Conlang all year round - SeNTAXember in September

[aldersprig]

Oh no, September is syntactical rules and I've already covered the easy bit, sentence order... wait, have I?

I covered Old Tongue's in JuLECTURary, but not Calenyen's.

Calenyen is Subject-Object-Verb, with most modifiers being tacked on to the end of words. Tense is added to the beginning of verbs (Goat-red food-low pasttense-Is-Loudly bleating-at).

Old Tongue Also normally adds modifiers after the subject of the modifier, a holdover from their system of diacritical marks in the original ideography.

I think Old Tongue does some funky things with tense, but I'm not sure what yet, or how. And I just learned about Anaphora and think Old Tongue uses this heavily.

Short post! But it doesn't take many words to say S-O-V, V-S-O. :-)

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Morphambruary 1
Febmanteau 1
Polysemarch 1
DisMayCourse
Juneme 1
Julectury 1
Augovernust 1
Morphambruary 2
Febmanteau 2
Polysemarch/Juneme2
Juneme 2/2.5
AugGOVERNust 2
JuLECTURy 2
✒️

Comments

[inventrix]

...hrm. Your sentence structure looks weird to me for Calenyen, but I'm not sure if it's on purpose or because you did it quickly.

The red goat was bleating loudly at the low food.

The red goat was bleating loudly at the low food.

[goat] [was bleating] [at] [food]

[goat] [food] [was bleating]

[goat][red] [food][low] [was bleating*][loudly]

I dunno where 'at' goes, but I feel like treating it like a verb modifier isn't right...? It's not subject, object, verb or modifier, but a meaningful preposition and how you represent that meaning in your grammar changes a lot...

*too lazy to break down verb tense

[inventrix]

So I was thinking about it more and I realized that all of the cases I can think of where there are multiple phrases like that, they aren't all objects, so I'm confusing myself now...

But it DOES raise the additional question of noun phrase modifiers as well as marking the... object direction...? of transitive verbs.

e.g.

The goat on the table bleats at the food.
The goat bleats at the food on the table.

[aldersprig]

that is a very good question. *ponders* *pokes at it*

I THINK

It should be

The goat table-on food bleats-at.

The goat food table-on bleats-at?

[inventrix]

*considers for a long time*

Probably the second one, since the language seems to tend towards trailing modifiers, not leading modifiers, but it could go either way because language is weird. 8o