Welcome to Gaia! ::

I'm an English grammar freak, yet I know barley what everything in it is called....I know things like verbs, nouns..adjectives...the basics. Predicates and stuff like that still confuse me...

I want my language to be much easier to understand, but only knowing what I Do know about grammar doesn't give me a very good starting point...

In my languages progress...I can construct sentences in the English grammar form, but I want it to be independent of that, but still easy for any English speakers to catch on to. As young as I am, I don't know too much about creating an ENTIRELY new language. I started out with a few basic words and yadda yadda....


Things like:
(note: These are all pretty random words..so if my Nalato is actually something in another language, then oops! ><)
I-dae
me-dao
you-sheu
can-canna
see-kee
believe-belonodae
supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.....uhh...Not quite that far...^^;

In any case, it's basically just the basic conversation.

With that even, I don't know how to mix it up. Would anyone be so kind as to help to get me on my feet with this? ^^

*nods* That's a very good place to start. =)

I also try to make an alphabet and what sounds are allowed to go together first. In my language, Niora, all words end in vowels because I use a syllablery. If you don't want to re-create English, then I'd try making a different phonetic system. Hope that helps! You can pm me too if you ever need anything. =)

The structure I basically stole from Lisp and category theory. Parentheses, operators, morphisms and functors.

From there the job was to build appropriate markers that didn't conflict with each other or ambiguate <-is now a word.

If you want a simple grammar then simply make everything adjectives with strict word order. Sure, your language will be boring, but it will be extraordinarily simple grammar-wise.

Actually, those are cases. And just for reference, the nouns they apply to will inflect (well, decline really) -- rather than conjugate as a verb would do with a tense.

And really, that list is mostly picky stuff that gets really, really specific. I've found through my own conlangs that using more than say 10 basic and inclusive tenses (i.e. leaving no noun uninflected except maybe the subject)... gets messy and confusing really fast. Especially if you include different forms for gender and/or number, but that's optional, of course. Take a look at Hungarian for an example of cases getting out of hand.

I agree with everyone saying that straight-up word order (including adpositions such as prepositions) is the secret to simplicity.

I come up with a few sample verbs, figure out how they work, and then use them as models for the rest. Decide if some are irregular, blah. That's how I did Lïtihla. Kintarasesa didn't really have conjugation for verbs, just tense markers. That was me being lazy, mostly. It works! biggrin

As for the rest, it's a matter of making things sound nice. I mean, a lot of grammar is making words sound right. We have two indefinite articles in English just because we don't like having things like "a elephant" said. It sounds funny to have to stop that vowel there. So we threw another letter in and made a new word.

Don't know whether to have prepositions or postpositions? Just ask yourself which sounds better: word blah word or word blah word.

My method is lots of "meh, lessee how this sounds!" and "oooh, I thought of a new word today!"

Moving this to Help.

Yep. And if a word's nigh impossible to say... ugh. It's gotta change. No matter what. Even if it follows the rules down to the letter.

If you've got a word that by the rules conjugates to "xilopghwl" and pghwl are all distinct consonants and you don't have those nonwritten vowels... you gotta make that verb irregular. Make it so in the whateverpersonand# it becomse xilopegwul or something instead.

cool

I had one word I just chopped a syllable of the beginning of because no matter what I did, it would always end up being a huge mouthful sad And I liked it to... but outside of the infinitive, it was a pain to say. It was just too long, and it was a common word, too! So it had to become shorter.