current consonant inventory June 21, 2012

(Consonants circled in pink are part of my lang’s phoneme inventory)

Despite phonetics and phonology being my favoured subjects in linguistics, I don’t really enjoy making fancy phoneme inventories and phonotactic constraints in conlanging when it’s just meant to be pretty rather than unique. There’s nothing too interesting about my inventory, a couple phonemes not in English, and a few big ones that are missing (p, b, g). In addition to those above I have unvoiced affricates at the dental, post-alveolar, and velar positions (‘ts’ , ‘ch’ , and ‘ks’/’x’ for the uninitiated). I’m planning on a palatalized and labialized  consonant series as well, but one might just be an allophonic variation. Haven’t decided yet.

basics of sentence structure June 19, 2012

Unmarked word order is (essentially) VSO (verb-subject-object)–so a sentence like “the girl kissed the frog” is “kissed (verb) the girl (subject) the frog (object)”.

Sentences are coordinated rather than subordinated–so that “I saw her kiss the frog” is rendered somewhat like “I saw her and she kissed the frog” (or with VSO order: Saw I her and kissed she the frog).

While I say VSO, I don’t actually have a case system in my conlang that declines nouns as subjects, direct objects, indirect objects, etc. Given my strong belief that language is about expressing the relations between entities (see, just a pinch of philosophy. It might be an engelang in some ways, but I view languages as organisms not computers), I prefer to use semantic rather than syntactic roles to organize my sentences. So rather than having a subject and object marked in “She kissed the frog”, they are actually marked as agent “she” and recipient “the frog” for their respective roles in the kissing. Depending on the verb, nouns will be marked differently according to what they are doing/receiving/experiencing/undergoing/etc. In a sentence like “Eleanor loves tea” Eleanor is still the subject syntactically, but is an  experiencer rather than agent; tea is usually classified as a  theme in this case.