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glossae conlanging for the uninitiated

Six decisions to make about your first

created language. The point of the functional approach to conlanging is to start translating texts as soon as possi-

ble. This gets you thinking about language in a real context and researching world languages to

broaden your scope.

But there are a few things you’ll want to figure

out before you get started. Let’s take a hack at

each of these parameters in more detail so you

have all the tools you need.

Throughout, I’ll sneak in links to explanatory

material that you can use to find out how real

languages handle these decisions, including

links from the World Atlas of Language Struc-

tures.

Click “go to map” on a World Atlas of Language

Structures page to search for your language in

the data set.

How can this guide be most useful?

There’s a lot of information here, so let’s make a plan to use it to the best possible extent.

If you want to just read through and absorb new information, go for it. It escalates from

easier to harder and weirder material.

If you start to feel your eyes glazing over, don’t worry too much! You can skip all this,

start a word list and even start translating—the practice will still help you learn to decon-

struct language. The only danger is making a language too much like English, and you can

fix that later.

That said, my best advice is to open a Word document and start making notes as you

go about how you want your language to handle each section. When you’re done, you’ll

have a language sketch, which is all you need to continue creating a conlang!

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First we’ll think about basic sentences with three parts: a doer of an action, an action, and

the thing the action is being done to. We call these three things, in order, the subject, the

verb, and the object.

English uses this particular word order. That order is subject-verb-object, or SVO.

(“English uses a particular word order.”) But it’s certainly not the only way to

arrange words! Look:

1. What subject-verb-object order are your sentences?

TOPIC: WORD ORDER

Contents:

TOPIC A: WORD ORDER

1. What subject-verb-object order are your sentences?

2. Does your language tend to be head-first or head-last?

TOPIC B: MAKING WORDS

3. Does your language tend to be analytic, fusional or agglutinative?

TOPIC C: TYPES OF WORDS

4. Do your nouns have cases, classes, number?

i. Cases

ii. Classes

iii. Number

5. What are your verbs like?

i. Tense and aspect

ii. Mood

iii. Marking

6. What are your pronouns like?

i. Personal

ii. Interrogative

iii. Indefinite

1. Lee grooms the duck. Subject—verb—object (SVO)

2. Lee the duck grooms. Subject—object—verb (SOV)

3. Grooms Lee the duck. Verb—subject—object (VSO)

Lee grooms the duck.

subject—verb—object

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WALS S6 contains the links you need to WALS 81—94.

Many languages only allow one of these orders for their sentences. But some languages,

like German and Latin, have flexible word order and mix around their words as they

please.

Some languages also care way more about where the verb is than anything else!

They’re happy with any order of elements just so long as the verb is first, last, or, for

some reason, second (right after the main topic.) These are called V1 / V2 languages

What about the other orders? You could also do VOS, OVS,

or OSV, right?

Well, you could, but mostly languages just . . . don’t. I think the coolest theory about why

is that those orders don’t distribute information throughout a sentence as uniformly.

VOS makes up only 1.8% of the WALS sample of 1350 languages, and there are only four

languages in that sample with OVS order! The language you’re most likely to know with

OVS order is . . . Klingon.

Q

Sentences are made up of smaller units called phrases. The most important part of each

phrase is called a head.

Linguists who study syntax also believe the sentence itself has a head—the verb! And for

complex syntax reason, the order of verb and object (not verb and subject!) gives us hints

about whether a language likes to put its head first or last in the phrase.

For instance, an SVO language has the verb before the object, so it might also tend to put

phrase heads first. Do you think a SOV language is more likely to put phrase heads first or

last?

The easiest way to cultivate your intuition of what a phrase is and where its head should be

is to see examples of phrases that are influenced by a language’s headedness . . .

2. Does your language tend to be head-first or head-

last?

TOPIC: WORD ORDER

WALS 81

VOS, OVS and OSV pop up as secondary orders.

Middle Egyptian is VSO . . . unless the object of a

sentence is a pronoun and the subject a normal

noun. If that happens the sentence is VOS.*

*Allen, James P. Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hiero-

glyphs. 2nd edition, Cambridge UP, 2010.

