The perfect series of videos for someone who has realised that their previous conlangs are shit and wants to progress. Thank you for bringing it to us!
Wow, a tech tree/skill tree for conlanging would be so cool. Imagine choosing between the "fusional" and "agglutinative" paths, or the "noun case" and "verb agreement" paths.
Spanish speaker here. The masculine indefinite article is "un", the numeral is in fact "uno" though. Careful there. You could have used Portuguese "um" and "um", that would've made the trick. E.g. "O número um" (the number one) vs "um menino" (a boy).
That is what I thought. I learned some Spanish when I was in school. I remember it this way. Un is masculine. Una is feminine. Uno is used for counting.
i am a native mandarin speaker and this series made mandarin look very unusual. which isn't bad, but it made me realise how unusual my native language is. wow its so weird... and i had no problem learning english too
Yeah. I prefer isolating analytic languages like Mandarin. Back when I first started conlanging, I preferred heavily fusional and agglutinating conlangs, mainly because that's what Westerners are exposed to. However, over time, I have really come to appreciate the unsung wonders of heavily isolating and analytic languages. People pooh-pooh them as "simple". But my 500-page Mandarin grammar would disagree.
@@Biblaridion well, there's bound to be mistakes in a 21-minute long video that has no content-fillers. it's just jarring because i'm a spanish student, but if you didn't take spanish 1 it looks pretty normal.
Actually "un" is a shortened form of "uno", even as a numeral, when it stands before the noun it qualifies. This becomes evident for example when you answer a question like "How many brothers do you have?" You could say "Tengo UN hermano" (I have one brother) stressing "un" to contrast it with "I have A brother", but anyway, the question "how many" asks for a number, and the number here is "un". Besides, you could just say "(Tengo) uno" ((I have) one), dropping the noun altogether. Another example that shows that "un" also translates "one" before a noun is "Marzo tiene treinta y un días" (March has thirty-one days, and clearly not *"March has thirty-a days"). So "un" here is the numeral ONE, not the article A. The trick is that the article "un" (i.e.: "un" meaning "a") ALWAYS precedes the noun, so it can NEVER take the form "uno". Great videos, by the way!
This is really, really good. There is a lot of free good info out there on phonology and syntax, but not so much on grammaticalization, which is key for creating a naturalistic conlang. I love how you go much more in-depth on this topic than the previous ones. Keep up the good work. After I finish watching this series I'll binge-watch the Nahuatl one (:
Thanks very much! You're right, I think a lot of the stuff about phonology and basic grammar is covered elsewhere, but part of the reason I wanted to do this series in the first place was because I felt like there weren't many resources for beginners that included all the diachronic stuff.
@@Biblaridion I wanted to ask, how can some language like Latin have both grammatical cases and prepositions? Also, how can a svo language have a verb conjugation with suffixes? Last thing, what are some ways of changing the word order in an historically logic way?
I’m convinced that English will eventually become its own language family, where the current dialects (British, American, Canadian, Australian, New Zealander, Singaporean, etc.) becoming distinct languages in the future. However I don’t think this will happen for a few more hundred years
вряд-ли, в век глобализации американец и британец могут ежедневно общаться, а значит у них вряд-ли возникнут уникальные особенности. скорее даже уже те различия, которые есть, исчезнут
I was thinking in Portuguese the word for the instrument horn (corneta) had nothing to do with animal horns (chifre), but then I realized that, actually, the root "corn-" comes from the Latin word for horn. I mean, they aren't homophones in Portuguese, but the relationship is actually very apparent. Pretty much every time I initially assume some word in English has a different etymology than its equivalent in Portuguese, it turns out to be pretty much the same (for instance "car" is short for "carriage" in English, and so is "carro" for "carruagem", and in both languages it's related to the verb "to carry"/"carregar"). I guess that happens because Portuguese descends from Latin, and English borrows fairly heavily from it. The two languages look pretty different on the surface, but the more carefully you look at it, the more apparent it becomes how incredibly similar they truly are.
I started to make my first conlang, developed it chaotically, but then used the "Oh, it's a highly archaic form of the *actual* language" excuse. I started making the actual language with the help of this series! Thanks so much!
Hey! I started one ConLang from this video series, but didn't go 'well'. The idea was to grab both Latin and German to try to created a merged 'old' language, but since it wasn't Proto-germanic it didn't work out... Then I started again, with proto-germanic words in hands and Latin words too. Started following all this series steps, keeping Latin written systems and 'w' (not 'v') sound - as well as the 'c' letter for the 'tch' sound anyware - , and thus it went pretty well!
- TIMESTAMPS - 0:05 Intro 0:22 Number 0:48 Articles 2:12 Diminutives and Augmentatives 3:58 Tense and Aspect 8:42 Passive and Causative 8:59 Mood 9:42 Agglutinative vs Fusional 11:24 Word Order 11:49 Noun Case 13:42 Verb Agreement 15:06 Possession 15:54 Non-Configurational Syntax (Free Word Order) 16:38 Irregularity 18:19 Semantic Change (Change in meaning) 20:03 Naming Your Language
Regarding 2:31 I think "-ling" isn't a diminuitive, or at the very least it is not the only one and it's not very common. Normally it would be "-lein" or "-chen", depending on the word you want to use it with.
Note: in lithuanian "The man runs" is translated as "Vyras bėga". The verb "teka" is used only to describe running liquids, like "river" and "water". So: "River/water runs" - "upė/vanduo teka". But: "The man runs" - "vyras bėga".
speaking as a native mexican, in spanish our aumentative can also be "ísimo". for example, "perrazo" means a large dog, but "perrísimo" means something is really cool.
If it's similar to portuguese, I assume -ísimo is for adjectives while azo is for nouns? In portuguese we have -ão/ona for nouns and íssimo(/a) for adjectives, like "cachorrão" for big dog and "Grandíssimo" for very big, although it is more common informally to say "grandão", with ão being generalised even for adjectives. I think different suffixes for different noun classes is a very interesting feature
This is great, I love this kind of thing. You do a good job of explaining how a language evolves to become synthetic, but I was wondering if you can describe how a language evolves to become more analytic.
hi im kind of an amateur conlanger but well, if ur looking just to make an analytic language you could probably just make it so that not much grammaticalization happens from the proto-lang, but if you are specifically looking to make a more synthetic language evolve to be more analytic i guess you could get rid of some more specific cases, numbers, tenses, aspects etc. to start. dont have many ideas other than that, i know most the romance languages became simpler than latin, maybe u could look into that?
когда происходит много фонетических изменений, многие падежи звучат одинаково и теряют смысл, получается одно слово в любом падеже, и их значения заменяются аналитически
A language can become more analytic by sound changes. If word-final vowels and/or consonants are not pronounced, then case endings and plural suffixes can be lost. This will cause different words to be used as grammatical particles, so the language can become more analytic.
This was so, so helpful! You're amazing at these videos. Grammar like this has never been my strong suit; I always mess up somewhere. Thanks to you, I have so much more info. on how to develop all that I need. I wanted to add person to my verbs, but now I know that it's not as common to have both verb person and noun case, which was a big area of confusion for me, now I no longer have to worry 😁! Again, thank you so much! Thanks to you, I made a language far better than my others. Thank you!
