "Vanilla especially, I like icecream" is as close as I can come to preducing a head final clause structure off the top of my head.
TheApexSurvivor strictly head final languages like Japanese do put their relative clauses first (because they are adjectives)... but I was wondering more how to evolve them at all regardless of where they go. You know like cases come from adpositions glomming on to their noun. How do these structures appear in the first place?
I guess my confusion lies in how much of this stage should be done before I move on to the next one? I built some root words, including ones that are culturally significant to the people for whom I'm trying to sculpt a language, but I don't know how many I need to be able to effectively start building the grammar of the protolanguage. I have, in total, 20 root words made, 16 if you don't count the suffixes I made, two of which denote a person from an animal, and two of which denote adjectives, one noun-like and one verb-like.
Not to long ago, i created a script and sound set for a language, and never got further (originally was just going to overlay it over english sounds) Though I think it works perfectly well to begin developing a conlang instead
It's surprising VOS is so rare, since it feels like a very intuitive structure to me. Like, first I'm going to tell you what kind of action the sentence is about "Eats..." Next I'm going to give you some more detail about this action "Eats pizza..." And finally, I'm going to tell who's doing this "Eats pizza she."
3:00 how would this work for a language in which the adjectives are derived from verbs rather than nouns? And would the adjective come before or after the object? I'm building a VOS language if that makes any difference.
1:22 fun fact about turkish is when we use all combinations, it still means the same thing and a person wouldn't find it that weird while talking. But it is still messy and wrong.
Could your version of "the person sees the big animal", which is "the person the big thing the animal sees", also be translated back into "the person-like big thing sees the animal"
In my conlang, when you say "The man is slicing bread." You will say "The is slicing man the bread." When words are used to describe something in this language, the words will be before the actual noun. The sentence structure is (Subject Checker), Adjective/Verb, Postpostition/Preposition (in informal cases | formal cases will only have Prepostition), Noun/Possessor, Postposition (only in formal cases), Possesse Also I now have a sentence in my conlang, Ecto shvensko Elo ecta Elavid. (Literal meaning: The look he the her. | Meaning: He looks at her.)
Quick question, so my language follows a OSV pattern. Assuming my adpostions are derived from verbs, would my adpostion still come last in the sentence or would it follow the noun it modifies. Ex. (Rak Pe Kan, "Rock Man Sits.") Would this turn into Rak Kan Pe to mean "The man sits on the rock" or would it still keep the original word order? This is my first conlang and everything else has made sense so far up until this point and I have been unable to get past it now for a few days. I know osv is a horrible option for my first conlang but most everything else i've chosen has been a good call lmao
actually tamil is word order flexible - you can order the words however you want and it will still make sense. but mostly that is only used in old tamil literature and modern tamil uses SOV ( mostly)
This division of adjectives into verb-derived and noun-derived seems a bit strange to be honest. The examples provided actually showcase the difference between the so-called attributive and predicatve adjectives. An attributive adjective is part of a noun phrase (for example - a big horse - 'big' is an attributive adjective), and it can go before and after the noun, sometimes in the same language (and the rules for placing the adjective may be quite complicated). A predicative adjective is a part of a predicative expression: The horse is big. Notice, that in English, there has to be a copula in a predicative expressions with an adjective (not all language have a copula, sometimes it's a zero copula, so you're essentially saying 'Horse big', but it's different from saying 'big horse'). The examples of the noun-like adjectives and verb-like adjectives that Biblaridion provided are exactly that, and, essentially, have nothing to do with adjective somehow being derived from verbs or nouns. Languages usually have both kind of adjectives (attributive and predicative). If you're language is SOV, then predicative adjective should go (at least, from my experience with languages) at the end of the sentence, and if it also has a copula, then this copula goes after the adjective (often being attached to it as an affix). The attributive adjective, though, goes after or before the noun it describes depending whether your noun phrases are head-final or head-initial (there can be both in the same language). Also, pragmatic considerations (like, emphasizing important information) can change the default word order as well. It's not also that simple, and can't be exhaustively explained in a few paragraphs (and I don't know everything anyway). Read up on the theory, study real-life languages, and think for yourself.
You use a CV notation for your open syllable, but what are the other options? How would we indicate if a coda is allowed, or if only some codas are allowed?
Ieno dhúrfië it-valtafangí eghiar. It means "I need to be the king". In this sentence we have to use a subordinate (I need, [to be the king]). It is introduced by "it-". Ieno means I. Dhúrfië means need. Valta means kingdom and fang means a person, so valtafang means a king. The í is a suffix to definite the word. Eghiar is the infinitive of be. So it gives you in english "I need, to-theking be.". Idk if my explanations were understandable, but that's my language ;) PS : the sentence is pronounced [jɛno ðuːɾfje it valtafaŋiː ɛɡçjɑɾ].
the noun adposition are like we write/create one by one and his meaning/use? (like on and in) and the verb way are actual verbs wich also work as a adposition? ("the book rests the table")?
I made the sentence "the person sees the animal" in my language! tehlu La watu tehlu Ra tehlu: the La(a): person/people watu: to see ra(a): animal/animals
Aah one of the best thing of being bilingual is that if some of this shit doesn't make sense then I can just speak in my first language and see if it makes sense or not. I first read "the person the animal sees" In English and it sounds so confusing, then I just read it in my mother tongue and it isn't as confusing anymore. (My mother tongue uses SVO but there are different distinct dialects of older versions of my language that I've heard of before that uses SOV)
How can you tell between Adjectives and Possessors? e.g "The man's dog vs the man-like dog" for SOV are they not the same? is it dependent on context to differentiate..??? or like English, is there an extra suffix needed ('s) for it?
