Vreleksá

Aert · Joined: 03 Jul 2008 Posts: 354

Hey,

Right now the only difference in Ÿlärà between nouns and verbs is the capital letter when written. Where the noun is derived from a verb, there are no spoken differences (at least not yet, there may be eventually).

So then, the only way to distinguish them in conversation is word order.

What do you guys think? Should I use articles, or some variation on pronunciation, or something? I'd like to avoid articles, and I don't know about the variation idea yet. Or should I just keep it the way it is?

(The thing is that my linguistics teacher said that all languages distinguish between nouns/verbs in spoken language; I'm not sure if she meant via word order if nothing else, but yeah.)

Thanks!

Tolkien_Freak · Posted: Sat Sep 12, 2009 12:45 am Post subject:

AFAIK word order is fine (I think that's the way Chinese works). You could do something inflectional - change the last vowel/consonant, mess with the vowels within the word, etc.

Baldash · Joined: 19 May 2009 Posts: 86 Location: Sweden

My conlang uses a semantically precise derivational/inflectional system to derive all parts of speech from a single set of stems. A noun ALWAYS refers to a subject of the verbal stem. 'inka means "is me", like 'inka tihab "the junglefowl is me", while 'inkam means "I/me". tiha 'inkam means "I am a chicken/junglefowl". nebu 'inkam tiham "I look at a chicken", and nebum "a looker". You use other affixes to change the meaning of the stem, e.g. with voices, if you want a noun referring to the event itself or an object or something else.

Aert · Joined: 03 Jul 2008 Posts: 354

The noun is just the action, the verb is the act of doing the action (and then there are derivational suffices that complicate the noun, and can change it into any number of parts of speech (except conjunctions, articles, etc))
eg: (to) dance -> (a) dance [-> (a) dancer; dancing (adj); etc]

Mine is pretty unambiguous (at least the way it's set up); there's a strict order (OSV), and multiple basic and advanced derivational suffixes, but when spoken, there could be ambiguity (though I'm not sure how, specifically).