You're very welcome, and thank you! I'm glad you find the series useful. You certainly could have verb agreement and noun case in the same language, especially if the verb only agrees with the subject (cf. basically every European Language), but if a language already has noun case and a default word order, then it becomes increasingly uncommon/unneeded for the verb to mark other roles beyond the subject.
10:38 Careful, '-as' doesn't mean that the noun is feminine, just that it follows the first declension. There are plenty of Latin words that follow the first declension but are masculine in gender, like 'nauta, ae' (sailor), 'poeta, ae' (poet), ...
LOL now I understand how weird is my native language, Hebrew: We do have stop clusters (mi*gd*al, li*dk*or); We have no nasal assimilation (metu*mt*am, e*nk*om); And we have no saparate between perfecrive and imperfective.
@@Biblaridion Spanish has bisniet(o/a) for great-grandchild, and bisabuel(o/a) for great-grandparents. English also does this with the terms “great” and “god” to imply either further genetic lineage or conditional legal lineage
5:39 Actually in Turkish we have something like "to be": We generally prefer using "Adam mutludur." and "Adam askerdir" but sometimes we don't use the -dir/-dur suffix because it is easier so it's actually a slang. And this suffix comes from "turur" in old Turkic meaning "he/she stops/stands". I liked that it was similar to the one described. 12:37 I think the suffix -le/-la, which derives from the word "ile", and the suffix -li/-li are mixed: with a car: arabayla having a car: arabalı This word "ile" comes from the word "birle" in Old Turkic and its root is "bir"(one), meaning together. The suffix -li/-lı is in the form of -lig/-lıg in old Turkic. So as far as I know they are completely unrelated.
Upon reviewing the video a couple of times, a couple of questions arose. 1) How did you get the passive perfect -nchâ from that list of sound changes? It should be something like 'nôa tihi ahi' > 'nôatihiahi' > 'nôatiai' > 'nôatyay' > 'nôachay' > 'nôachâ'; but no matter how hard I try, I don't end up with '-nchâ'. 2) When lexical material like auxilaries and stuff becomes phonologically dependent (i.e gets affixed), how are you able to tell which syllables get the stress when applying the sound changes? If it just becomes "one big word", then is it just a matter of applying the stress rules? But that can't be it... otherwise applying the "loss of vowels between obstruents in unstressed syllables" rule would result in some unpronounceable consonant clusters in some words. Maybe, then, it's only the syllables that don't receive neither primary nor secondary stress that are considered unstressed as to the sound changes? Thank you for your time!
1.) Affixes (especially frequently used ones) often shorten up independently of any sound changes. In this case, once the long vowel in 'nōa' no longer receives the stress after 'tihiahi' gets suffixed, the long vowel might get shortened and the /a/ might just get lost entirely. So, nōatihiahi > nōatiai > nōatyay > -nōtyay > -notyay > -ntyay > -nchay > -nchā. 2.) The affixation may cause a stress shift within the word (depends on where the stress was in the stem and the lexical source of the morphology before affixation, as well as where the phrase-level stress was placed). In some cases, it may end up completely changing the stress rules of the language (I believe Old Latin had stress always falling on the first syllable, but then lots of suffixation ended up changing it to stress on the penult unless there's a long vowel in the antepenult). And if there's ever a situation like you describe, where vowel loss in unstressed syllables would cause unpronounceable clusters, then there may be some rule about certain syllables being immune to vowel loss (especially the first and last syllable), or, alternatively, any unpronounceable clusters may also get reduced (like in the "I am going to eat" > "I'ma eat" example).
17:31 The English irregular plural example has the sound changes in the wrong order. The Proto-Germanic -i plural occurred so early that umlaut happened in both the North and West branches (Gothic, in the East branch, didn't have this change consistently), such that the vowel disappeared and the root vowel changed even before the evolution of the old forms, i.e. Old Norse, Old Saxon, Old German, etc. Old English already had "mȳs" attested long before the first Vowel Shift changed it from /y/ to /i/, and earlier than the Great Vowel Shift from /i/ to /aj/. The example holds in general, but the sample has the changes in a weird order to actual history.
I can imagine linguists from the universe of Simātsan travelling to this island and researching this language, and then being amazed at how it features both noun case and poly-personal agreement.
I'm already conlanging along with this series! It helps a lot to have a reference Having in mind the place where this is spoken is more important than what I thought So, for my new spacing system... NO SPACES. In mountains you wont find that much material to make paper, but not that few to discard it, so, to save paper, no spaces, just a | between words PD:until now, my favorite word of my conlang is omonton, that comes from omomton Om just means "and", and "ton" means "wound" So, bassically, it means "it is physically painful that you speak so much"
We dont really use Bauta in Swedish but instead say Stor or Jätte (big and giant) to indicate that things are of greater size, from what ive heard only old people and smaller children use bauta in the case of being reaaally big. Boulder would be called klippblock (a piece of a cliff) or maybe stenbumling
In the middle of all these... Man do I have a lot of work ahead of me. Way outta my depth right now, but great videos and information. A valuable resource. Thanks !!
What about comparisons for modifiers / adjectives? The video covers augmentatives and diminutives, but what about more / -er and most / -est, the comparative and superlative? I suppose aug. and dim. would get those, however one wants to derive them for the conlang. (Also, situations like less, least, full vs. empty vs. partially full or empty, wellness or illness, various other important states that might be covered in the grammar or in common affixes.
Hey, so I would like some tips. I'm making a head-final language, but I want all grammatical affixes to be suffixes. I do I do this while keeping the actual word order all head-final (like Turkish). For example, following what you've said, I would end up with a plural prefix, but I want I plural suffix while still keeping the head final syntax. How would I accomplish this naturalistically
You could say the plural suffix developed at an early stage of the language's history when there was more flexibility in word order. Incidentally, beyond reduplication, plural prefixes are actually quite rare.
Polish has a decent amount of cases and verb agreement (though the verb just agrees with the subject). One of the advantages of this is that some words can be omitted: instead of saying "ja mówiłem jemu" (I told him) we'd say "mówiłem mu" (told 'im) - the -łem suffix is specifically past tense and first person so we don't need "ja", and "jemu" can be abbrieviated to "mu" pretty easily. Another example - "ja jego zabiłem" ("I killed him") becomes "zabiłem go" Also we have different versions of the "to him" for those two. I know what the difference is but I don't know how to explain it - "jemu"/"mu" is used for phrases like "I said to him" (powiedziałem mu) or "I gave to him" (dałem mu) while "jego"/"go" is for stuff like "I hit him" (uderzyłem go) or "I kissed him" (ucałowałem go) EDIT: there's also "strzeliłem mu" which means something like "I shot at/to him" but as far as I can tell is only used to mean "I hit him" It occurs to me that my language has a lot of ways to describe an act of violence
Yay, we finally got some noun cases! I love noun cases. My current conlang has some interesting constructions that originate in the loss of the adjectival case. The language still does not have proper adjectives, and adjectival meanings have been folded into other cases (mostly the genitive for inherent qualities and the location cases for changeable qualities). The adjectival case endings do, however, persist in personal name suffixes, as children are often named according to perceived or desired traits.
mega in megabyte is not an augmentative although it may appear that way and was likely even derived from that. mega in megabyte is a metric prefix which represents an exact quantity. it's something more in line with grammatical number than augmentatives
I'm curious about the basic verb paradigms, should I pick the verb for 'To walk' too or can it be any verb, as surely the verb that proceeds the auxillary verb would affect how the paradigm is formed. Also, for my conlang I am trying to evolve 'I hunted' which is 'Ke Waku ona' but using your sound changes here only results in a single change being 'Ke wakwona' but that doesn't seem to be enough for any sort of paradigm. Apologies if it seems to be a silly question, I am very new to all this.
You can pick any verb to test your paradigm, but you're absolutely right that, depending on what you're sound changes are, the paradigm might differ depending on the phonology of the verb stem, which is how languages can evolve to have multiple paradigms (e.g. If you look at the verb conjugations of Latin, basically the only major difference between them is the vowel in the suffix). In this series I cover some pretty common sound changes like intervocalic voicing and vowel loss, but if you want a more developed paradigm, I would suggest using many more sound changes than I do in this language, maybe something like 20-30.
Grammar is always the most frustrating part of learning a language, because they get more complex over time and by the time you start learning it, there's a couple thousand years of context that you don't have. But that makes me wonder: are there languages that haven't really evolved phonetically?
But wouldn't nouns also have irregular case markings? And relative to nouns and verbs, wouldn't there be changes in the root due to affixes. For example, when adding "-tihiahi", the stress would no longer be on the root of the verb and thus the sound changes, that would not have happened in the root due to stressed syllables, would happen in the root of the perfect. Tell me if I am wrong somewhere.
Just a little question on an exemple you gave! At 14:20 there's a sentence in basque but it sounds really stranger to me... In which dialect is it written?
I actually skipped grammatical evolution entirely. This was completely on purpose, because I thought it would be more interesting if there were a bunch of sound changes but the grammar stayed the same (much like the whole Thai shenanigan, except with grammar and not script). It actually made for a very interesting (but slightly confusing) conlang that I am quite proud of.
With my choice to derive four copulas in my tutorial protolang from the verbs for "be", "look/see", "feel", and "taste", I'm starting to feel uneasy as they might lose their original meanings entirely. What words should I create to succeed them? I could build words for "lick", "sniff", etc., though still... And I'm also feeling I should've used other, more practical verbs to derive the four copulas.
Due to phonological evolution, the past tense and present/past imperfective aspect merged. (past tense was dỹ and imperfective "do" was dym at the time that happened). Also, the people are so used to saying the past tense affix that the word "do" literally becomes an affix in this case. Several sound changes later, past tense imperfective is gwím, and normal past tense is guɕãdỹm, making it really irregular compared to the Proto-Lang.
Huh, in Hungarian monster "szörnyeteg" is the combination of fur "szőr" and i kind of the word terrified "retteg". I have spoken it my whole life but ive never noticed these things
Is there a naturalistic way to determine the gender of a word, if it is not directly related to the actual gender of the thing? French for example only has male and female pronouns, so even for things a gender needs to be chosen. In German, male or female persons also sometimes have neutral gender ("das Weib"" which maybe comes from a shortening of "das Weibchen"?) and I, as a native speaker, do not see any pattern for it. But is there a pattern in the proto-German and how did it change to the modern standard language?
I don't have too much of an idea, but from my personal observation, it seems to be dependent on culture. Things that are more culturally feminine, either directly or remotely, tend to be those genders. For example in Spanish: "Mesa" meaning table is feminine (The connection being that woman are culturally expected to set up dinner) "Perro" meaning dog is masculine (As dogs are seen as a partner through battle which, traditionally, is a thing for men)
I think that patterns aren't cultural, but grammatical. So, for example, in Russian every word ending on -а, - я is expected to be feminine, while words ending on -о, -е are expected to be neutral (With a few exceptions, of course)
@@rosiecarrot1769 , yes but not all languages actually have such clear paterns. German only has different articles and that's it. And also, what causes those patterns to apear? I can't think of anything other than culture (at least for sex based gender)
The theory one of my French teachers told me is that the genders came from animistic religions, where some kind of god or spirit was associated with every object, and the gender of the imagined spirit became the object's gender. I have no idea if there's any truth to that in our world, but it would be a neat way to get culturally-derived genders into a conlang.
@@timefortjer6705 The thing is, the sounds at the ends of the words are not that stable over hundreds and thousands of years. In Germanic languages noun genders were very much apparent from the structure of the word. Over time, though, as words got shorter or vowels merged the motivation became obscure, native speakers essentially learning word's genders as kids (for example, Vater and Feuer now end the same way, which used not to be the case) Russian is not completely devoid of this, though word genders are still fairly transparent even after the collapse of the Proto-Slavic declension system. If anything, the gender system became more consistent and stable, with a smaller amount of well-defined classes. I wonder if something really CAUSES the classifications to appear. A lot of languages have some form of grouping nouns into classes. I guess, they may arise spontaneously when building some sort of order from chaos. If, however, you connect the gender with the affixes at some point, I cannot see an easy way to get rid of it. Probably, the corresponding morphemes should become weaker first and unify into a smaller amount of options-both for nouns and for any words that have any sort of gender agreement. Or maybe you should lose the agreement first; then the phonetic shape of a noun stops meaning anything (nothing depends on it).
While you changed words to prefixes, I changed prefixes to words, because when my friend joined in, it kinda confused him, so I changed it to be clearer.
Cases might disappear if they start to weaken in sense as new adpositions evolve to take over their old roles. This also often results in a word order shift to SVO. It depends on how the case system works, but I would guess that most of the time, the nouns will revert to whichever is the unmarked case (usually the nominative), but if not, you might end up with something like Nahuatl, where every noun ends in ‘-tl(i)’ unless it’s possessed. There are more possibilities if you have a European-style fusional case system; If I remember correctly, the Italian ‘-i’ and ‘-e’ plurals come from the Latin ‘-ī’ and ‘-ae’ nominative plural endings, whereas the ‘-s’ plural ending in French and Spanish developed from the reanalyzed ‘-ās’ and ‘-ōs’ accusative plural endings of Latin.
Ok so a few questions Are root word used in words created from lexicon and the root word could possibly be different? Because in my language the word “Hiko” meaning fire turned into “Igo” and “Hikozimi” meaning fireplace/campfire turned into “Ikzim”. Also how do languages branch off into a “language family tree”? Could you make a video about that? This series is good, it helped me so much!
It can branch off by adding different sound changes to different versions of the language. Let's say,you have got your language and branch it off. Well then,you can 'split' it into how many parts you want,and add different changes to each one. Them,for example you add the change 'j becomes ʝ between vowels' to one version. Then you only need to NOT apply it to the other versions. Maybe this helps to visualise: Noule>Old Kham 1-nj mj> ɲ 2-b d ɡ> β ð ɣ/V_V 3- ...... The list goes on. Then,when you split it.... Old Kham>Khã|Old Kham> Qami 1-ħ>x | 1-ʀ> rˠ 2- |2- And so on,and so on.... I hope I helped you,I don't usually do well at explaining things.
