Conlang Year: Week 16
Sixteen weeks is four weeks four times. The train keeps rolling! Prompts are here.
Day 106 - Write an introduction to your verbs
I did this last week, so I decided to add a basic diagram of the sentence structure as it currently exists. We haven't made many adjectives or adverbs yet, but I put them in the diagram anyways.
adverb VERB negation infinitive adjective SUBJECT adjective directOBJECT adjective indirectOBJECT
Day 107 - Write section on tense/aspect distinctions
I wrote out a table for this one last week and it's in my documentation already.
Day 108 - Write a section describing verb negation
I decided to copy some of my example sentences into the documentation. I hadn't had them next to the various rules they exemplified previously, but I think it might make them easier to understand in the future.
Day 109 - Review verb inflections to add in dictionary entries
I've got the verb inflections well documented. I haven't ended up with any irregular verbs yet in the way that I have for irregular nouns, but I'm sure as I do (because of later sound changes due to difficulty in pronunciation or further changes across the language), I'll add it to my dictionary.
Day 110 - Comb through dictionary entries to check for accuracy
I keep the dictionary on a spreadsheet, where I have entries for each possible conjugation of a noun. I haven't done that yet for verbs because rather than keeping track of four possible cases for a noun, having fifteen possible conjugations of tense/person/animacy seems like it's going to stretch the capabilities of the spreadsheet. It's something I'll have to keep in mind in the future.
Day 111 - Create new words with their full dictionary entries
Here's nine new verbs -
| IPA | Definition |
|---|---|
| ɾoŋʃ | to take |
| ɾɛʃ | to give |
| mɛɪɸ.ʃθʌ | to jump, to leap |
| ðʌx | to run |
| wʌʎ | to strike, to punch, to attack |
| ʎuɾm | to think, to contemplate |
| βaθ | to watch, to regard |
| ɾɛʃ.mɛ | to search, to look for |
| θam | to wait |
Several of these changed more than I expected - they almost all started out as multiple syllables which then dropped terminal vowels and then many of them moved to unvoiced terminal consonants.
Day 112 - Explore options for active/passive distinctions
This one is interesting - I don't know non-English languages well enough to know how they handle this, but I don't think that I want to fall back to the structure of English here. I read through the Wikipedia article on the passive voice and I think conjugating the verb to indicate it will probably be what I go with.