Conlang Workshop 3: The Words of Your Conlang
by Jam Ham
The Words of Your Conlang
How nouns inflect for number and case
How verbs inflect for person, number, tense, and mood
Word order and sentence structure (VSO vs. SVO, head-initial vs. head-final)
How adjectives interact with nouns in a sentence
Examples from existing conlangs and Jam Ham’s personal conlang
Task #3: Develop Your Conlang's Morphology & Syntax!
For this week, please come up with the morphological and/or syntactic rules of your conlang (p much the rest of your grammar!)! Remember to also browse such rules from the inspo languages you've mentioned in workshop #1 (if you have any)!
Also, here's last week's workshop task in case you missed it: conlang-table
For the task, work on at least one aspect of the following:
The inflectional and derivational morphology of your conlang.
How are words derived? How is a word's part of speech changed, or how are totally new words formed from existing morphemes?
Are words derived through affixing? Apophony? A mix of different tactics?
Does your language inflect nouns and verbs (or other parts of speech)?
If so, what categories are nouns and/or verbs inflected by? (i.e. case, number, or gender? tense, aspect, or mood? Do verbs agree with the subject (and/or the object), and if so, through which of these categories?)
How are these inflections shown?
Are words inflected through affixing? Apophony? Separate words? A mix of different tactics?
I would also suggest to work out allomorphic rules, but this is not required!
The word order (syntax) of your conlang.
How does your language arrange the subject, object, and verb of a sentence?
Is your conlang mostly head-initial or head-final (or a more even mix)?
Make sure to use charts (if you can) or use sample phrases and sentences to demonstrate these rules in context (which means you get to make more words yaaay!).
REMINDER: The topic of this week occupies a large aspect of your conlang, so you do not have to make a fully-fledged grammar this week! You can spread your work throughout the entire workshop series, and you just have to show us what things you've been cooking up this week!
For nouns specifically, I found these Wikipedia links helpful if you want to browse different noun class systems or different noun cases. You may find something interesting that you'd want to put in your conlang: