Yesterday, I made massive progress in my dumb constructed language. It’s basically just a weird mix of English, Spanish, Esperanto, and French.
Pronouns
| Pronoun | Nominative | Objective | Possessive |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1st person singular | je (j’) | me | mi (m’) |
| 1st person plural | nos | nos | nos |
| 2nd person singular | tu (t’) | tu | ti (t’) |
| 2nd person plural | vos | vos | vos |
| 3rd person singular | lo | lo | d’lo |
| 3rd person plural | los | los | d’los |
Objective case is the same as in English; it’s used when the noun is in a prepositional phrase or is the direct object.
Verbs
There are three tenses: the past, present, future, and past future.
The past tense of mort (kill) is a mort. a means “have,” so a mort is like English’s perfect tense: “have killed.” My conlang doesn’t make a distinction between simple past and perfect; I hope this doesn’t go wrong.
The future tense of mort is t’mort; t’ means “to,” so t’mort is like “is to kill.” This isn’t how infinitives are formed in my language; this is just leftover feature from when I had infinitives. This can be combined with the past tense marker a to make a t’mort: “would kill.” I’m not sure what tense this would be called; I think “subjunctive,” but a more sensible name would probably be “past future.” I am not an expert.
Verbs can be made into nouns by adding the -ac suffix, like English’s -tion suffix (act of X). So mortac is the act of killing.
I’m stealing Spanish’s flipped “Y pleases X” for “X likes Y” sentences. plez is “please” in my language, so
He likes to kill fish.
Mortac d’pic plez lo.
lit. Act of killing fish pleases him.
(I’m thinking of making a new preposition here because mortac d’pic, or the murder of the fish, could mean the fish are either the murderers or the victims. mortac PREP pic would clarify that the fish are the direct objects of the action, and d’ would be used for the subject; it’s used for possession as well, so I think this makes sense.)
I haven’t figured out participles yet. Will do.
Other things
The vocabulary I have for this language is pretty dumb. Allow me to enlighten you.
With the slightly arbitrary word making process I have, “time” (ES tiempo, EO tempo), “temperature,” and “temporary” are all the same word (temp). I haven’t made enough sentences to see if this causes a problem.<span data-dumb=** data-fixing-markdown-syntax-highlighting-lol></span>
A bigger problem is egg (ES huevo, EO ovo) and sheep (ES oveja, English “ovine”) are the same word: ov. However, I see this as a feature; they’re both very innocent words, so children’s books would probably play on this a lot.
The plurals of nouns are generally just given -s, unless the singular form ends in an s, in which case the suffix becomes -‘s. Also, if the singular ends in a q, the q becomes an x instead of an s being added.
bov -> bovs (cows)
urs -> urs's (bears)
cliq -> clix (clicks)
Sentences
Since adjectives come before nouns in my language, if they come after, they’re probably the predicate. From my last post, I explained how nouns, adjectives, and prepositional phrases can be implicitly casted to a predicate where their translation in English would have an added “to be.”
L’person intel.
Lit. The person intelligent
The person is intelligent.
L’bov un magiqist.
Lit. The cow a magician
The cow is a magician.
J’d’California.
Lit. I of California
I am from California.
Right now, prepositional phrases are a bit confusing. For example, l’ov d’l’bov could either mean “the egg of the cow” or “The egg is the cow’s.” Maybe that’s okay. Not sure.
Everything here is subject to change.