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Word order question Head-first answer Head-last answer

Noun / adjective duck yellow yellow duck

Verb / adverb sing badly badly sing

Preposition / location on the counter the counter on

Possessor / possessed duck Plato’s Plato’s duck

Noun / relative clause duck who Plato loves Plato loves who duck

Noun / “this/that” duck this that duck

Noun / number duck one one duck

TABLE 1—WORD ORDER

Some languages are head-first or head-last across the board, but many mix and match.

And some of the order sets above are almost universally correlated with object-verb or

verb-object languages, while others are barely correlated at all. So how are you supposed

to make all these decisions?

One great beginner approach is to do everything your

inspiration language does by clicking through the

WALS chapters 81—89 (each of those table rows has its

own chapter) and finding your language on the map.

Another is to shortcut your memory by declaring

everything head-first or head-last.

Learning about phrases and heads will help you chunk

your text effectively when you start translating. At the

same time, translating will deepen your understanding

of what a phrase is. That feedback loop is why we want

to get you working ASAP!

What is a relative clause?

Whether a language is head-first or head-last affects the order of so many phrases that

it’s easiest to show a table of some of them so you can get the lay of the land.

Phrases and heads are the first

step toward learning formal syn-

tax theories. These can help you

form complex and original word

order rules, but they’re pretty

advanced and there’s a lot of sci-

entific contention about what is

correct anyways. Try looking up

minimalist program.

LEVEL UP:

Here’s a sample word order sketch

for a language based on Turkish and

Japanese. Postposition is the term

for a preposition that goes after the

noun. Is this language head-first or

head-last?

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3. Does your language tend to be analytic, fusional,

or agglutinative?

TOPIC: MAKING WORDS

These huge words refer to three different ways languages can make new meanings.

They’re morphological types. Morphology is the study of words.

Most languages have a tendency to use one or another, but do use the other strategies as

well. For instance, new grammatical forms almost always start out as analytic before

they’re worn down into agglutinative and fusional parts!

1 Analytic languages make new meanings by putting existing words into combos.

2 Agglutinative languages make new meanings by adding new bits to words as

well, but often the bits are not words themselves. (The bits are call mor-

phemes, hence “morphology.”)

3 Fusional languages also add morphemes to their words to make new meanings,

but those morphemes mean many things at once, not just one. Fusional lan-

guages might also make more changes in the original word or stem to indicate a

new meaning, including changing consonants, vowels, stress, or tone.

mangeais, mangeons In French, mange means ‘eat’. The left form is used for ‘I ate’,

and the right for ‘we ate’. The endings –eais and –eons mean

‘first person’, ‘plural / singular’, and ‘past.’ You can’t pry the

meanings apart into separate morphemes.

What is “first person?”

will walk. Walk is a verb on its own, and so is will. But together, they

make a new meaning.

ochi-sase-ta. In Japanese, ochi- means ‘fall’, -sase- means ‘make somebody

do’ and –ta means ‘past’. Together: ‘made somebody fall’. But

crucially, sase and ta can’t be used on their own.

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4. Do your nouns have cases, classes, number?

CASES

Some languages have morphemes that are attached to a word to show what role it plays

in the sentence. Is it a subject? An object? Is it receiving something? These are called

noun cases. Malayalam, for instance, spoken in Kerala, has these cases: (source)

Languages might have anywhere between 2 and 20 cases!

Like you can see in the table, cases tend to have special Latinate jargon names. Eventually

you’re just going to have to memorize them, but don’t worry about it yet, it’ll come

through practice. For now, try finding out whether your inspiration language us-

es cases and which ones it uses, then learning about those to decide whether you want

them in your conlang! Or explore the Wikipedia list—there are some very cool ones.

Cases of ‘you’ Case name Example meaning

nii nominative you [doing an action]

ninne accusative you [an action being done to you]

ninakkŭ dative you [experiencing/receiving]

ninnootŭ sociative you [having something given to you]

ninnal instrumental [because of, using] you

ninnil locative [at, on, into] you

TOPIC: TYPES OF WORDS

You’ll build and modify your noun grammar as you learn more about your inspiration

language and translation. So don’t feel you have to absorb all this now. Remember,

right now we’re just making a sketch of our conlang. But here are three subsets of noun

grammar that are useful to know about:

Wikipedia list of weird Latinate jargon case names WALS 49

CLASSES

In some languages, nouns are sorted into two or more categories. You’ll often see these

categories called gender when there’s 2 –3 categories, because those categories are

most typically male / female or male / female /neuter, but sometimes animate / inan-

imate.