How to separate accusative and dative cases: 1. Postpositions 2. Merge the postpositions with the indirect object 3. Reimagining, I guess. Now your former accusative case is now a dative, and you have a new accusative.
An easy way to do that would be to start with the same Proto-language then apply different changes to them to seperate them into seperate Languages, branching them off as they go, say your language family has languages a, b, and c, a and b could've separated early on so they have accumulated entirely different changes from the Proto-language, but after that split c split from b, so c would have undergone the same changes as b pre-split but afterwards went in seperate paths, meaning c is closer to b than a.
Hey i doubt anyone will see this, but are the augmentatives and such meant to come from the protolanguage word for the things or the neolanguage word for the things. If i want to use the word for sea as an augmentative, would i use the old word (waliqueta) or the new word (walid)
It's sooo english thinking to feel a need for a continous form and a future tense ... I am german and we have no continous and almost do not use future tense ... :-D
I'll almost certainly make a video about this soon, but in the meantime, the easy way to evolve gender is just to have it so that nouns have to occur with some sort of classifier, and then have the classifiers merge with the nouns. I briefly discuss this in my Oqolaawak video.
I have and abilitative mood, but i am stuck on what would make sense for a continuous abilitative phrase, because because "i can do 'x' continuously' doesn't make that much sense, this i have ruled it not possible, which bothers me quite a bit
holy I did not know how fun it is to configure phonetics also I think my language took a toll to being irregular. Which I don't hate as my language is lacking complexity. Hey, I picked what rules were and rules they were, no codas in the middle of the word = noun irregularities which don't matter as much as verb irregularities but I fear this will affect verbs too.
I think the German "-ling" suffix isn't the best example of a diminutive in that language. It more accurately means "person of", similar to the English "-er" as in: Eindringling: intruder, from eindringen (to penetrate) Flüchtling: refugee, from Flucht (escape) Häftling: prisoner, from Haft (imprisonment) Schwächling: weakling, from schwach (weak) Feigling: coward, from Feige (cowardice) Abkömmling: descendant, from abkommen (descend) Even "Liebling" follows this pattern and can translated as "beloved." I'm not a native speaker, so I don't know if "-ling" might not also be used as or sometimes have the connotation of a diminutive. Schwächling and Feigling certainly suggest it, but the others certainly don't. Some better examples of diminutives in German are "-chen" and "-lein."
The "-as" in "puellas" isn't actually fusion, but a case ending that you talk about later. It's a plural accusative ending of the 1st declension and never functioned as a few words that then got pulped into one word and suffixed, it was always a case ending. It also doesn't necessarily mean that the noun is feminine (though in that case it obviously is), because some words that belong to the 1st declension can be masculine and yet still have the same case ending, e.g. "advena" - newcomer, "advenas" - plural accusative of newcomer. Latin doesn't use consistent suffixes to symbolise things such as, for example, plurality because depending on which declension the noun belongs to, it's plural markings can look very different (I declension: femina, feminae; II declension: faber, fabri; III declension: lex, leges; IV declension: exercitus, exercitus; V declension: dies, dies) and that doesn't even include the different cases that have unique endings for both singular and plural (a plural nominative is different from a plural ablative, e.g. pl. nom. "leges", pl. abl. "legibus").
The perfect series of videos for someone who has realised that their previous conlangs are shit and wants to progress. Thank you for bringing it to us!
exactly why im here
Mood asf
ععععععع
*adds in Biblaridion as an example word from greek* smooth 3:48
judepeixoto oh god the Greek says Biblidarion
Smol Booklet
haha it took me a second to understand what you were talking about
Smoooth
Guys help him, he is a booklet
Wow, a tech tree/skill tree for conlanging would be so cool. Imagine choosing between the "fusional" and "agglutinative" paths, or the "noun case" and "verb agreement" paths.
imagine multi-track drifting
or both noun case and verb agreement if you're feeling extra soviet
@@yeetyeet-jb6nc I bet you're a middle school band kid th-cam.com/video/chDF7Ynomgs/w-d-xo.html&ab_channel=tellingithowitis
I would really like one of these. Would be super useful.
Does anyone know how to make a computer app to create a language like this?
Spanish speaker here. The masculine indefinite article is "un", the numeral is in fact "uno" though. Careful there.
You could have used Portuguese "um" and "um", that would've made the trick.
E.g. "O número um" (the number one) vs "um menino" (a boy).
Um
I thought that was a bit odd as well.
"Un" in French works too
And Swedish
That is what I thought. I learned some Spanish when I was in school. I remember it this way. Un is masculine. Una is feminine. Uno is used for counting.
i am a native mandarin speaker and this series made mandarin look very unusual. which isn't bad, but it made me realise how unusual my native language is. wow its so weird... and i had no problem learning english too
well he doesnt really go all the way through the evolution of fusional languages to analytic ones like mandarin, but it does happen.
Yeah. I prefer isolating analytic languages like Mandarin. Back when I first started conlanging, I preferred heavily fusional and agglutinating conlangs, mainly because that's what Westerners are exposed to. However, over time, I have really come to appreciate the unsung wonders of heavily isolating and analytic languages. People pooh-pooh them as "simple". But my 500-page Mandarin grammar would disagree.
english and mandarin when you really come down to it have quite similar grammar, dare i say even more similar than english and spanish
@@prophetofgarfield That's not a secret, English is becoming less synthetic
@@wtc5198 lol when did i say it was? it's just an interesting phenomenon
the spanish indefinite articles are actually un and una, the numeral is still uno.
lol that was so jarring to me
Yeah, that was a really rookie mistake on my part.
@@Biblaridion well, there's bound to be mistakes in a 21-minute long video that has no content-fillers. it's just jarring because i'm a spanish student, but if you didn't take spanish 1 it looks pretty normal.
Actually "un" is a shortened form of "uno", even as a numeral, when it stands before the noun it qualifies. This becomes evident for example when you answer a question like "How many brothers do you have?" You could say "Tengo UN hermano" (I have one brother) stressing "un" to contrast it with "I have A brother", but anyway, the question "how many" asks for a number, and the number here is "un". Besides, you could just say "(Tengo) uno" ((I have) one), dropping the noun altogether.
Another example that shows that "un" also translates "one" before a noun is "Marzo tiene treinta y un días" (March has thirty-one days, and clearly not *"March has thirty-a days"). So "un" here is the numeral ONE, not the article A. The trick is that the article "un" (i.e.: "un" meaning "a") ALWAYS precedes the noun, so it can NEVER take the form "uno".
Great videos, by the way!
This is really, really good. There is a lot of free good info out there on phonology and syntax, but not so much on grammaticalization, which is key for creating a naturalistic conlang. I love how you go much more in-depth on this topic than the previous ones.