What about inpositions? Would the adpositions actually just be infixes? Or would the affected noun be wrapped around the adposition? I'd assume both would be possible.
I made a poem with my previously made conlang (I've loads of them) Fo Bai dong ad bini esda sa a dong vais, a dong twa tifisa cqwistö kongyösa fih[i]tö (I forgot how it continued...)
1:25 in most cases, Russian doesn't actually distinguish between SOV and SVO. 'Ya tibya lublyu' (lit. I you love) and 'Ya lublyu tibya' (lit. I love you) mean the same thing. also please excuse my transliteration here I've always had problems with Russian transliteration. (also sidetone but most transliterations dont distinguish between 'e' which sort of sounds like 'ie or ye' and 'э' which sounds like the 'e' in enter and it always annoys the heck out of me.)
So, in an SOV language with it being postposition --- if I were to say "he sits in the canoe" would it be "he canoe in sits" or "he canoe sits in"? I'm assuming it's the former, but am unsure if either of those two are even the right ones. thanks!
Now every conlang I make will have a word for "finding it hard to get out of bed in the morning"
English does actually have a term for that: "Dysania".
I think all languages need one word that means some extremely specific thing, and it will always be written and said the same, no matter their writing system and phonetics. Make the word something like "That feeling you get in you left pinky toe when a gay giraffe licks you, interrupting you eating a hamburger."
@@marbleswan6664 That's what I'd call "2010 internet humour"
My conlang's word(s) for that is: Kilunajika Lefena Dokalos Tikamurna, literally meaning 'Hating to leave bed morning' and I made up Kilunajika for that. It can be shortened to Kiledotik
@@Biblaridion Wow. I didn't know about that. The closest word I could come up with is tiredness. I have this all the time. I am not a morning person. I hate to be forced out of bed too early. At worst I feel like I have been hit by a truck. I do know that the perfect antonym for this is insomnia. I have insomnia a lot as well. I like to say up late at night, and my mind is busy. I hate being forced to go to bed at this time, because I can't sleep. It feels like torture. It is funny how things can get thier own names.
me, doing everything the opposite of biblaridion: Why am i not getting it?
Redacted lol
I’m just watching the video and I still don’t get it.
@shouldn't be active anymore its pretty easy if you just listen closely
@@MixMasterJ1221 I recommend making a conlang along w him tbh
Me, doing everything as he does but in an abstract way with literally no notes:
I watched this series once and barely understood anything.
Now I'm watching it again while making a conlang myself, the hype I'm getting from just making up words and putting them together is unbelievable
It is fun to see it come together. I hope yours isn't as complex as mine is!🤣
same
fr like I put letters I like together and they're words??? Its so fun
It’s so fun! Especially when you accidentally make a new rule when make sentences in your language 😂
@@GrsArt42mine has like 4 different syntax structures 😭
When coming up with root words, something that I find *exceedingly* helpful is onomatopoeia.
Instead of declaring "X word = rock", you could instead try describing the qualities of a rock, phonetically, the way an early speaker of your language might, e.g. "tiku" could mean "rock" by way of your early speakers describing the sound of rocks hitting each other. Similarly, words like "pata" could emulate slashing and therefore mean "water", and "foha" could emulate the sound of wind and therefore mean "sky".
There's also the idea of "bouba vs. kiki". Basically, words with lots of P, B, O, and A sounds tend to feel "rounder and softer" when used together, compared to words that have K, T, I, and E sounds, which tend to feel "harder and sharper" when used together. Therefore, "obu" could refer to something large, round, and lethargic, such as a boulder or a tree. Meanwhile, "teki" could refer to something small and sharp, like an animal's claw.
Hey, that is a really good idea. I will definitely use it.
Also, can I ask how did you connect the sounds with letters? Did you just think of a sound and asign it a letter, or did you just use the sound symbols?
i never realized that onomatopeoia uses 4/5 of the main english vowels
@@ivoivanov8307 That's called romanization and it's explained in the previous video. Idk if you need this knowlege after 1 year, but I'll leave it here anyway.
this helps a lot!! thank u!
I not reading this
Isn't OSV just how Yoda speaks?
Basically. Slightly more fiddly around the edges here and there, from memory, but that's the basics of it. Certainly most failed "Yoda-speak" comes from failing to do that properly.
(Noticeably, Yoda will take "will" in "will go" as the primary verb with "go" as part of its object, rather than treating "will go" as one verb, or "go" as the verb and "will" as a modifier. Basically, its a bit fuzzy on how much of the verb phrase is or is not part of the object phrase.)
@@laurencefraser Can you provide an example of correct and incorrect Yoda sentences involving this "will go" construct? I'm curious.
@@bonbonpony "go you will" is something anybody would recognize as Yoda-speak, but it isn't correct technically. The correct OSV would be "you will go", but that sounds like plain English. "Will" is a modifier, not a verb in itself.
It actually doesn't have an order.
It's actually VOS best I can tell- "Go there, you must". It changes around a lot tho
1:30. They're so rare you needed a fictional language just to represent the first one properly, and presumably couldn't even find three for the last one.
Well in the 350 WALS sample there were 4 OVS and 1 OSV orders
alan smithee Though in saying and as a way to show emphasis it’s far more common. It’s even allowed in English.
Well English can use OSV. For your guidance I ask.
@@Alice-gr1kb after master Yoda your speech patterns follow I see
Ptaku93 yes
One correction: Latin, while preferring SOV, actually has free word order, like many other synthetic languages. For example, the sentence "Felix loves Julia." can be stated in Latin in any of the following ways, all having pretty much the same meaning:
"Felix Iuliam amat." - by far the most common pattern (SOV)
"Felix amat Iuliam." - quite common
"Amat Felix Iuliam." - very poetic :)
"Iuliam Felix amat." - a bit less common, but completely valid (answers the question "Whom does Felix love?")