But when there’s 4+ categories, we start calling them classes, because they stop re-

flecting gender and start reflecting things like—real examples from Niger-Congo lan-

guages—‘liquids’, ‘large domestic animals’, and ‘vegetables’. They sometimes have sim-

ilar semantics to noun counters, which we don’t talk about in this document, but are

a way that some languages categorize their nouns for counting.

How is gender expressed in the sentence? Let’s take a quick look . . .

TABLE 2—SAMPLE CASES

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WALS 31

NUMBER

The word “number” has a special meaning in linguistics—it’s the difference between

singular and plural. Not all languages distinguish singular and plural! And in others,

there’s a number called a dual which is just for groups of two. (Think of the difference

between English “we both” and “we all.”)

WALS 32 WALS 30

5. What does your language’s verb grammar look

like?

TOPIC: TYPES OF WORDS

Take it slow on verbs! There’s just a lot to handle at

once. When you run into a new verb concept in your

translation, you’ll be able to learn about and handle

it then.

For instance, you might not need a passive for a

while into your conlanging odyssey, so we aren’t

going to talk much about it here.

Our main concepts are tense/aspect, mood,

and marking.

Because verbs and nouns are so

complex, a language you create

with just the information here

will end up being more like Eng-

lish. Unique verb grammar will

be easier the more you learn!

LEVEL UP:

Lingala nouns show off their gender in a nice prefix, but in other languages gender is

all based on memory. Then, if that noun has an adjective, the adjective agrees with

the noun and gets its own special prefix. And similarly, the verb agrees with the

gender of its subject. One reason gender might have developed is so it’s very clear in

every sentence where the subject is and what noun adjectives belong to!

Noun prefix Adjective prefix Verb prefix Stuff in this class

mu- mu- a- human beings

chi- chi- chi- things that are round/solid, not long

n- nothing ri- artifacts, objects

ru- ru- ru- things that are long and flat/narrow

ka- ka- ka- small things

Shona is the Bantu language with the most native speakers. Here are noun classes

from some dialects of Shona: (source) (source 2)

TABLE 3—SAMPLE CLASSES

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TENSE/ASPECT

Tense and aspect are how verbs talk about time. They are slightly different, but how

they’re different requires some explanation.

Some terms, you’re already very familiar with. Past, present and future are the ca-

nonical English tenses.

But let’s get a bit weirder. Continuous—“Lee is walking”—and perfect— “Lee has

walked”—are the canonical English aspects.

Wait, how is that different from tense? Why do we need both

of these?

Aspects are more about how the action is viewed in time. I don’t know why we need both

of them! Ask the human brain. A lot of language get by with just aspect, like Mandarin.

What tenses and aspects does your inspiration language have? A lot of languages have

this information on their Wikipedia pages, so that’s a great place to start! Or check out

Wikipedia’s long lists of tenses and aspects:

MOOD

Mood is like the hippie cousin of tense and aspect. Linguistically, my list below actually

mixes mood with a bunch of other stuff, but it needs to go somewhere, so it’s here! If you

like, think of this category as “Other stuff about verbs” instead.

As far as formal linguistic mood, English uses an analytic strategy for the most part.

Should, could, can, must . . . these all combine with the verb to give it an extra meaning.

But other languages have single morphemes to express similar meanings, especially

meanings about what is certain/doubtful/possible and meanings about the speaker’s

disposition toward events.

Mood-type things that you’ll face when translating (and their jargon terms) include:

• Commands (imperative)

• Question (interrogative)

• Negative (not really a mood—a polarity)

• Speculation, projection, prediction (subjunctive/assumptive/speculative)

• Suggestions, wishes, requests (optative/jussive/hortative)

• Ability (potential)

• Causative (not really a mood—a “valency-increasing operation” that means a sen-

tence subject is making somebody else do the verb)

• Passive (not really a mood—a “voice” that means a sentence subject is having the

verb done to it)

Now go on and have fun in the Wikipedia page. Play safe.