Keep up the good work. After I finish watching this series I'll binge-watch the Nahuatl one (:
Thanks very much! You're right, I think a lot of the stuff about phonology and basic grammar is covered elsewhere, but part of the reason I wanted to do this series in the first place was because I felt like there weren't many resources for beginners that included all the diachronic stuff.
Biblaridion you are basically the only conlang youtuber who really emphasises or even talks about language evolution as a key factor which is great!
@@Biblaridion I wanted to ask, how can some language like Latin have both grammatical cases and prepositions?
Also, how can a svo language have a verb conjugation with suffixes?
Last thing, what are some ways of changing the word order in an historically logic way?
I’m convinced that English will eventually become its own language family, where the current dialects (British, American, Canadian, Australian, New Zealander, Singaporean, etc.) becoming distinct languages in the future. However I don’t think this will happen for a few more hundred years
yeah probably :)
Meh, if it ever gets too bad american media will seep into the other englishs and thatll keep them tied
@@thorodinson6649 fair point, the internet does change some things
вряд-ли, в век глобализации американец и британец могут ежедневно общаться, а значит у них вряд-ли возникнут уникальные особенности. скорее даже уже те различия, которые есть, исчезнут
with the amount of globalisation we have today, it would be a very very slow process or might never happen.
It took me about two years to fully understand this series, but boy. I am so, so grateful for these videos. Thanks, Bib!
I think this might be the single most interesting video I've seen on TH-cam. Thank you for doing this.
I was thinking in Portuguese the word for the instrument horn (corneta) had nothing to do with animal horns (chifre), but then I realized that, actually, the root "corn-" comes from the Latin word for horn. I mean, they aren't homophones in Portuguese, but the relationship is actually very apparent.
Pretty much every time I initially assume some word in English has a different etymology than its equivalent in Portuguese, it turns out to be pretty much the same (for instance "car" is short for "carriage" in English, and so is "carro" for "carruagem", and in both languages it's related to the verb "to carry"/"carregar"). I guess that happens because Portuguese descends from Latin, and English borrows fairly heavily from it. The two languages look pretty different on the surface, but the more carefully you look at it, the more apparent it becomes how incredibly similar they truly are.
I guess that's why English has "unicorn" instead of "unihorn".
@@gcewing Yup, cornū(nominative) is latin for horn.
És lusófono?
@@allejandrodavid5222 Sim, sou brasileiro.
@@QuotePilgrim boa
I started to make my first conlang, developed it chaotically, but then used the "Oh, it's a highly archaic form of the *actual* language" excuse. I started making the actual language with the help of this series! Thanks so much!
Hey! I started one ConLang from this video series, but didn't go 'well'. The idea was to grab both Latin and German to try to created a merged 'old' language, but since it wasn't Proto-germanic it didn't work out...
Then I started again, with proto-germanic words in hands and Latin words too. Started following all this series steps, keeping Latin written systems and 'w' (not 'v') sound - as well as the 'c' letter for the 'tch' sound anyware - , and thus it went pretty well!
Hey, do you think you could still post the Excel file? I’m curious to see the result :)
try watching artifexian’s videos for more complex ideas
2:21 the only time in Swedish you use the word ”bautasten” is in the Asterix comics where Obelix’s gigantic are called ”bautastenar” ;)
- TIMESTAMPS -
0:05 Intro
0:22 Number
0:48 Articles
2:12 Diminutives and Augmentatives
3:58 Tense and Aspect
8:42 Passive and Causative
8:59 Mood
9:42 Agglutinative vs Fusional
11:24 Word Order
11:49 Noun Case
13:42 Verb Agreement
15:06 Possession
15:54 Non-Configurational Syntax (Free Word Order)
16:38 Irregularity
18:19 Semantic Change (Change in meaning)
20:03 Naming Your Language
Regarding 2:31
I think "-ling" isn't a diminuitive, or at the very least it is not the only one and it's not very common. Normally it would be "-lein" or "-chen", depending on the word you want to use it with.
Note: in lithuanian "The man runs" is translated as "Vyras bėga". The verb "teka" is used only to describe running liquids, like "river" and "water". So: "River/water runs" - "upė/vanduo teka". But: "The man runs" - "vyras bėga".
would you translate 'teka' as 'flow' rather than 'run' then?
Chris Amies exactly. 🙂
speaking as a native mexican, in spanish our aumentative can also be "ísimo". for example, "perrazo" means a large dog, but "perrísimo" means something is really cool.
wait, so a really cool thing is a very doggy thing?
If it's similar to portuguese, I assume -ísimo is for adjectives while azo is for nouns? In portuguese we have -ão/ona for nouns and íssimo(/a) for adjectives, like "cachorrão" for big dog and "Grandíssimo" for very big, although it is more common informally to say "grandão", with ão being generalised even for adjectives. I think different suffixes for different noun classes is a very interesting feature
I feel like my Brain is going to literally self destruct after watching this entire series in one day. I feel like I don’t understand any of it.
ha tell me, I'm a native spanish speaker
@@Beatriz-wq4jr damn I totally forgot about this comment and video. I’ve long since left my conlanging phase behind me, but it’s a damn amazing hobby.
This is great, I love this kind of thing. You do a good job of explaining how a language evolves to become synthetic, but I was wondering if you can describe how a language evolves to become more analytic.
hi im kind of an amateur conlanger but well, if ur looking just to make an analytic language you could probably just make it so that not much grammaticalization happens from the proto-lang, but if you are specifically looking to make a more synthetic language evolve to be more analytic i guess you could get rid of some more specific cases, numbers, tenses, aspects etc. to start. dont have many ideas other than that, i know most the romance languages became simpler than latin, maybe u could look into that?
когда происходит много фонетических изменений, многие падежи звучат одинаково и теряют смысл, получается одно слово в любом падеже, и их значения заменяются аналитически
A language can become more analytic by sound changes. If word-final vowels and/or consonants are not pronounced, then case endings and plural suffixes can be lost. This will cause different words to be used as grammatical particles, so the language can become more analytic.
It's so cool to see Basque used as an example for unlikely/weird linguistics
This was so, so helpful! You're amazing at these videos. Grammar like this has never been my strong suit; I always mess up somewhere. Thanks to you, I have so much more info. on how to develop all that I need. I wanted to add person to my verbs, but now I know that it's not as common to have both verb person and noun case, which was a big area of confusion for me, now I no longer have to worry 😁! Again, thank you so much! Thanks to you, I made a language far better than my others. Thank you!
You're very welcome, and thank you! I'm glad you find the series useful.
You certainly could have verb agreement and noun case in the same language, especially if the verb only agrees with the subject (cf. basically every European Language), but if a language already has noun case and a default word order, then it becomes increasingly uncommon/unneeded for the verb to mark other roles beyond the subject.
(12:50) For some reason, I want to see the "to the animal" to be a dative case.
I’d also recommend to take into account the Case Hierarchy if your goal is to make a NatLang
3:45 The modern greek word for book is βιβλίο, not βιβλιάριο. βιβλιάριο means booklet, carnet. So, how did you deduce that βιβλιάριον replaced βιβλίον
The e
10:38 Careful, '-as' doesn't mean that the noun is feminine, just that it follows the first declension. There are plenty of Latin words that follow the first declension but are masculine in gender, like 'nauta, ae' (sailor), 'poeta, ae' (poet), ...
