Conglanging for The Opal Mask post 2

Post One Here

Today I'm going to deal with word order and nominal grammar (that is grammar relating to nouns) in language one.

Word order in Language One is actually fairly free in that people can understand it no matter what order the words are in because the cases. In spite of this it has a definite tendancy towards Verb-Subject-Object (VSO).

So yes the language has cases.

Cases:

It's a Tripartite Language which means the subject of a transitive verb, the subject of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive verb all take different cases (this gets even worse in language two which manages to add in features of Active-Stative but more on that when we get there). As a result the language has both a passive and an antipassive voice.

So cases:

• Ergative: The subject of a transitive verb
• Accusative: The object of a transitive verb
• Absolutive: The subject of an intransitive verb (also the unmarked base form of the noun)
• Genitive: Marks nouns that modifies other nouns. Usually possessive.
• Dative: Indirect Objects.
• Vocative: Identifies the person or thing being address

In addition the language keeps wanting to have not one but multiple Locative Cases in place of prepositions - in other words it's trying to ape Finnish which among it's impressive tally of fifteen cases includes six locative cases. I told it no. I may regret this when I get to prepositions.

Noun Class (aka Grammatical Gender):

People may remember Mountain (which I'm still working on) with its ridiculous number of Genders. Language one isn't that bad but it does have four noun classes.

• Spirit - Things possessed of divine essence. Gods, spirits, human beings, magical creatures and things (even ones with no consciousness).
• Physical/Animate - Non-magical animals and plants.
• Material/Inanimate - Non-magical things
• Abstract Concepts

Other Stuff:

• There are markers for dual and plural.
• There are temporal markers for things that don't exist anymore (but used to) and for things that don't exist yet (but will). There may also be markers for things that don't exist yet and are not yet planned to exist but which are desired and things which exist but you wish they didn't. These are not cases because they are seperate from the case marker.

This concludes the nouns. Next Verb Grammar and then maybe some wordage.

Go to Part 3 here