And the two other permutations are possible, though perhaps sounding a bit contrived (still, quite usable in poetry, where rhyme and meter justify not following the usual word order). This is possible because the accusative case suffix -am in "Iuliam" clearly states that she is the direct object of the sentence, while "Felix" is the subject, being in the nominative case.
Contrast this with analytic languages, like English, where there are no case endings and changing the order of words completely changes the meaning ("Dog bites man." vs "Man bites dog.").
Thats correct. Classical Sanskrit is also word order free.
रामः विद्यालयं गच्छति। ( Ram goes to school)
विद्यालयं रामः गच्छति ( to school Ram goes)
गच्छति रामः/विद्यालयं विद्यालयं/रामः (this is a bit uncommon.)
Actually that double dot( : ) indicates the subject in male nouns and the dot on top (.) Represents the object. So the order isnt that necesary. This gives Sanskrit a freedom and is very well suited for poetry.
PS- The double dot and the top dot arent only indicators but have distinct sound of their own . There r vowels. The double dot is aspirated sound like (ha) while the dot is (am).
But Sanskrit paid a heavy price for this (atleast in my opinion) .
As a result the language is frighteningly inflectiony(if thats the word) . It has a LOT of inflections. There r 8 noun cases. 3 numbers and 3 genders. There is a different suffix for every noun case of every gender of every number.
@@saikiariyan1464 Well so do most Slavic languages, plus the slightly different inflection for animacy and definiteness in certain cases and genders. It doesn't seem to have done them any harm, they're pretty live and kicking.
@@saikiariyan1464 Can you recommend any good resources for learning Sanskrit? Or maybe some books?
me, a Latin student, looking for someone else to point out that Latin has a free word order
This is the episode the loses me- the previous two episodes were just right in terms of complexity, but _this_ episode, goodness. A bunch of complicated concepts are suddenly thrown at me like I'm expected to know what everything means already.
Honestly, so much for teaching us as if we were beginners.
Pretty much the only thing I've understood thus far is that languages are complicated and that English is ridiculous.
That's because modern English is a mix of several different languages with different rules. It's basically a Frankenstein language made of body parts taken from corpses of other dead languages :q
I used to relate to you but then I started learning the terms and it's sort of easy for me, :D. You should too!
@Gizio the Jackal You guys took over 24% of the total landmass so i think we're even
@@vinzcastro9304 agreed but are we gonna talk about the fact that russia hordes lot's of unused land?
@Gizio the Jackalwell it's kind of a natural consequence when we've been spending our time invading the native americans
1:31 *laughs in czech*
In this language, you can use almost all of the possibilities depending on what information is important in the sentence.
Člověk (S) vidí (v) zvíře (o) - "default", commonly used order
Zvíře (O) vidí (V) člověk (S). - It is important that the man is the one who sees it.
Člověk (S) zvíře (O) vidí (V). - It is important that he *sees* it.
Zvíře (O) člověk (S) vidí (V). - I'm not really sure how to explain this one. But I personally use it when I'm being sarcastic or trying to correct someone.
I just find this interesting.
Same in every slavic language
Laughs in Esperanto too, haha.
@@ivankurta1033 probably not for bulgarian and macedonian because these languages have no cases
honestly, what?
@@xtrangernowroljunkghipwate659 and esperanto is suppose to be an easy international language to learn
Free word order FTW! Greetings from Poland. :D
Wrażenie to na mnie zrobiło że Polski mieszkańcem jesteś ty
Polskim w słów ułożenia brak.
"Free"
No language provides absolute liberty in this regard.
Nor does any, to my knowledge at least, not use word order to express some category of its POS.
Stupid fucking is that
Same from Hungary!!!
Fun fact: in spanish the order of subject, verb and object doesn't matter.
For example with the sentence "The man sees the mountain", we can write it as:
SVO: El hombre ve a la montaña.
SOV: El hombre a la montaña ve.
OSV: La montaña el hombre la ve.
OVS: La montaña la ve el hombre.
VSO: Ve el hombre a la montaña.
VOS: Ve a la montaña el hombre.
Hombre = man
ve = sees
montaña = mountain
el/la = the (when before a noun)
There are some diferences depending on how you rearange the words, for example, adding the preposition "a" to indicate the object, or adding the pronoun "la" (before the verb).
Técnicamente es correcto, pero no niegues que suena bastante raro decir "Ve a la montaña el hombre".
These videos are awesome. I've been trying to create a language for years now and all my attemps were total failures. With these videos I think I finally have all the tools I need to at least get to something decent.
I created a fictional world and I'm trying to add a fully fonctional language for the inhabitants of this world. Basically it's for celestial people who live in clouds (similar to angels) and descend to the world beneath the clouds (earth) and expend their territory to an island under their initial city.
I chose my sounds, word order, grammar basics....everything but I'm stuck on one simple thing: Root words.
I just can't find out how to make simple words that don't look like some already-existing languages and that sound natural for my "angels".
For exemple if I want to create the word for "fire", in my mind it feels like it should start with an "F", like many other languages (fire, feuer, feu,...) so I'm stuck on that idea and try to create a word that follows that pattern. Same for water, I have the word "aquatic" in my mind (or aqua, agua, eau... in some languages that I know) and I feel like I have to make a word containing (or starting with) an "A". Or with a "N" for night/nuit/noche/nacht...
How do you mix up your letters and decide "that is the word I'll choose for "fire" or "night"" even if it sounds totally different from what your mind is used to for that particular concept?