This video blew my mind. Trough the evolution I understood the sense of a lot of thing I didn't understand before and that I felt just randomic.
LOL now I understand how weird is my native language, Hebrew:
We do have stop clusters (mi*gd*al, li*dk*or); We have no nasal assimilation (metu*mt*am, e*nk*om); And we have no saparate between perfecrive and imperfective.
Could you use augmentative affixes to state lineage i.e. grandparent and grandchildren?
Sure, in fact I know I've seen languages that do exactly that, I just can't think of any off the top of my head.
@@Biblaridion Spanish has bisniet(o/a) for great-grandchild, and bisabuel(o/a) for great-grandparents. English also does this with the terms “great” and “god” to imply either further genetic lineage or conditional legal lineage
@@PyckledNyk same in portuguese. bisneto/a, bisavô/ó. also, french has "grandparents"
5:39 Actually in Turkish we have something like "to be":
We generally prefer using "Adam mutludur." and "Adam askerdir" but sometimes we don't use the -dir/-dur suffix because it is easier so it's actually a slang. And this suffix comes from "turur" in old Turkic meaning "he/she stops/stands". I liked that it was similar to the one described.
12:37 I think the suffix -le/-la, which derives from the word "ile", and the suffix -li/-li are mixed:
with a car: arabayla
having a car: arabalı
This word "ile" comes from the word "birle" in Old Turkic and its root is "bir"(one), meaning together. The suffix -li/-lı is in the form of -lig/-lıg in old Turkic. So as far as I know they are completely unrelated.
Upon reviewing the video a couple of times, a couple of questions arose.
1) How did you get the passive perfect -nchâ from that list of sound changes? It should be something like 'nôa tihi ahi' > 'nôatihiahi' > 'nôatiai' > 'nôatyay' > 'nôachay' > 'nôachâ'; but no matter how hard I try, I don't end up with '-nchâ'.
2) When lexical material like auxilaries and stuff becomes phonologically dependent (i.e gets affixed), how are you able to tell which syllables get the stress when applying the sound changes? If it just becomes "one big word", then is it just a matter of applying the stress rules? But that can't be it... otherwise applying the "loss of vowels between obstruents in unstressed syllables" rule would result in some unpronounceable consonant clusters in some words. Maybe, then, it's only the syllables that don't receive neither primary nor secondary stress that are considered unstressed as to the sound changes?
Thank you for your time!
1.) Affixes (especially frequently used ones) often shorten up independently of any sound changes. In this case, once the long vowel in 'nōa' no longer receives the stress after 'tihiahi' gets suffixed, the long vowel might get shortened and the /a/ might just get lost entirely. So, nōatihiahi > nōatiai > nōatyay > -nōtyay > -notyay > -ntyay > -nchay > -nchā.
2.) The affixation may cause a stress shift within the word (depends on where the stress was in the stem and the lexical source of the morphology before affixation, as well as where the phrase-level stress was placed). In some cases, it may end up completely changing the stress rules of the language (I believe Old Latin had stress always falling on the first syllable, but then lots of suffixation ended up changing it to stress on the penult unless there's a long vowel in the antepenult). And if there's ever a situation like you describe, where vowel loss in unstressed syllables would cause unpronounceable clusters, then there may be some rule about certain syllables being immune to vowel loss (especially the first and last syllable), or, alternatively, any unpronounceable clusters may also get reduced (like in the "I am going to eat" > "I'ma eat" example).
8:15 in English, I think an example is like
You're
You'll
You've
I'm
I've
It's
I'll
You're
Etc...
17:31 The English irregular plural example has the sound changes in the wrong order. The Proto-Germanic -i plural occurred so early that umlaut happened in both the North and West branches (Gothic, in the East branch, didn't have this change consistently), such that the vowel disappeared and the root vowel changed even before the evolution of the old forms, i.e. Old Norse, Old Saxon, Old German, etc. Old English already had "mȳs" attested long before the first Vowel Shift changed it from /y/ to /i/, and earlier than the Great Vowel Shift from /i/ to /aj/. The example holds in general, but the sample has the changes in a weird order to actual history.
I can imagine linguists from the universe of Simātsan travelling to this island and researching this language, and then being amazed at how it features both noun case and poly-personal agreement.
Well. I'm going to have to watch this about a thousand time before I get everything. Great video!
I'm already conlanging along with this series!
It helps a lot to have a reference
Having in mind the place where this is spoken is more important than what I thought
So, for my new spacing system... NO SPACES. In mountains you wont find that much material to make paper, but not that few to discard it, so, to save paper, no spaces, just a | between words
PD:until now, my favorite word of my conlang is omonton, that comes from omomton
Om just means "and", and "ton" means "wound"
So, bassically, it means "it is physically painful that you speak so much"
This is great! Thank you very much for a very rich source of these topics. Keep up the good work! Subscribed!
With each passing day, I'm more and more glad that I speak the language without articles.
We dont really use Bauta in Swedish but instead say Stor or Jätte (big and giant) to indicate that things are of greater size, from what ive heard only old people and smaller children use bauta in the case of being reaaally big. Boulder would be called klippblock (a piece of a cliff) or maybe stenbumling
The new year has grown!
How can someone put so much effort into a video? This is just awesome, keep up the work! :D
In the middle of all these... Man do I have a lot of work ahead of me. Way outta my depth right now, but great videos and information.
A valuable resource. Thanks !!
20:45 Hats off to anyone who realized the sound change that made the "j" phoneme possible.
What about comparisons for modifiers / adjectives? The video covers augmentatives and diminutives, but what about more / -er and most / -est, the comparative and superlative? I suppose aug. and dim. would get those, however one wants to derive them for the conlang. (Also, situations like less, least, full vs. empty vs. partially full or empty, wellness or illness, various other important states that might be covered in the grammar or in common affixes.
FoD music in the intro is valid also great video
and subbed
1:42 That's wrong. In Spanish we use UNO as one, and UN/UNA as the indefinite article.
Good video anyway
Hey, so I would like some tips. I'm making a head-final language, but I want all grammatical affixes to be suffixes. I do I do this while keeping the actual word order all head-final (like Turkish). For example, following what you've said, I would end up with a plural prefix, but I want I plural suffix while still keeping the head final syntax. How would I accomplish this naturalistically
You could say the plural suffix developed at an early stage of the language's history when there was more flexibility in word order. Incidentally, beyond reduplication, plural prefixes are actually quite rare.
Polish has a decent amount of cases and verb agreement (though the verb just agrees with the subject). One of the advantages of this is that some words can be omitted: instead of saying "ja mówiłem jemu" (I told him) we'd say "mówiłem mu" (told 'im) - the -łem suffix is specifically past tense and first person so we don't need "ja", and "jemu" can be abbrieviated to "mu" pretty easily. Another example - "ja jego zabiłem" ("I killed him") becomes "zabiłem go"
Also we have different versions of the "to him" for those two. I know what the difference is but I don't know how to explain it - "jemu"/"mu" is used for phrases like "I said to him" (powiedziałem mu) or "I gave to him" (dałem mu) while "jego"/"go" is for stuff like "I hit him" (uderzyłem go) or "I kissed him" (ucałowałem go)
EDIT: there's also "strzeliłem mu" which means something like "I shot at/to him" but as far as I can tell is only used to mean "I hit him"
It occurs to me that my language has a lot of ways to describe an act of violence
I love all of your videos, you're such a creative inspiration for me ^-^
Detailed sound change description request:
[ʃjij] - [sin]
Yay, we finally got some noun cases! I love noun cases.