Wikipedia: Grammatical tenses Wikipedia: Grammatical aspects

Wikipedia: Grammatical moods

Q

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MARKING

In lots of languages, verbs change to reflect the type of subject they’re talking about.

There’s three main types:

1. Person. 1st person is “I”, 2nd person is “you”, 3rd person is “it.”

2. Number. Singular, dual, plural . . . go check your nouns!

3. Gender. Also covered in the noun section.

English only has a tiny bit of this left—the rest got rubbed away by years of repetition. In

English, our person-number marking is “I say” / “he say-s.” That’s it. Pretty sad. And

some languages have none at all. However, some languages have huge paradigms of

marking distinguishing all three types!

6. What are your language’s pronouns? TOPIC: TYPES OF WORDS

A pronoun is a word that can act in place of a noun. Pronouns are one of the first things

I recommend you physically put into a word list, because you’re almost definitely go-

ing to need them no matter what. (I’m serious, start an Excel spreadsheet right now!)

Let’s talk about three different types of pronouns:

1. Personal. I, you, he, she, we…

2. Interrogative. What, when, which, who…

3. Indefinite. Something, anyone, nobody, everybody…

You might be used to thinking of pronouns as just the first category. But pronouns are

much bigger and weirder than that … !

This partial Old Irish paradigm also has different conjugation sets for different verbs depending

on what their roots sound like.

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INTERROGATIVE

In the sentence, “Who is this duck’s owner?!” the word who is actually a pronoun as

well! Strictly speaking, only who, what and which are actually pro-nouns… when,

how and so on are pro-adverbs. They start for “what time”, “what method,” and so on.

So you could easily have others like “what direction,” “what extent,” even “what place

from/to/behind/on” instead of just “where”! Languages differ quite a bit on what in-

terrogative words they use, so research will guide you.

INDEFINITE

This refers to pronouns that don’t mean anybody in

particular. In English, this is the series of pronouns

starting with some-, no-, any-, every– and so on.

Again, there’s no particular reason we have some-

time but not notime. Or why we have both every-

body and everyone. Think about including these

kind of exceptions—in all your grammar, not just

pronouns—to create textured, naturalistic lan-

guages.

Another related concept is the quantifier, words

like some, each, every, none that show how much

of something there is.

And with that . . .

WALS 35—number in pronouns

PERSONAL

Personal pronouns are the ones you’re most familiar with, and you might even have been

taught that these are the pronouns. We’re talking I, you, he, she, it, we, y’all, they.

Personal pronouns don’t vary as wildly as verbs from language to language for the most

part. If your inspiration language does something really interesting and different from

English, your research will tell you. A couple of things I do want to point out that English

does that many other languages don’t:

He/she/it—67% of languages in the WALS sample have no gender distinction in their

third person pronouns at all. Others also have gender distinction in “I” and “you.”

Y’all—The fact that English has the same singular and plural in the second person is

pretty weird. Not unheard of, but not common. Most languages apply all their noun

numbers (or even more!) to their pronouns.

WALS 44—gender in pronouns

Indefinite pronouns and quanti-

fiers are the site of a lot of work

in formal semantics and formal

logic—where linguistics meets

math. It’s mind-blowingly com-

plicated how our brains deter-

mine what indefinite pronouns

“sound right”, and worth a

glance if they interest you.

LEVEL UP:

WALS 46—indefinite pronoun types

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You’re done your sketch! If you’ve been keeping notes and doing a little research along the way to see how

world languages handle these different questions, you might actually have a word

doc right now open with, essentially, your first conlang. It’s only a little baby

now, but soon it will grow up big and strong. Welcome to our very cool club!

And even if you haven’t, you’re well on your way! Keep this guide tucked in your

pocket to handle some of the questions that might arise as you start translating.

For tips on how to choose and crack into your first translation text, pointers from

my own beginner days are on the website at glossaeblog.wordpress.com.

Godspeed, soldier, and happy conlanging.