I can't say I've ever had this issue, but I would recommend having a firm idea of what you want the language to sound like (I often come up with phonological forms for words based on how well they sound with the words I've already created), and if all else fails, you could try using an online word generator like Awkwords.
One thing I do is I’ll still have the “f” for fire, but if you switch up the vowels and order and end up with something like “rofen” it’s not as obvious
My conlangs have words for "finding it hard to get out of bed in the morning".
Here they are:
Qwiqwiqwëdaq uses "Æt'tli".
Môhru uses "Niqq".
Rrarrarar uses "Tamalquiqiqnoqiqqnoqiqngq".
Ngweni uses "Tld".
WTF is that third one?
@@nathanhunt9105 I wanted to make Rrarrarar an Inuit-type language.
No offense but the third one sounds like it was derived from the sound one makes in bed when they realize they have awoken and proceed to warp their body as they spread out over the whole mattress
@@nathanoher4865 well then it's perfect
I’m currently making my language in the object-verb-subject word order. I had absolutely no idea how rare this was, guess I learned something today.
I absolutely love this word order
this word order is absolutely loved by I
Wow, you started with some quite complex syntactic structures right away. There are simpler ones that are more natural to start with when creating a new language, like noun phrases (adjective + noun), prepositional phrases (preposition + noun phrase), possessives, plural forms, thinks like that. Verbs and tenses are usually the most complex and most evolved structure in a language. And the subject-predicate structure is like the most top-level one.
6:27 technically speaking, Latin is only really rigid in prepositions. SOV is preferred, but look at any Latin literature and you’ll find OVS, SVO, and even VSO pop up, along with too much hyperbatonning. Possession happens through case marking and is treated roughly equally as Adjectives. It’s beautiful.
But same thing for Turkish too. In poetry you can write in any order including verb is not at last. But in normal text verb is at last .other words including subject can change (and must change otherwise it s weird in meaning of emphasis). the word which is closest to verb means it s emphasised.
Bunu=this kim=who yaptı=did
Who did this= bunu kim yaptı? (True)
Kim bunu yaptı (wrong) (kim is not name of person it means who).
Bunu Joe yaptı = joe did this.(true)
joe bunu yaptı (wrong).)
Only maybe a new Turkish learner can make such mistake, because he will think SOV order way.
@@PimsleurTurkishLessons I don't know Turkish but in Latin you'll find free word order outside of poetry
Sallust taught me that (famous Roman historian who wrote stupidly complex sentences)
Indeed❤
As a turkish native speaker I like that you are always using my language as an example for your videos
do you mean trukish? 3:34 look at the top left corner
@@soleildj1572 I didn't see that :)
Russian is really a free word order language. Sometimes if you jumble up the words too much it would sound a bit unnatural or too bookish, but most of the times it really doesn't matter. It could slightly shift the emphasis, but the determining factor is the way you pronounce the sentence.
For my language, I’m having the adjectives be prefixes or suffixes instead of different words. And wether or not it is added to the front or back of the word determines wether it is positive or negative.
"Any sentence will consist of three primary roles: the Subject, the Verb, and the Object."
Not an intransitive sentence, or a zero-copula sentence. And the distinction between Subject and Object, or between Nouns and Verbs doesn't always follow the way we think about it (see Ergativity, Active-Stative language, zero-copula, using nouns as verbs meaning "to be (a) _" or "to act like a _")
1:43, a good example for free word orders is Ancient Greek. This was used, for example, to build tension in a sentence.
the video: is complicated
me: laughing at the word "possessees"
This word itself is possessed
😂
Important note to everyone who wants to make their own language/conlang.
Consider the nouns' gender and semantic classes before creating root words.
I didn't and had a really hard time turning things around. 😭
I'm forgetting english now.
same
I feel this
I'm on this stage i think.
Language:
Chegz! Fegza cha chef afech echack?
Agza, Fa chef afech echack.
Fegza cha gzecha chef afech efeck?
Agza!
Chachegz!
Chechagz.
English:
Hello! Do you have some eggs?
Yes, I have some eggs.
Do you also have some herbs?
Yup!
Thank you!
You're welcome.
Chegz! I like your conlang, May I ask what does the two words 'chef afech' mean?
Help lol
@@KumekawaMakotone I assume “chef” means “have” and “afech” means “some”
if this was released at the start of quarantine this would have much more views
Korean is a neat case here; its default word order is SOV, and as you'd expect its adjectives come before nouns and prepositions after-but it's also transparently clear that the adjectives are verb-like (ignoring compound words/phrases where the initial noun acts as an adjective, they really are just verbs that conjugate somewhat differently) and the postpositions are noun-like (acting kinda like possessees).
the person sees the animal:
“Kraqam, ri’atok okar.”
Kraqam [kraxam]=Animal
ri/ro=me
ri’atok=person
okar=to see
I'm so lost.
@@adventuresofcats7857 I'm so lost.
@PowderSnom animal = enimol, person = fwarson
wow, some nice original words you got there, totally not copied from the language I'm speaking in right now
@PowderSnom and also, of course you had to do OVS word order xDDDD
@PowderSnom same honestly
I'm gonna say that the historical reason for my language's inconsistencies (SOV that has prepositions and adjectives after nouns) is that its prepositions are derived from nouns and its adjectives were derived from verbs. But it's good to know that languages can be weird and that's ok.
Very, very well-explained!
1:40 Classical Sanskrit also had a free word order for language as a whole but different dialects were bound to different word orders and were still mutually intelligible without any difference.
that's really interesting thanks for sharing
I spent about an hour and a half puzzling with the random sounds I had come up with and like and trying to turn them into usable pronouns. Took a while, but DAMN I love the way I did it. Has really sad implications for my world and those that use the language. And now I'm calling it for today as my brain is hurting.