My current conlang has some interesting constructions that originate in the loss of the adjectival case. The language still does not have proper adjectives, and adjectival meanings have been folded into other cases (mostly the genitive for inherent qualities and the location cases for changeable qualities). The adjectival case endings do, however, persist in personal name suffixes, as children are often named according to perceived or desired traits.
In Finnish ablative Case means to get off from on top of the word it is attached to
10:24
It is يقرأن
Not يقرون
And يقرأن
Indicates all aspects, and differentiation is by means of articles and preclitics
mega in megabyte is not an augmentative although it may appear that way and was likely even derived from that. mega in megabyte is a metric prefix which represents an exact quantity. it's something more in line with grammatical number than augmentatives
Luckily my conlang is very ancient and was largely forgotten by modern society, so I don't need to evolve it too much XD
I'm curious about the basic verb paradigms, should I pick the verb for 'To walk' too or can it be any verb, as surely the verb that proceeds the auxillary verb would affect how the paradigm is formed.
Also, for my conlang I am trying to evolve 'I hunted' which is 'Ke Waku ona' but using your sound changes here only results in a single change being 'Ke wakwona' but that doesn't seem to be enough for any sort of paradigm.
Apologies if it seems to be a silly question, I am very new to all this.
You can pick any verb to test your paradigm, but you're absolutely right that, depending on what you're sound changes are, the paradigm might differ depending on the phonology of the verb stem, which is how languages can evolve to have multiple paradigms (e.g. If you look at the verb conjugations of Latin, basically the only major difference between them is the vowel in the suffix). In this series I cover some pretty common sound changes like intervocalic voicing and vowel loss, but if you want a more developed paradigm, I would suggest using many more sound changes than I do in this language, maybe something like 20-30.
I was kind of insecure about my words being pretty long, but then I see Naalangmangaarmitit nalujanga and I am suddenly perfectly fine
Grammar is always the most frustrating part of learning a language, because they get more complex over time and by the time you start learning it, there's a couple thousand years of context that you don't have. But that makes me wonder: are there languages that haven't really evolved phonetically?
I mean, did “mis-” really undergo semantic bleaching? Feels like a bit of a swing and a miss.
I feel like there should be a link to stand still stay silent since you used it for the thumbnail
this is really good, but i wish there was something to explain how a language would go from polymorphic to analytic instead of the other way around...
That Navajo sample sentence is somehow the funniest thing I've ever seen. It also made me realize how similar Ilothwii is to Amerindian languages.
But wouldn't nouns also have irregular case markings?
And relative to nouns and verbs, wouldn't there be changes in the root due to affixes.
For example, when adding "-tihiahi", the stress would no longer be on the root of the verb and thus the sound changes, that would not have happened in the root due to stressed syllables, would happen in the root of the perfect.
Tell me if I am wrong somewhere.
Just a little question on an exemple you gave! At 14:20 there's a sentence in basque but it sounds really stranger to me... In which dialect is it written?
This is some hardcore learning😎
I actually skipped grammatical evolution entirely. This was completely on purpose, because I thought it would be more interesting if there were a bunch of sound changes but the grammar stayed the same (much like the whole Thai shenanigan, except with grammar and not script). It actually made for a very interesting (but slightly confusing) conlang that I am quite proud of.
My language has two cases witch are:
ut and ud, ut is nominative case and ud is the other case
With my choice to derive four copulas in my tutorial protolang from the verbs for "be", "look/see", "feel", and "taste", I'm starting to feel uneasy as they might lose their original meanings entirely. What words should I create to succeed them? I could build words for "lick", "sniff", etc., though still... And I'm also feeling I should've used other, more practical verbs to derive the four copulas.
14:20 lol that Basque example is written in the Bizkaian dialect
Due to phonological evolution, the past tense and present/past imperfective aspect merged. (past tense was dỹ and imperfective "do" was dym at the time that happened).
Also, the people are so used to saying the past tense affix that the word "do" literally becomes an affix in this case.
Several sound changes later, past tense imperfective is gwím, and normal past tense is guɕãdỹm, making it really irregular compared to the Proto-Lang.
My language is called "gjanee" which means language but if you want to get even more literal it means person-hear.
Is there a certain number of generated vocab that would be good to have before evolving a conlang into its next state?
18:11 passive would be "noa," not "kāni" wouldn't it?
Huh, in Hungarian monster "szörnyeteg" is the combination of fur "szőr" and i kind of the word terrified "retteg". I have spoken it my whole life but ive never noticed these things
I just have to point out that bauta- on Swedish is an informal/slang prefix, generally only used by small children, at least in my experience.
How would one evolve person markers on verbs like Spanish -o, -as/-es, -ás/-és/-ís, a/e, -amos/-emos/, -áis/-éis/-ís, -an/-en?
Fuse the pronouns to the end of the verb before the sound changes
Is there a naturalistic way to determine the gender of a word, if it is not directly related to the actual gender of the thing? French for example only has male and female pronouns, so even for things a gender needs to be chosen. In German, male or female persons also sometimes have neutral gender ("das Weib"" which maybe comes from a shortening of "das Weibchen"?) and I, as a native speaker, do not see any pattern for it. But is there a pattern in the proto-German and how did it change to the modern standard language?
I don't have too much of an idea, but from my personal observation, it seems to be dependent on culture. Things that are more culturally feminine, either directly or remotely, tend to be those genders.
For example in Spanish:
"Mesa" meaning table is feminine (The connection being that woman are culturally expected to set up dinner)
"Perro" meaning dog is masculine (As dogs are seen as a partner through battle which, traditionally, is a thing for men)
I think that patterns aren't cultural, but grammatical. So, for example, in Russian every word ending on -а, - я is expected to be feminine, while words ending on -о, -е are expected to be neutral (With a few exceptions, of course)
@@rosiecarrot1769 , yes but not all languages actually have such clear paterns. German only has different articles and that's it. And also, what causes those patterns to apear? I can't think of anything other than culture (at least for sex based gender)
The theory one of my French teachers told me is that the genders came from animistic religions, where some kind of god or spirit was associated with every object, and the gender of the imagined spirit became the object's gender. I have no idea if there's any truth to that in our world, but it would be a neat way to get culturally-derived genders into a conlang.
@@timefortjer6705 The thing is, the sounds at the ends of the words are not that stable over hundreds and thousands of years. In Germanic languages noun genders were very much apparent from the structure of the word. Over time, though, as words got shorter or vowels merged the motivation became obscure, native speakers essentially learning word's genders as kids (for example, Vater and Feuer now end the same way, which used not to be the case)
Russian is not completely devoid of this, though word genders are still fairly transparent even after the collapse of the Proto-Slavic declension system. If anything, the gender system became more consistent and stable, with a smaller amount of well-defined classes.
