With the consonants and vowels of the proto-language decided, and the phonotactic constraints we could create some words. Though I feel we should save that for later after we lay down the foundations for the proto-grammar. After that, we could come back to it and the syntax after creating the root words. But first, let's think about the syntax.
Should our language have an "I/me" distinction like Germanic languages including German and English? A "we/us" distinction? What about determiners like "this" and "that"? Should there be articles like English's "a" and "the"? There's also clusivity, which English lacks, explaining how "we/us" are in English, regarding who's included and who isn't.
There's also word order, which a number of people reading this might be familiar with. Basically, a sentence can be divided into three components: the subject, the object, and the verb. The order varies from language to language. English's word order is subject-verb-object, or SVO, which is the second most common word order there is. The most common is SOV. There are languages like Irish that put the verb first. Klingon's word order is OVS, which is second-most rare, while OSV is the rarest. There are also languages that use free word order, where the pattern shifts, with there being methods outside word order to mark the components. I think there are also word order patterns where a component is split into parts, like V1SV2OV3, where the verb is split into three parts. We could go for SOV as it's the most common, though I'll go for OSV, to stand out from other languages.
What about adjectives? Where do we place them? Well, as Biblaridion taught, it depends on what the adjectives are evolved from. They could derive from nouns, they could derive from verbs, and they could even derive from both. There might be languages in which adjectives are distinct from nouns or verbs, while still deriving from one or both of them. There might be languages where they derive from neither. I'm considering going for derivation from both nouns and verbs for our sample language. I'd like to point out that languages like Navajo don't even have adjectives at all.
English has prepositions, which most of us are familiar with, and other languages have the same thing. Prepositions come before nouns. There are languages with something similar yet different, called postpositions, which follow nouns. In general, adpositions are components that modify nouns. There are also impositions, which are found in eight of the world's languages according to WALS. I'm going for postpositions, which are adpositions derived from verbs in languages of certain word order patterns. There might actually be variance in regards to the terms, and I hope no one gets confused.
Possession is also a thing. Every possessive phrase contains one possessor and one possessed. Most languages treat the possessor as an adjective, leading to the order being the same as the noun and the adjective in the language. So our decisions for the syntax will make something automatic in regards to possession. Alienable vs inalienable possession is also a thing, just to throw it out there.
Adverbs are also a thing, though Biblaridion never covered them in his tutorial series. He confirmed plans in his latest QnA to remake the series as he feels there are a lot of key elements he missed, like the creation and derivation of adverbs. u/Beltonia said this: "The most frequently used adverbs may be independent roots, like not, very, also and often.
Many languages have a way of deriving adverbs from adjectives. An example is the English suffix -ly, which is related to the word like. Another is the -ment(e) suffixes in Romance languages, which comes from a word that means "mind" or "mindset", so it came to mean "in the mindset of...".
Adverbs can also be identical to adjectives. This turns up sometimes in English (e.g. fast) and more often still in German. This is partly because German's systems of adjective agreement and strict word order make it obvious whether a word is an adjective or an adverb."
u/HaricotsDeLiam gave some other examples:
German treats most adverbs as if they were undeclined adjectives. English also lets you use some adjectives as adverbs with little to no derivational morphology (e.g. Make it gayer, "Can I use the restroom really quick?").
Arabic gets most adverbs from one of two sources:
to make an appositive equivalent to "[being] a ... [one]"; examples include سعيدًا sacîdan "happily" (lit. "a happy one"), شكرًا şukran "thank you" (e.g. "[out of a feeling of] thankfulness"), عادةً cadâtan "usually" (lit. "[it's] a habit") and يومًا yôman "once" (lit. "one day"). In most vernacular varieties, this adverbial suffix is the only short-vowel case marker that survives.
Attaching the clitic preposition بـ bi- "withINST" to a genitive noun (in Quranic Arabic all nouns modified by prepositions are genitive), e.g. بالإضافة bi-l-'iḍâfa(i) "also, in addition", بسرعة bi-surca(tin) "quickly, with speed/haste", بالخَير bi-l-ḳêr(i) "well, in good ..."
Many languages allow you to use a participle in an adverbial sense, e.g. "They went back into the building searching for ghosts", "He left overjoyed".
AIUI many other languages have adverbs that look like serial verb phrases, subordinate clauses or or deverbal noun phrases. The examples that come to mind are from Navajo, e.g. chidí naa'na'í "caterpillar tractor" (lit. "car crawling about"), jóhonaa'éí yináádáłígíí "planet" (most lit. "the one who walks around that ball that rolls all over the place by day"); notice that aside from chidí "car" (this is an onomatopoeia mimicking the hum of the engine), all the other words come from verb stems with the nominalizers =í, =éí and =íí stuck onto them and used adverbially.
On a server, someone said this: "I think the main lesson to get out of all those different examples is that they can evolve from basically any kind of content word. Also, I like that they made the point that you can just not have any adverbs. Just adjust the grammar so an adjective (or noun or verb) is understood as a modifier sometimes. One more idea: You could have more than one part of speech that fills the role English uses adverbs for. Maybe you have type of word that modifies verbs and another type of word that modifies adjectives and verb-modifiers. And your verb-modifier and modifier-modifier could evolve from different sources."
With this in mind, I think I'll go without adverbs, and maybe gain them from evolving the language's grammar.
Our next chapter will involve laying down the foundations for the proto-grammar. On a bonus note, I'll add in clusivity in case none of the tutorial conlangs are demonstrating that. For those unfamiliar, clusivity is, well, you know how in English, we have we/us, and whichever word we use varies? Well, clusivity helps with that. So I'm going for it, as it might help with a language in a way that a listener would really know whether a speaker is referring to both of them, themself and someone else, or all of them. Maybe I could add it later down the line when I'm evolving the grammar.