2:33 the first line in Japanese is actually a sentence, not just the noun phrase, in Japanese, the adjectives work like verbs, so in this line its a subject-predicate sentemce.
But the second line is on the other hand, its a typical noun phrase like adj + n.
The two example are in different situation so I think that's not a good example in your explanation, you can use 暑い天気/変な人、今日は暑い/この人は変だ in the same sentence structure as comparison, that would be better.
But still appreciated you make this series, that helps a lot😆
I never understood head-final versus head-initial! Thanks!
at 2:52 If adjectives were derived from verbs would that sentence be: "The person the animal bigs sees"?
Probably something like “the person the bigging animal sees” is more likely
Maybe "the person animal being big sees"
I know your comment is from a year ago, but I think it would be more along the lines of "The person the animal growing sees" since we're wanting to base the adjective for "big" on an action. Kinda like the example of noun-based adpositions in Mayan.
I think it would be "the person the growing animal sees."
I think it would be something like, "The person the animal that is big/which is being big sees," but I'm not sure. Aside from English I speak some Yurok, and Yurok does something kinda similar (the way my teacher put it when I was in school, it doesn't use adjectives exactly, but instead the thing doing the action described is, well, doing the action described, so if the action is running, it is running; if the action is being sweet, it is being sweet). I'm not a linguist, so if verb-based adjectives are different from straight up verbs, I'm afraid I can't help you much.
I did it!!!!
default word order: SOV
noun-adjective
noun-postposition
possessee-possessor
sample sentence: "the person sees an animal"
taro goju meno
lit. man animal see
sample sentence #2: "the person sees a big animal"
taro goju petu meno
lit. man animal big see
YAYYYYY
0:20
In my native language "ālu" means potato and "kīma" means minced meat
I think he did it on purpose 😂
In my native language (Tamil) ālû means person.
@@risyanthbalaji805aalu parantha
Wow. There are so many options for syntax. I like to think of a kind of flow of action in a sentence. It is reminiscent of sentence diagrams. The SVO pattern and the head initial patterns show flow better. So I would like to go with those. The sample sentence works like this. Person the sees animal big the. The subject comes first, because that is where the action starts. Then the verb comes afterwards, because the action flows through it. Having the subject and verb as two words is the bare minimum for constructing a sentence. It may be a good idea to start out writing sentences like this. Here are some examples. Person sees. Dick plays. Jane runs. It is really bare bones, but one has got to start somewhere. It is possible to have one word sentences in English if they are imperative. There is a subject of you that is implied. Here are two examples. Stop. Run. Getting into imperative may be a bit too complicated for starters, so one should postpone that. Some sentences have objects. The object goes last, because that is where the action ends. Person sees animal. There are two kinds of objects direct and indirect. If both appear, than the direct object goes first. It gets the action before the indirect object. Person watches animal for owner. This sentence has watch. It can mean seeing or babysitting something. The animal is what the person watches. So this is the direct object. Doing an action to or for something makes an indirect noun. The person is directly babysitting the animal, and they are doing that to help the owner. The person is not babysitting the owner. So the owner is an indirect object. Then there are words that modify other words. The nouns and verbs are the main vessels which the action flows through. Pronouns replace nouns entirely. Then the modifying words come later, because they lack the flow. The modifying word comes after the noun, so the proximity indicates a connection. Adjectives modify nouns and pronouns. So they go right afterward. This completes the sentence. Person the sees animal big the. Maybe even articles can come afterward. It is really different than what happens in English. Articles are so short and are used so often that they almost loose thier meaning. So they can go in the back, where they are far removed from the action flow. That is why I put the behind big. Both modify animal. Adverbs modify verbs, adjectives and other adverbs. They get the same rule of going after the word they modify. I added adverbs to the sentence. Person the sees carefully quite animal big very the. Carefully, quite and very are all adverbs. This gets complicated as there is a chain of modifiers. Sees-carefully-quite is a chain. Carefully modifies sees, which is a verb. In turn quite modifies carefully, which is an adverb. Animal-big-very-the is another chain. Big is a pronoun. It modifies animal, which is a noun. Very is an adverb. It modifies big. The is an adjective. It modifies animal. Very is after big. This indicates it modifies big. It doesnt modify the. Wow. This is getting really different from English. In English the sentence would go like this. The person quite carefully sees the very big animal.
There can be other things beyond the basics of syntax. I would like prepositions to be between the two objects they connect. I am not sure if that is an adposion or preposision. I would like to use preposition to indicate possetion. There would be a word between posessor and possesee. It is like the word of, but it is a special word used just for possesion. The possessee always comes first, because it receive the flow of action more directly. Proper English would have this. The man's dog. I would have the syntax like this. Dog of man the. I would even like to use this for pronouns that are possessors. English modifies like this. His dog. I would have the syntax in two possible ways. Dog of he. Dog of him. The difference is that he is a subject and him is an object. I don't want to make such distinction. I can just use the context of the syntax to determine whether the pronoun is a subject or object. I am thinking about dropping gender entirly. So it would be like this. Dog of it. Funny enough in English it can be used as a subject or object. It makes perfect sense in context anyway. A man is very masculine in a biological sense. However I think it is plausable to ignore that completely in a grammatical sense. It is not meant to be a dehuminizing way, expecially when speakers of a language are used to having gender neutral words. In English, male animals get thier gender ignored all the time. It makes sense. In most animals it is difficult to tell the gender. There are some easy ones, like lion, deer and peafowl. However the easy ones are the exception, not the rule. I may be biased as an English speaker, but I think ignoring genders of humans and animals makes more sense than giving genders to inanimate object. Genders don't even work for plants very well, since most are hermaphrodites. The only plant I know that could be separated to he and she is the ginkgo. There are words that are classified as verbs, but they don't do much. The main example is the verb to be. I wonder if subject and object can still apply. The action is just a state of being and that is it. Sometimes the obeject is an adjetive that describes the subject. I wonder if the adjetive can be used as an object or should it be reworked somehow. There is an example. I'm a nut. Maybe I is the subject, am is the verb and nut is the object. I have this particular sentence in mind, because the song is in my head. It is so catchy.