I wonder if something really CAUSES the classifications to appear. A lot of languages have some form of grouping nouns into classes. I guess, they may arise spontaneously when building some sort of order from chaos. If, however, you connect the gender with the affixes at some point, I cannot see an easy way to get rid of it. Probably, the corresponding morphemes should become weaker first and unify into a smaller amount of options-both for nouns and for any words that have any sort of gender agreement. Or maybe you should lose the agreement first; then the phonetic shape of a noun stops meaning anything (nothing depends on it).
While you changed words to prefixes, I changed prefixes to words, because when my friend joined in, it kinda confused him, so I changed it to be clearer.
why would the locative of animal be Kinko instead of Kimko when you said that nasal assimilation would only change an m into an n before a t, d, or s?
How would cases in languages disappear, and which endings would nouns retain in the caseless language?
Cases might disappear if they start to weaken in sense as new adpositions evolve to take over their old roles. This also often results in a word order shift to SVO. It depends on how the case system works, but I would guess that most of the time, the nouns will revert to whichever is the unmarked case (usually the nominative), but if not, you might end up with something like Nahuatl, where every noun ends in ‘-tl(i)’ unless it’s possessed. There are more possibilities if you have a European-style fusional case system; If I remember correctly, the Italian ‘-i’ and ‘-e’ plurals come from the Latin ‘-ī’ and ‘-ae’ nominative plural endings, whereas the ‘-s’ plural ending in French and Spanish developed from the reanalyzed ‘-ās’ and ‘-ōs’ accusative plural endings of Latin.
Thank You. I was always curious about how this occurred.
Ok so a few questions
Are root word used in words created from lexicon and the root word could possibly be different? Because in my language the word “Hiko” meaning fire turned into “Igo” and “Hikozimi” meaning fireplace/campfire turned into “Ikzim”.
Also how do languages branch off into a “language family tree”? Could you make a video about that?
This series is good, it helped me so much!
It can branch off by adding different sound changes to different versions of the language. Let's say,you have got your language and branch it off. Well then,you can 'split' it into how many parts you want,and add different changes to each one.
Them,for example you add the change 'j becomes ʝ between vowels' to one version. Then you only need to NOT apply it to the other versions. Maybe this helps to visualise:
Noule>Old Kham
1-nj mj> ɲ
2-b d ɡ> β ð ɣ/V_V
3-
...... The list goes on. Then,when you split it....
Old Kham>Khã|Old Kham> Qami
1-ħ>x | 1-ʀ> rˠ
2- |2-
And so on,and so on....
I hope I helped you,I don't usually do well at explaining things.
How to separate accusative and dative cases:
1. Postpositions
2. Merge the postpositions with the indirect object
3. Reimagining, I guess.
Now your former accusative case is now a dative, and you have a new accusative.
I wish you could have explored how to make a language family, i want to know more about that
An easy way to do that would be to start with the same Proto-language then apply different changes to them to seperate them into seperate Languages, branching them off as they go, say your language family has languages a, b, and c, a and b could've separated early on so they have accumulated entirely different changes from the Proto-language, but after that split c split from b, so c would have undergone the same changes as b pre-split but afterwards went in seperate paths, meaning c is closer to b than a.
In Arabic The Verb can have a suffix to the verb in order apply the subject/object as pronouns.
Hey i doubt anyone will see this, but are the augmentatives and such meant to come from the protolanguage word for the things or the neolanguage word for the things. If i want to use the word for sea as an augmentative, would i use the old word (waliqueta) or the new word (walid)
It's sooo english thinking to feel a need for a continous form and a future tense ... I am german and we have no continous and almost do not use future tense ... :-D
@Biblaridion In your video you didn't talk about grammatical gender and I'm struggling to make them in my language can you help me
I'll almost certainly make a video about this soon, but in the meantime, the easy way to evolve gender is just to have it so that nouns have to occur with some sort of classifier, and then have the classifiers merge with the nouns. I briefly discuss this in my Oqolaawak video.
@@Biblaridion Thank for answering, I didnt thought you would. I'll check the video on Oqolaawak and I'll look forward for this video. thanks again
I have and abilitative mood, but i am stuck on what would make sense for a continuous abilitative phrase, because because "i can do 'x' continuously' doesn't make that much sense, this i have ruled it not possible, which bothers me quite a bit
This channel is amazing!
How do I create naturalistic infixes?
I heard some verbs had a feud. It was tense.
holy I did not know how fun it is to configure phonetics
also I think my language took a toll to being irregular. Which I don't hate as my language is lacking complexity. Hey, I picked what rules were and rules they were, no codas in the middle of the word = noun irregularities which don't matter as much as verb irregularities but I fear this will affect verbs too.
Can someone tell me whats the name or the link of the document with the phonetic changes? Thanks in advance
I think the German "-ling" suffix isn't the best example of a diminutive in that language. It more accurately means "person of", similar to the English "-er" as in:
Eindringling: intruder, from eindringen (to penetrate)
Flüchtling: refugee, from Flucht (escape)
Häftling: prisoner, from Haft (imprisonment)
Schwächling: weakling, from schwach (weak)
Feigling: coward, from Feige (cowardice)
Abkömmling: descendant, from abkommen (descend)
Even "Liebling" follows this pattern and can translated as "beloved." I'm not a native speaker, so I don't know if "-ling" might not also be used as or sometimes have the connotation of a diminutive. Schwächling and Feigling certainly suggest it, but the others certainly don't.
Some better examples of diminutives in German are "-chen" and "-lein."
at 1:13 you say "maður sá bók" means a man saw a book. "maður sá bók" roughly translates to i saw a book. great video btw, keep it up.
The "-as" in "puellas" isn't actually fusion, but a case ending that you talk about later. It's a plural accusative ending of the 1st declension and never functioned as a few words that then got pulped into one word and suffixed, it was always a case ending. It also doesn't necessarily mean that the noun is feminine (though in that case it obviously is), because some words that belong to the 1st declension can be masculine and yet still have the same case ending, e.g. "advena" - newcomer, "advenas" - plural accusative of newcomer. Latin doesn't use consistent suffixes to symbolise things such as, for example, plurality because depending on which declension the noun belongs to, it's plural markings can look very different (I declension: femina, feminae; II declension: faber, fabri; III declension: lex, leges; IV declension: exercitus, exercitus; V declension: dies, dies) and that doesn't even include the different cases that have unique endings for both singular and plural (a plural nominative is different from a plural ablative, e.g. pl. nom. "leges", pl. abl. "legibus").
It's a fusional suffix because it encodes case, number and declension at the same time.
21:45 that's because turkish has roundness harmony
No one will explain to me how grammatical gender forms in the first place
I assume it's because people have a tendency to anthropomorphize things.
search: "dog is a gender" and click the one that is made by artifexian
is it ok that I named it before creation? but then it worked out probably better than if i named it now.
21:08 hīkua? Wasn't [h] lost in the language?