Category: Learn/Brainstorm/Try

Goal: Decide if modifiers will agree with nouns Note: Focus on any modifiers that are basic in your language. Tip: Your decision should reflect the larger system. Work focus: Learn/Brainstorm/Try Today’s focus is on whether your modifiers will agree with the nouns they co-occur with. Modifiers can agree in number, class, and/or case (i.e. any…

Goal: Consider different types of possession Note: You can use different strategies for different types. Tip: Your strategy may involve case and/or word order.  Work focus: Learn/Brainstorm/Try Some languages distinguish between alienable and inalienable possession, marking those relationships differently. Inalienable possession typically refers to a relationship between possessor and possessed that is a more inherent…

Goal: Explore ideas for more adpositions Note: Even languages with extensive cases have adpositions. Tip: Drawing diagrams helps with spatial adpositions. Work focus: Learn/Brainstorm/Try Now that basic nominal inflections are covered, it’s time to expand other strategies for expressing relationships for noun phrases. Adpositions are grammaticalized function words that provide relational information—they indicate the relationship…

Goal: Explore options for marking nominal functions Note: Options include word order, adpositions, and/or case markers. Tip: Case-marking is also referred to as “flagging.” Work focus: Brainstorm/Learn/Try Today is the last prompt asking you to explore options before the upcoming series of prompts that ask you to actually start creating forms and putting your plans…

Goal: Explore options for marking definiteness Note: Grammatical information can be indicated in other ways. Tip: Select options that cohere with your vision for the language. Work focus: Brainstorm/Learn/Try Some languages have special inflections or grammatical words to indicate definiteness for a noun. In such systems, there might be a form to indicate the noun…

Goal: Explore options for noun number Note: If you want to mark number, brainstorm possible lexical sources. Tip: Remember that inflections do not need to be attached to the noun base. Work focus: Brainstorm/Learn/Try Another common noun inflection is number, which means marking a noun to indicate if it is singular, plural, etc. Some languages…

Goal: Explore options for noun classes Note: If you want noun classes, list potential options for lexical sources. Tip: For now, you can just list the lexical sources in their English equivalents. Work focus: Brainstorm/Learn/Try The next four days are focused on common ways nouns can be marked for grammatical information, whether that marking comes…

Goal: Decide on a more synthetic or analytic approach Note: This decision reflects how forms grammaticalize in your conlang. Tip: Situate these decisions with your sound change timeline. Work focus: Learn/Brainstorm/Try The way units come together in a language’s grammar can be more analytic or more synthetic. In a more analytic system, each unit is…

Goal: Explore options for word order and syntactic alignment Note: Decide whether you want more head-initial or head-final strategies. Tip: Word order is often defined in nominative-accusative terms. Work focus: Learn/Brainstorm/Try It’s time to move on to decisions about grammar! The first major decision I’m presenting to you is in two parts because these two…

Goal: Try compounding forms and test again Note: Sometimes sound changes are most noticeable in compound and affixed forms. Tip: These are not actual compounds yet—they are just for testing purposes. Work focus: Learn/Brainstorm/Try This is the last prompt I’ll give you for testing sound changes. (At least, for now it will be. Goodness knows…