2:22 You can also say 她很漂亮 (Ta hen piaoliang) sorry just a little thing I noticed as I speak quite a lot of mandarin
Should that "de" be on the end there at all? What's it doing?
@@_skysick_ No, as a speaker of Mandarin I am certain that there should not be a 的 de at the end.
Actually, I don't even think the phrase in the video is correct; I've never even heard of it as a complete sentence. I'd interpret it as 她漂亮的 tā piàoliang de "Her beautiful (unwritten possessee)," which is an incomplete sentence, or just simply a typo of 她漂亮 tā piàoliang, a more informal way of saying 她很漂亮 tā hěn piàoliang "She is (very) beautiful."
@@melitopiia4730 Yeah, that's how I heard it too. It sounds like it would mean "what she beautifuls..."
@@_skysick_
The Mandarin example is straight up wrong. "True adjectives" in Mandarin all function as stative verbs so to say "X is adjective", you just say "X adjective", no verb needed. However, Mandarin also phonologically dislikes monosyllabic words so sometimes the adjectival copula 很 (normally meaning "very" but in this case doesn't actually mean anything) is added before the adjective. 很 has to be used with monosyllabic adjectives but often gets used with polysyllabic adjectives anyway (to the point where not using 很 sounds a bit improper nowadays). 的 functions as a complementizer when added to an adjective, meaning that the "adjective的" construction must appear in a noun phrase, i.e. there has to be a noun after it.
looks like youve got some inspiration from tamil - aalu also means person here, and maa means great (or sometimes big too). also, only modern spoken tamil has a default word order of SOV (even that is kind of flexible) - ancient and medieval tamil , the tamil we use in formal occasions or to write, has a extremely flexible word order - SOV, SVO, VSO, VOS, OSV, OVS all are possible. its just that colloquilly we normally use SOV
I love this series so much, it's so useful! Would you do a series please on writing ConLangs with culture and people/animal names in mind? So many incredible fantasy series have good people names and dragon names and its so difficult especially if you're making a language from scratch
3:33 "Trukish"
I lvoe to speka trukish
ncie tehy konw hwo to sepak lnaguage
Tanhks thsi terhad maed my dae
The lorry driver's preferred communication method
i swa lkongi in hte cmoetns to ese if htis swa hree
Trukish, the language with postpositions.
I'm now making a conlang I'm calling Puranki. (Pronunciations are the same as the IPA symbols.) It has a VSO word order and follows all of the common head-initial traits.
"li" means "see," "puranki" means "person," and "ma-a" means "animal."
"li puranki ma-a." (The person sees the animal.)
This series has been really helpful for me while I'm creating this language! ^^
I came here with some clarity. Watched this, and now I leave more confused then ever 😂
My language, Aeri, is Head-Initial in that the Verb comes before the Object. Everything else (Adjective-Noun, Noun-Postposition, Possessor-Possessee) is Head-Final. Also, CZcams is yelling at me for Postpositions and Possessees. I guess the English version of youtube was designed to be used by Head-Initial speakers rather than Head-Final speakers. Also, I just want to say thank you for making these videos, they're really helping me with creating Aeri.
This video deserves a superlike
Shouldn't the Mandarin at 2:24 be "她很漂亮(She is very beautiful)"? Because I'm Chinese and never have I seen "她漂亮的" in my life.
True (你好)
p.s can you teach me some swears in Chinese please XD
Thats right, he makes a mistake, in Mandarin, the adjective can't directly connect to the noun as a predicate, people must add 很 before adjective
Ice meme van oh. My. GOD
Latin is somewhat like that (1:33). It has a neutral word order, but two or three other permutations are legitimate to change the emphasis of what is said or written. Since Latin uses words inflected according to case, it's easy, at least in principle, to figure out which words are subject, verb, and object.
2:23 Mandarin is not correct. 她漂亮的 is not a complete sentence and can mean something like "her beautiful ...(something)". If you want to say "she is beautiful" you need to say 她很漂亮 (ta hen piao liang) which literally means "she very beautiful". Anyways, really appreciate that you used Mandarin as an example and great video~
is it possible for a some amount of the speakers to go from sov to an svo and the language Evolves form there?
Sure, word order changes happen all the time. Changes from SOV to SVO sometimes happen when some older system of role-marking is lost. The most obvious example is the romance languages: Latin, while having a somewhat free word order, was mostly SOV, but when the case system was lost, the word order shifted to SVO, which has been maintained in French, Spanish, and Italian. I believe the same thing also happened in Old Chinese.
thank you for the help it help with my conlang a lot
Not quite the same thing, but Greenlandic may end up evolving from an ergative language to a nominative language based on how younger speakers are using it.
2:03 then there is Italian where you can put the adjective wherever you want around the name and it still means the same.
Actually it sounds a bit different, just like a difference in the tone would sound different. It's pretty strange. Still, the sentence would mean the same in almost all cases.
One could tell something similar about the object, verb and subject order thing, but that's a bit more strict
Ever since this video I have sometimes yelled out 'Selemu!' in my head in the morning.
