Conlang Year: Week 7
I have reached seven weeks, which is nearly one-seventh of the year. Once again, the prompts can be found here.
Day 43 - Explore options for noun classes
I am planning to go with an animate-inanimate class distinction. I don't want to make things too complicated, but I did enough time with French that I think I can handle two classes. The base words for these classes will probably be roots that translate into something like "life" and "death."
Day 44 - Explore options for noun number
I like the idea that nouns are not numbered. I am going to avoid adding number markers to Thekkish.
Day 45 - Explore options for marking definiteness
I know that Russian doesn't use articles like "a" or "the" and it's interesting thinking about the alternate ways to specify exactly the subject of speech, so this is another one I don't plan to add to the language.
Day 46 - Explore options for marking nominal functions
I plan to steal from German here and go with nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive cases. These will mostly be marked with affixes to the existing words.
Day 47 - Organize your notes and make a templatic structure
Noun class affixes are going to come before the grammatical case affixes.
NOUN-class-case is the template I'll be working from.
Day 48 - Create class markers or new nouns
I haven't created words for life and death yet, and since those are going to serve as the base for our cases, I'd better start there!
life - ɾaɪ.y
death - ɢaɪ.ðʌ
Interestingly, the sound changes that I've chosen don't affect these.
When we grammaticalize these, I'm going to delete the final syllable of each and simplify the vowel, so we end up with this:
animate - ɾa
inanimate - ɢa
To test these out, I'll apply the animate to θmub, the pre-sound change word for leg, adding the suffix after lowering vowels but before fortifying terminal consonants. I'll then do the same for qaɪ.a, the word for hill.
θmub.ɾa - animate leg
qaɪ.a.ɢa - inanimate hill
These didn't end up changing a lot with the sound changes, but the b that was fortified to a p in θmub is retained because of the order of the sound changes and the addition of the suffix making it no longer a terminal consonant.
Day 49 - Create number markers or more words
I'm not using number markers, so here's a bit of new vocabulary.
one - pu
few - ʒʌɾyn
many - xɾaʃɸ
rock - ʃɪθ.βan
wolf - θʌ.uz.uzð
to hold - xɛɪ.pʌ.ɛɪ
After sound changes, those become the following:
one - pu
few - ʒʌɾn
many - xɾaʃɸ
rock - ʃɪθ.βan
wolf - θʌsθ
to hold - xɛɪ.pɛɪ