I hope you brought your Tolkien hats, because it’s time to get conlanging again!
Before we dive in, I hope you get a chance to check out my book series, The Warriors of Bhrea, which has its very own constructed language called Korvet. If you’d like to see a conlang in action (and have already read LOTR), take a look at my series here!
Now, back to business. In Part 1, we went over sounds. In Part 2, we created roots. And in Part 3, we created words and their structure. Check out those previous posts if you have not already!
Now, it’s time to put those words to work and make some sentences.
The Basics
Next it’s time to think about how to organize words in a meaningful way. In other words, you need to create a syntax.
How does a sentence have meaning? If you think back to elementary school, you probably learned that there are nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, etc. In English, the word order helps you determine the word’s function.
He walked to the store.
We know that the subject of the sentence is “He” because it is the first noun. If it were in another order, it would have a different meaning.
The store walked to him.
A weird sentence, and it TECHNICALLY makes sense. Grammatically, at least. I’ll let you determine the capability of a store to walk. However, that shows my point of word order mattering.
Here are a few sentences that DON’T make sense because they violate English’s syntax rules:
The store him to walked.
Walked he store to.
To him walked store the.
As you can see, they don’t make a lick of sense due to the order of the words! This is why word order matters in English.
Linguistic Typology
Linguists categorize language typology by what order the subject, verb, and object go in. There can be six combinations:
- Object–subject–verb
- Object–verb–subject
- Subject–verb–object
- Subject–object–verb
- Verb–subject–object
- Verb–object–subject
SOV is the most common type, at about 45% of languages (such as Japanese, Latin, and Urdu). SVO follows closely behind at 42% (Mandarin, French, and Thai). English is SVO, or subject-verb-object. We can see that in the example from above:
He (subject) walked (verb) to the store (object).
Korvet is OVS, which apparently is a very rare type–about 1% of the world’s languages (and, funnily enough, Klingon). That wasn’t intentional, but somehow it ended up that way! A Korvet sentence might look like this:
ram (him) + kvet (love) + -lo (she) = ram kvetlo (she loves him)
bis (store) + –em- (accusative case) -jat (to) + il- (past tense) + lar (walk/go) + -ra (he) = bisemjat illarra (he walked to the store)
The typology is the most basic component to consider for your conlang. However, what about more complex sentences? If every sentence were just a subject, verb, and object, that would get old pretty fast, don’t you think?
As you flesh out your language’s syntax, you’ll want to add elements like how to make subclauses, conjunctions, and transformations. And that’s just scratching the surface, really!
Resources
Rather than reinvent the wheel, I’ll give you some resources to dive deeper into creating more complex sentence structures. Seriously, check these out, because they are incredibly helpful, and their creators are deep wells of conlanging knowledge to draw upon.
The Language Construction Kit
This was and still is my conlang bible! For any aspiring language builders, I highly recommend taking a look at this site. Mark Rosenfelder writes his process in an understandable yet entertaining way.
LangTime Studio
If you prefer video resources, this is a hidden gem! If you admired the usage of conlangs in media like Game of Thrones, The Witcher, and more, you can watch the creator of those languages (David Peterson) show you his process as he creates new conlangs with an experienced linguist.
Rick Morneau
Perhaps you are old school and enjoy the good ol’ days when web pages were neatly organized into walls of text with headings and paragraphs of text underneath. That’s not a knock against anything–the info is seriously useful! Rick Morneau dives deep into syntax and gives you a full run down. If you want to know pretty much all there is to syntax, this is a wonderfully informative page.
In the next part, we will go over fleshing out your conlang and adding cultural flourishes that will give the language some oomph and “realistic” feel. Until then, happy conlanging!