1:37 modern Iranian Persian has a free word order too! Originally it’s SOV but if you change their positions (which you can) it slightly changes the meaning.
I chose to opt for basically ignoring possession and instead having possession denoted by word order using the verb "to own".
I also use VSO order, and verb-like adjectives, so something like "the big man's little dog sees the blue rock" would become;
"see (own man big dog little) rock blue"
which in English requires at the very least commas where I've added brackets just to get over how jarring it is to see "[verb] [verb]".
Oh also my adpositions are postpositions, so the heads thing... I guess I'm kinda head-initial aside from the adpositions, and technically possession doesn't exist as a distinct concept in my conlang so I guess it's native speakers aren't too concerned with ownership but are really concerned with "things" rather than their variation or manner...
World building beforehand might have been a good idea but I'm starting to enjoy accidentally limiting the world through the language which exists within it
I love the video, it was very helpful, but I have been trying to find evidence for my school research topic , its on linguistics, and i want to to know where you get your evidence from. Is it from Wikipedia alone?
For example Czech is a language with free word order.
pán viděl psa (SVO), pán psa viděl (SOV), viděl pán psa (VSO), viděl psa pán (VOS), psa viděl pán (OVS) and psa pán viděl (OSV)
are all possible, meaning "a man saw a dog", although the SVO is the by far most common and the others feel pretty weird, but it's possible because of Czech's different word forms based on the word being object, subject and others (total of 7 in singular and 7 in plural). So "psa" (meaning dog) (which is in the 4. or object word form) is different from "pes" (1. form if it was subject)
Oh this is insane from a newcomer's perspective (Newcomer here...uh...hi there) and very complex,...but it looks like a lot of fun once you actually start doing it.
Avīeš. Eideha ynykka ilhniyya Alex!
This is my own language, Ulfian, and this is the Ulfian sentence in English.
Hi. My name is Alex!
currently trying to make a conlang based on a few already existing languages, that actually derives from said languages (french, german, a few romance languages)
I am actually working on a bird-people-language right now, which don't have noses and therefor can't pronounce nasal sounds. This video really helps ^^ Gha-arr Shet Tsha-ak tarr Gaat. (The animal the big thing the person he sees) (the person sees the big animal.)
Haven't realised it until this moment but a language I speak, Somali, has a semi free word order, in that the subject always comes first but you can choose what comes next, whether it be the verb or the object.
I don't know how to translate ayuu or uu, they're not words but the glued used to hold together the sentence, depending on the gender of the subject/verb/object.
You use ayuu if you want to put the object in the middle, this is SOV.
You use uu if you want to put the verb in the middle, this SVO.
Male, ayuu or uu
Female, ayee, or wee
"I finding it hard to get out of bed in the morning" -> "A faszda edev aszata vivde ennesela"
"The person sees the aniaml" -> "Piszan lo ivnu"
*considers*
How do you decide how to derive syntax for more complicated things like subordinate and relative clauses.
Well subordinate clauses are dependent on the main clause, so in absolute head final languages you'd have your main clause come after the subordinate clause(s). This seems incredibly unnatural though, so you'd probably stick to head first for clauses.
"Vanilla especially, I like icecream" is as close as I can come to preducing a head final clause structure off the top of my head.
TheApexSurvivor strictly head final languages like Japanese do put their relative clauses first (because they are adjectives)... but I was wondering more how to evolve them at all regardless of where they go. You know like cases come from adpositions glomming on to their noun. How do these structures appear in the first place?
3 times watching it and finally got everything down :D
I guess my confusion lies in how much of this stage should be done before I move on to the next one?
I built some root words, including ones that are culturally significant to the people for whom I'm trying to sculpt a language, but I don't know how many I need to be able to effectively start building the grammar of the protolanguage. I have, in total, 20 root words made, 16 if you don't count the suffixes I made, two of which denote a person from an animal, and two of which denote adjectives, one noun-like and one verb-like.
Not to long ago, i created a script and sound set for a language, and never got further (originally was just going to overlay it over english sounds)
Though I think it works perfectly well to begin developing a conlang instead
It's surprising VOS is so rare, since it feels like a very intuitive structure to me. Like, first I'm going to tell you what kind of action the sentence is about "Eats..."
Next I'm going to give you some more detail about this action "Eats pizza..."
And finally, I'm going to tell who's doing this "Eats pizza she."
3:00 how would this work for a language in which the adjectives are derived from verbs rather than nouns? And would the adjective come before or after the object? I'm building a VOS language if that makes any difference.
farsi has quite interesting word order now. it has SOV as a default, (but not only word order) but does all the other like it is SVO
1:22 fun fact about turkish is when we use all combinations, it still means the same thing and a person wouldn't find it that weird while talking. But it is still messy and wrong.
Could your version of "the person sees the big animal", which is "the person the big thing the animal sees", also be translated back into "the person-like big thing sees the animal"
specificity is good too, sometimes you need just one word for one sentence
In my conlang, when you say "The man is slicing bread." You will say "The is slicing man the bread." When words are used to describe something in this language, the words will be before the actual noun. The sentence structure is (Subject Checker), Adjective/Verb, Postpostition/Preposition (in informal cases | formal cases will only have Prepostition), Noun/Possessor, Postposition (only in formal cases), Possesse
Also I now have a sentence in my conlang, Ecto shvensko Elo ecta Elavid. (Literal meaning: The look he the her. | Meaning: He looks at her.)
