Teaching LH/CG Characters, OCs, and Others About Conlanging

Planning the Syntax

With the establishment of the phonologies and phonotactics of the four proto-languages, it would be easy to set up some words. Personally, I'd save the worldbuilding for after the grammar is decided, and maybe I, my cohort(s), or both/all of us together(the "all" meaning being subjective the whole time given how many TTS characters I'm choosing to be involved in this school) could suggest the students to consider the same.

Anyway, there are multiple ways of establishing a language's syntax and grammar. We/they will save complex morphology at a later point in the course, and just establish a default word order for the protolangs. But before that, we should consider the synthesis of the protolangs. A few types of synthesis exist for languages: analytical, agglutinative, fusional, polysynthetic, etc.

Analytical languages are where words convey meaning while remaining separate without being annexed, examples including Mandarin, and English in recent years or centuries. Isolating languages are pretty much the same as analytical ones, though there might be something different I need to look into. Agglutinative languages combine morphemes to express information, with examples including Turkish, Finish, Hungarian, and Esperanto, with the two most popular examples being Japanese and Korean. Fusional languages are those in which a single morpheme can encode multiple meanings simultaneously, with examples being Sanskrit, Spanish, Romanian, and German. English is also a considered example of a fusional language. Though people coined the term "iso-fusional" for the modern synthesis of English, as it's slowly becoming analytical. Polysynthetic languages are the most intense as they combine multiple morphemes and stems, thus condensing entire sentences, into a single continuous and long word, with examples being the Eskaleut languages and Cherokee(Tsalagi).

There are theories that oligosynthetic languages exist, those being ones that make use of just a few hundred morphemes, though there is no evidence proving natural ones exist. Regardless, with all this information in mind, some ideas for the synthesis could be thought up.

Proto-Language 1 Synthesis: fusional

Proto-Language 2 Synthesis: agglutinative

Proto-Language 3 Synthesis: analytical

Proto-Language 4 Synthesis: agglutinative

Now for the questions: What would be the synthesis of each team and/or solo student's conlang(s)?

Now for the default word order. Any sentence in a language comprises three main roles: the subject, the object, and the verb. Every known natural language distinguishes them, though the order varies. The most common word order is SOV, while English's order is SVO, the second-most common. Languages like Irish are VSO, though OSV is the rarest word order, with the second-rarest being OVS. Nahuatl is one of the languages with free word order, marking certain roles by other means. Knowing this would leave us with ideas for the protolangs' word orders.

Proto-Language 1 Order: a flexible one that puts the object before the subject nonetheless

Proto-Language 2 Order: SOV

Proto-Language 3 Order: VOS

Proto-Language 4 Order: verb-initial and head-final

Question about this: What word order(s) would the teams and/or solo students decide for their conlang(s)?

Adjectives in a language are derived from either nouns, verbs, or both. Adverbs somewhat qualify as adjectives, though they need some looking into. Georgian's adjectives are derived from nouns. Navajo(which is said to not use adjectives at all) are derived from verbs(which I guess allows them to qualify as adverbs instead of adjectives), and so are Mandarin's adjectives. English adjectives are derived from one of the two, or maybe both. In Japanese, adjectives are officially derived from both. This information would lead to some ideas worth trying for the four protolangs.

Proto-Language 1 Adjectives: derived from and after nouns

Proto-Language 2 Adjectives: derived from verbs and placed after nouns

Proto-Language 3 Adjectives: derived from verbs and half as many nouns

Proto-Language 4 Adjectives: derived from both nouns and verbs

A question regarding the students' choices: What would each team and/or solo student decide for adjectives in their conlang(s) to be derived from?

English has something called prepositions, which are called that because they come before the noun. Other languages place them after nouns, leading to them being known as postpositions. The more general term is adpositions.

Proto-Language 1 Adpositions: prepositions

Proto-Language 2 Adpositions: postpositions

Proto-Language 3 Adpositions: derived from both nouns and verbs, though not the same ones the adjectives are derived from

Proto-Language 4 Adpositions: derived from nouns

To ask about the choices of the participating students: What would each team and/or solo student decide for adpositions in their conlang(s) to be derived from?

In terms of possession, there are two components: a possessor and a possessee(something possessed by them). They tend to order them the same way they order the adjective and the noun, but with the possessor being in place of the adjective and the possessee being in place of the noun. This and the established word order of the proto-languages could give off a rough idea of the order of the possessor and the possessee for them. Anyway, with the syntax decided, we can now get to the grammar.