My conlang uses SVO SOV OVS OSV VSO and VOS (they are all used for different reasons. The last two are only used in literature)
5:21 Mine is:
Verb - Object
Noun - Adjectives
Ambiposition &∨ Circumposition- Noun - Ambiposition &∨ Circumposition
Possessee - Possessor
The only complicated thing(s) is/are the adpositions
Quick question, so my language follows a OSV pattern. Assuming my adpostions are derived from verbs, would my adpostion still come last in the sentence or would it follow the noun it modifies. Ex. (Rak Pe Kan, "Rock Man Sits.") Would this turn into Rak Kan Pe to mean "The man sits on the rock" or would it still keep the original word order? This is my first conlang and everything else has made sense so far up until this point and I have been unable to get past it now for a few days. I know osv is a horrible option for my first conlang but most everything else i've chosen has been a good call lmao
not me deciding on open syllables and imidiatly breaking my own rule by adding a consoant at the end of words in plural
actually tamil is word order flexible - you can order the words however you want and it will still make sense. but mostly that is only used in old tamil literature and modern tamil uses SOV ( mostly)
japanese is technically free word order, with the exception that any sentence must end with a verb (including state of being)
How would the process be different if my adjectives were derived from verbs?
This division of adjectives into verb-derived and noun-derived seems a bit strange to be honest. The examples provided actually showcase the difference between the so-called attributive and predicatve adjectives. An attributive adjective is part of a noun phrase (for example - a big horse - 'big' is an attributive adjective), and it can go before and after the noun, sometimes in the same language (and the rules for placing the adjective may be quite complicated). A predicative adjective is a part of a predicative expression: The horse is big. Notice, that in English, there has to be a copula in a predicative expressions with an adjective (not all language have a copula, sometimes it's a zero copula, so you're essentially saying 'Horse big', but it's different from saying 'big horse').
The examples of the noun-like adjectives and verb-like adjectives that Biblaridion provided are exactly that, and, essentially, have nothing to do with adjective somehow being derived from verbs or nouns. Languages usually have both kind of adjectives (attributive and predicative). If you're language is SOV, then predicative adjective should go (at least, from my experience with languages) at the end of the sentence, and if it also has a copula, then this copula goes after the adjective (often being attached to it as an affix). The attributive adjective, though, goes after or before the noun it describes depending whether your noun phrases are head-final or head-initial (there can be both in the same language). Also, pragmatic considerations (like, emphasizing important information) can change the default word order as well.
It's not also that simple, and can't be exhaustively explained in a few paragraphs (and I don't know everything anyway). Read up on the theory, study real-life languages, and think for yourself.
You use a CV notation for your open syllable, but what are the other options? How would we indicate if a coda is allowed, or if only some codas are allowed?
Ieno dhúrfië it-valtafangí eghiar.
It means "I need to be the king".
In this sentence we have to use a subordinate (I need, [to be the king]). It is introduced by "it-".
Ieno means I.
Dhúrfië means need.
Valta means kingdom and fang means a person, so valtafang means a king. The í is a suffix to definite the word.
Eghiar is the infinitive of be.
So it gives you in english "I need, to-theking be.".
Idk if my explanations were understandable, but that's my language ;)
PS : the sentence is pronounced [jɛno ðuːɾfje it valtafaŋiː ɛɡçjɑɾ].
the noun adposition are like we write/create one by one and his meaning/use? (like on and in)
and the verb way are actual verbs wich also work as a adposition? ("the book rests the table")?
I made the sentence "the person sees the animal" in my language!
tehlu La watu tehlu Ra
tehlu: the
La(a): person/people
watu: to see
ra(a): animal/animals
Aah one of the best thing of being bilingual is that if some of this shit doesn't make sense then I can just speak in my first language and see if it makes sense or not.
I first read "the person the animal sees" In English and it sounds so confusing, then I just read it in my mother tongue and it isn't as confusing anymore.
(My mother tongue uses SVO but there are different distinct dialects of older versions of my language that I've heard of before that uses SOV)
6:25 What would be some of these historical deviations? It seems like that would be a lot to know at this stage in the process.
1:20 isn't there also the V2 option for languages like German that always put verb second in a sentence, no matter where subject and object are?
If a language had noun like adjectives and prepositions, which one would come first?
The same as English, since that's just what English does
I’m going to Do What I Want thank you
How can you tell between Adjectives and Possessors?
e.g "The man's dog vs the man-like dog" for SOV
are they not the same? is it dependent on context to differentiate..???
or like English, is there an extra suffix needed ('s) for it?
What about inpositions? Would the adpositions actually just be infixes? Or would the affected noun be wrapped around the adposition? I'd assume both would be possible.
I made a poem with my previously made conlang (I've loads of them)
Fo Bai dong ad bini esda sa
a dong vais, a dong twa
tifisa cqwistö kongyösa fih[i]tö
(I forgot how it continued...)
1:25 in most cases, Russian doesn't actually distinguish between SOV and SVO. 'Ya tibya lublyu' (lit. I you love) and 'Ya lublyu tibya' (lit. I love you) mean the same thing. also please excuse my transliteration here I've always had problems with Russian transliteration. (also sidetone but most transliterations dont distinguish between 'e' which sort of sounds like 'ie or ye' and 'э' which sounds like the 'e' in enter and it always annoys the heck out of me.)
1:15 This has probably made my trying to learn Hawaiian quite a bit easier
This is goddamn confusing. Lmao.
I'm just gonna quit cuz if I were so smart to understand this I would be doing something else with my life lol
SOV for the win!
So, in an SOV language with it being postposition --- if I were to say "he sits in the canoe" would it be "he canoe in sits" or "he canoe sits in"? I'm assuming it's the former, but am unsure if either of those two are even the right ones. thanks!
日本語を話しますか？
Good video, I'm still learning and I'm sure I made a number of mistakes in my first conlang.
まったくない.
The third word is "language" yes?
I understood only '日本語' and 'ますか'..